Related Papers
Perspectives in Education
Education for participatory democracy : a Grade R perspective
2011 •
Vivien Linington
This paper proposes a form of Grade R pedagogy in South African schools that addresses both the diverse realities of South Africa’s children and the principles underpinning a participatory democracy. The community of enquiry pedagogy we propose is based on a socio-cultural historical theoretical perspective and focuses on the nurturing of a reasonable person (both learner and teacher) in the context of a play-based Grade R (reception year). This relational pedagogy assumes the inclusion of child’s voice and the participation of child1 as thinker, and therefore challenges teachers to take up different roles as co-enquirers, democrats, guides and listeners.
Reading to Learn (RTL) Through Story Books: Moving Beyond Physical School Access to Epistemological Access in a Grade R Classroom in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
2020 •
tawanda mukurunge
Learning to read is a basic skill and right that each child must be endowed with in school. Reading enables active, civic, social and economic participation. This is made possible through reading to learn. However, South Africa is faced with a daunting task to improve literacy development. From the assessments done South African learners are ranked the worst performers compared to worse off countries. Despite all, there is minimal investment in emergent literacy directed towards grade R to develop literacy behaviours. Grade R is the backbone of all the basic literacy skills that are employed in the future grades. It appears access for this cohort is only physical, past the school gate, but not epistemological. It is at the backdrop of the above that this study focused on creating opportunities for and developing Grade R learners’ emergent literacy skills. As interventionist pedagogy, RtL within an interpretivist approach was applied to weave through the learning experiences of Grade...
South African Journal of Childhood Education
We are workshopped: problematising Foundation Phase teachers’ identity constructions
2014 •
Vivien Linington
The new Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications document envisages a particular type of teacher (DHET, 2011). These teachers need to be, amongst other things, reflective, committed, critical practitioners with sound content knowledge (DHET, 2011). It is with this in mind that a remark made by Foundation Phase teachers in Limpopo raised several questions for the research team investigating communities of practice in the Foundation Phase. The fact that teachers considered themselves to be ‘workshopped’, where something is done to them, is in opposition to the kind of teacher envisaged by government which sees teachers as pivotal to educational transformation. This paper unpacks the implications of teachers constructing themselves as ‘workshopped’ and its relation to workshops as vehicles through which knowledge is acquired. Using a critical discourse analysis of interviews and classroom observations conducted with Foundation Phase teachers, we explore the extent wh...
Masekitlana re-membered: A performancebased ethnography of South African black children’s pretend play
Mashatole Abram
Abstract: The extensive empirical research inspired by Piaget and Vygotsky’s theories of make-believe play has been criticised for restricting data to Western, urban, middle-class children. We seek to redress this bias by researching the traditional black South African Pedi children’s game Masekitlana. Our data relies on embodied memories enacted by Mapelo (one of the authors), and interviews with two other informants. The analytical framework draws upon ‘emergent methods’ in ethnography such as performance ethnography, auto-ethnography and memory elicitation through ‘bodynotes’ within a Vygotskyian orientation to play. The findings show that Masekitlana shares features common to all pretend play, but also exhibits others unique to it including: i) extended monologue, ii) metacommunicative frames for realistic thinking, and iii) a complex relation between social and solitary play. These findings support Vygotsky. However, ‘the long childhood’ of Masekitlana suggests that the stages theory of Piaget, as well as Vygotskyian ideas that have come down to us via Cole and Scribner and Valsiner, require revision in the light of Bruner’s two modes of cognition and Veresov’s reinterpretation of the theatre movement within which Vygotsky’s central ideas are embedded
African Journal for Physical Activity and Health Sciences (AJPHES)
Grade R teachers' experiences of implementing physical education
An exploration of foundation phase teachers' experiences in using play as a teaching strategy in Grade R
2015 •
Nompumelelo Hadebe
South African Journal of Childhood Education
A foundation for foundation phase teacher education: Making wise educational judgements
2014 •
Karin Murris
We start our paper with a critical exploration of the current ‘back to basics’ approach in South African foundation phase teacher education with its emphasis on strengthening the teaching of subject knowledge. We claim that such a proposal first demands an answer to the question ‘what is foundational in foundation phase teaching?’ We propose an answer in three stages. First we argue that teacher education should be concerned not only with schooling or qualification (knowledge, skills and dispositions) and socialisation, but, drawing on Gert Biesta’s work, also with subjectification (educating the person towards the ability to make wise educational judgements). Secondly, these three aims of education lead to five core principles, and we finish by showing how these principles inform our storied, thinking and multimodal/semiotic curriculum. Our answer to our leading question is that pedagogical ‘know-how’ and views of ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ constitute the subject knowledge that is fou...
South African Journal of Childhood Education
Move to literacy: fanning emergent literacy in early childhood education in a
2011 •
Vivien Linington
A literate child is one who is able to read, write, speak and listen. Literacy begins at birth, and continues steadily as children develop. The explicit processes that form emergent literacy are for example, phonemic awareness, letter and word recognition,<br />vocabulary enrichment and structural analysis. These literacy practices are well documented and articulated. But how these practices and the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values (KSAVs) that underpin them are best acquired by young children<br />is contested. This paper argues that an early childhood education (ECE) approach, which fans literacy, should follow a quality play-based approach that embraces a pedagogy of play that foregrounds how children learn through play, and how teachers teach through play. In combining two constructs ‘pedagogy’ and ‘play’, we propose an approach that is underpinned by movement and other appropriate learning activities, which support the development of perceptual-motor behaviou...
South African Journal of Childhood Education
Grade R educators voluntarily share their mathematics practices: Authentic realities in South Africa showcased
Faith Tlou
Perspectives in Education
Transformation and decolonisation of mathematics education for sustainable development: A case study of its learning trend in Nigeria
2017 •
Ishola Akindele SALAMI
