Respect and responsibility: Teaching citizenship in South African high schools

Respect is a core concept in citizenship debates. South African high school educators often draw upon respect as a key value within citizenship education. Their teaching of this value is often conflated with promotion of the practice of responsible citizenship. The constructions of respect and responsibility in these situations are imbued with assumptions around authority and power relations, such that learners’ are expected to take responsibility for demonstrating respect for in an unequal rather than reciprocal understanding of respect. Thus, negotiations of different kinds of respect are highlighted. The need for schools to embody a culture or ethos of respect is noted if learners are to be expected to recognise and adopt respect as a key element to citizenship in theory and in practice.     

Do training institutions learn from experience?

This essay is concerned with organisational learning and, in particular, policy learning. Sometimes, organisations learn; sometimes they do not. Sometimes they use their acquired knowledge, but this is, not always the case.     

Girls' secondary education in Uganda: assessing policy within the women's empowerment framework

This paper makes the case that policies, such as the National Strategy for Girls' Education in Uganda (NSGE), intended to achieve gender equity in education for girls in developing countries, have limited relevance to, and impact on girls' actual educational experiences. Recent considerations of girls' education acknowledge that gender equity within education is more than access to schooling; it entails the cultivation of capabilities necessary for girls to participate fully, actively and equally in all aspects of their societies. Drawing on a longitudinal, ethnographic policy research case study with 15 Ugandan schoolgirls in rural Masaka District, Uganda, from August 2004 to September 2006, I explore the girls' educational experiences in relationship to the NSGE. I employ the Women's Empowerment Framework (WEF) to evaluate the NSGE with respect to the extent to which its interventions are ‘empowering’ for girls.     

《荒原蚁丘》之比阿特丽丝形象浅析

本文运用女性主义理论对《荒原蚁丘》女主人公比阿特丽丝的形象进行深入探讨,以她的童年经历作为切入点分析其成长背后的隐痛,展示她对本土文化中各种形式的男性中心主义的警惕与批判;同时揭示出非洲女性在后殖民时代所面临的种种话语诱惑与陷阱,并挖掘比阿特丽丝在复杂语境下突围的希望。     

Biowatch South Africa and the challenges in enforcing its constitutional right to access to information

This paper examines the difficulties encountered by Biowatch, a South African civil society environmental organization, in its attempts to obtain access to government information in respect of genetically engineered plants. After establishing the context of South Africa's access to information regime, including a brief discussion of several of its weaknesses, the paper engages in an extended account of the Biowatch case as an exemplar of some of the more pronounced challenges to the effective implementation of the country's access to information legislation. The elaboration of the case is based on interviews conducted with the Director of Biowatch and counsel from the Legal Resources Centre that aided Biowatch, as well as various internal and court documents provided by Biowatch and its lawyers.     

Patterns of intergroup attitudes in South Africa after 1994

In the heterogeneous South African society, race has become not only the major organizing principle, but also the primary unit of social analysis. The concept “intergroup relations” has consequently predominantly been associated with racial relations and “intergroup attitudes” with “interracial attitudes”. Interest in South African race relations has furthermore been enhanced by the tumultuous struggle against apartheid. A substantive body of research acquired during apartheid indeed points to interracial tension. The advent of a new political dispensation in 1994 has been accompanied with expectations that increased intergroup contact, in particular, would result in improved interracial relations. The current study investigates intergroup attitudes after 1994. Three countrywide surveys were conducted in 1998, 2001 and 2009 using representative samples of all major racial groups. The results indicate that overall attitudes were more positive among more affluent and urbanized communities. However, there are indications of prevailing negative relations, in particular between Blacks and Afrikaans-speaking Whites. While the attitudes of Afrikaans-speaking Whites seem to have become more positive, that has not been the case to the same extent for Blacks. Blacks also appear to be less positive towards English-speaking Whites than during apartheid. Overall, the results point to more positive intergroup attitudes in some instances, but also to potential emerging points of tension.     

西非孔子学院发展现状、问题和对策

对西非孔子学院的发展现状进行了描述,指出其发展面临的问题,并提出了建设性意见,以期探索一些具有普遍借鉴意义的非洲地区孔子学院可持续发展的对策。     

Portugal and the Mediterranean trade: A Prelude to the discovery of the “new world”

Before the century of great discoveries, and during most of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese developed important commercial activity in the Mediterranean. This is the central issue of this article as seen through two themes: the first is an assessment of the Portuguese organization of Mediterranean trade, with special attention given to the foodstuffs which were, and continued to be, a feature of such trade; and second, is to observe how Portuguese faced competition from others nations’ merchants in the region. The study of these two aspects will provide a better understanding of the re-orientation of Portuguese trade towards the Atlantic.     

南非教师教育制度的重建:进展与成效

民主新南非的教育体系是在种族隔离教育遗产的基础上通过全方位的变革建立起来的。南非教师教育制度的重建是一个漫长、复杂的过程。通过调整管理体制、颁布教师教育标准、优化院校结构、出台国家政策框架等举措,南非已建构起一个以成果和能力为本位的、具有民主治理特质的、一体化、开放式的教师教育与发展体系。国家教师教育与发展政策框架的实施虽然取得了一些成效,但也面临多方面的不确定性和挑战。