South African universities and human development: Towards a theorisation and operationalisation of professional capabilities for poverty reduction

This paper reports on a research project investigating the role of universities in South Africa in contributing to poverty reduction through the quality of their professional education programmes. The focus here is on theorising and the early operationalisation of multi-layered, multi-dimensional transformation based on ideas from Amartya Sen's capability approach. Key features of a professionalism oriented to public service, which in South Africa must mean the needs and lives of the poor, are outlined. These features include: the demand from justice; the expansion of the comprehensive capabilities both of the poor and professional capability formation to be able to act in ‘pro-poor’ ways; and, praxis pedagogies which shape this connected process. This theorisation is then tentatively operationalised in a process of selecting transformation dimensions.     

School playgroups: Which features of provision matter?

This paper identifies the shared features of provision in exemplar school playgroups defined using the social capital concepts of bonding and bridging relationships. Relationships promote capabilities amongst people, with play a known capability for advancing children's developmental and educational outcomes. By attending to the bonding and bridging relationships in each school playgroup, exemplar groups were identified and studied to reveal their shared features of provision. Six main features of provision were identified, including materials, facilitator, space, location, scheduling and health and safety. Awareness of these features may benefit school leaders and/or governance seeking to implement a school playgroup within their own community. Findings from this project suggest high-performing school playgroups can operate in areas of lower and higher socioeconomic status and/or parental education, and in regional and rural areas.     

How do students’ accounts of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees?

In this article we examine how students’ accounts of the discipline of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of 86 interviews with 32 sociology and criminology students over the course of their undergraduate degrees, we constituted five different ways of accounting for sociology. These ranged from describing sociology as a form of personal development focused on developing the students’ opinion to describing sociology as a partial way of studying the relations between people and society. The majority of students expressed more inclusive accounts of sociology over the course of their degrees. However, some students’ accounts suggested they had become disengaged with sociology. We argue that the differences in the ways that students were disengaged were not captured by our phenomenographic categories. In conclusion, we argue that our analysis illustrates the crucial role that students’ relations to knowledge play in understanding the transformative nature of higher education.