Shan Simmonds

North-West University | NWU · Curriculum Studies Group (Potchefstroom Campus)

South Africa’s curriculum, and education system at large, remains humanistic and dominated by Western Eurocentric ways of thinking, doing and being. The ongoing protest action in higher education has made explicit the inequalities that continue to keep epistemic violence, Eurocentrism, and human exceptionalism intact. Central to this protest action...

In this article we document the becoming of the Curriculum Studies Special Interest Group of the South African Education Research Association. We outline the SIG's activities since inception and theorise the work of the SIG through thinking with the ideas of scholars. For us theory works not as a noun but as a verb, so we prefer to speak of theoris...

No abstract because this is an editorial

Humanist discourse has assumed such an ideological normalcy to the extent that any attempts at its disruption are likely to be met with severe resistance. As such, higher education curriculum design and curriculum content continue to be largely anthropocentric, buoyed by human-centred neoliberal principles that have gradually encroached the academe...

Since the democratic dispensation, South Africa's education system has striven towards not only providing all students with physical access, but also epistemological access to learning. Hence, basic education is charged with the responsibility of delivering an equitable and inclusive curriculum. Teacher education in higher education institutions is...

South Africa’s transforming higher education landscape remains a dynamic and evolving space to trouble and disrupt dominant knowledge doctrines that prescribe phallocentrism and Eurocentrism. This qualitative study engaged ten lecturers from the three campuses of North-West University (NWU) in semi-structured interviews to collect in-depth informat...

Sense of belonging, perceived stress and wellbeing are reported factors that influence students' university experience and learning. The COVID-19 pandemic and shift to online emergency remote teaching were likely to exacerbate these affective dimensions of student experience. This article employed a quantitative survey research design to determine...

In the reconceptualisation era of curriculum studies, scholars drew on a range of theories such as existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, poststructuralism, and especially critical theory. They used critical theory as a lens to examine the influence of social and political forces on curriculum, in particular the role of dominant i...

Social sustainability is paramount for peaceful and inclusive societies. It embraces all cultures and civilizations while promoting that these contribute to, and are crucial enablers of, sustainable development. One aspect hereof is knowledge-what is taught and who decides. South African students remain frustrated with the Eurocentric and Western d...

Sustainable development has been the dominant focus in sustainability discourses over the past three decades. In 2015, the United Nations Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a blueprint for peace and prosperity. The agenda is to be driven by the now well-known 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The higher educ...

The sudden mass migration of teaching, learning and assessment to the digital terrain because of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the global proliferation of scholarship. This scholarship ranges from romantic notions of the opportunity to revivify curriculum and pedagogy in what was deemed an underutilised educational technology (online) resource...

This article is a collective project. It is a rhizome-article that is an assemblage of five heterogeneous essays that trouble dominant practices of assessment, generally, but also within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors problematise standardisation, measurement, quantification, and other technologies of performativity that dominate...

In this article, we provoke the question as to the potentiality of dissent in a neoliberal higher education assemblage circumscribed within the meta-assemblage of late global capitalism. We offer a counter-intuitive exploration of the much-vaunted post-apartheid South African fetish, social cohesion, to argue that such ideological imperatives, when...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a plethora of inequalities in South Africa. These inequalities have had a direct impact on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG 3 (good health and well-being) and SDG 4 (quality education) were the focus of this article. This article investigated how students enrolled at a South African res...

Aim/Purpose: There is a significant amount of research on supervision, assessment, and socio-economic benefits in South Africa. However, there have been relatively few attempts to analyse the research proposal phase, which remains a critical part of doctoral education in South African. Background: As part of the broader transformation agenda in Sou...

Student-teachers are exposed to different approaches to teaching Religion Education in South Africa. Amongst these have been the phenomenological-reflective-dialogical approach of Cornelia Roux and the empathetic-reflective-dialogical approach of Janet Jarvis. These different approaches made immeasurable contributions as they started to shift how R...

Background: Key to sustainability and expansion of any field is the intellectual works of its scholars who engage in their field as in-becoming and who continually strive towards its advancement. For researchers of curriculum studies this involves being knowledgeable and conversant of the underlying discourses framing and challenging the field. Ai...

At present, there is a dearth of primary data on the experiences of the child survivors of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Qualitative research methodologies are needed to help researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to understand the complex issues associated with child sex trafficking (CST), to gain greater insight into t...

South Africa’s higher education landscape mirrors its history of its relentlessly discriminatory past along racial, gender, social, political and class lines. Within this setting teacher education aims to cultivate its teaching and learning toward the fostering of moral persons who are caring towards the other and concerned with social justice and...

While widespread concerns exist over the experiences and career trajectories of postdoctoral fellows in higher education, these concerns are not always examined through the lens of a social and cultural context unique to a national system. Postdoctoral fellows do exist in various forms at academic institutions around the world. Understanding their...

Protest movements such as the #MustFall currently dominate the South African higher education landscape. This article focuses on such protest movements, paying particular attention to protests against gender-based violations at some universities, commonly referred to as #RapeMustFall, as an exemplar of the gender injustices and inequities that pers...

Human rights education is critiqued for being traditionalist and conceptually imprisoned. This view stems from the distrust in its ability to transform deeply rooted injustices and inequalities etched within South Africa’s society. There is therefore an outcry to reimagine human rights education. For this article it is important to understand how a...

Curriculum is a site of political, racial, gendered, and theological dispute. Teachers who acknowledge this and see the implications for democratic living embrace their teaching practice as curriculum leaders and participate in complicated conversations. With the focus on gender equity as a democratic ideal, this article explores the lived experien...

p>Transformation is often loosely defined. We argue that the reason for this is its inherent complexity. Paradoxically, its lack of definition is an asset, which provides an opportunity to rethink and research transformation in higher education, rather than an urgent problem to be solved. In this article, the possibilities for researching and rethi...

In this article we problematise the fact that human rights legislation, whether intentionally or otherwise, reinforces binary categories such as ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’. This form of ‘othering’ highlights the incongruence between what the legislation offers and sexual minorities’ lived experiences. We argue that human rights thus constitute...

Although classified as a developing country, South Africa lags far behind other BRICS member countries. A cause for concern is that the number of PhD studies rather than what they contribute is often used to measure their quality. This article argues that a quality PhD study must engage with the global knowledge society. A critical meta-study was c...

In South Africa four key policy discourses underpin doctoral education: growth, capacity, efficiency, and quality discourses. This article contributes to the discourse on quality by engaging with quality assurance from the perspective of the decision makers and implementers of macro policy (national), meso (institutional), and micro (faculty/depart...

Photovoice provides alternative ways of doing research with schoolgirls, who are vulnerable and often under-acknowledged research participants. It is particularly valuable in dealing with sensitive topics such as gender-based violence, poverty and HIV/AIDS and other chronic illnesses. Photovoice is thus widely employed in disciplines such as health...

Heterosexuality is associated with normative, ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ social and sexual relations. Concomitantly, those who do not conform to heterosexual standards are ‘othered’. Conforming to normativity creates the “heterosexual imaginary” (Ingraham, 1996) and perpetuates heteronormativity. This article focuses on the dangers of institutionalised...

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (2000−2015) are clearly embedded in South Africa's education policy documents. However, they are not adequately infused into the curriculum. This article focuses specifically on the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG) − promoting gender equality and empowering women − and the need to place this cu...

Theoretical ambiguities in curriculum studies result in conceptual mayhem. Accordingly, they hinder the development of the complicated conversation on curriculum as a verb. This article aims to contribute to reconceptualizing curriculum studies as a dynamic social practice that aspires to thinking and acting with intelligences and sensitivity so as...

With the advent of democracy in South Africa, religious education became a contested topic in the education sector. Contestation stemmed from the desire to embrace religious plurality rather than Christian National Education (CNE) that dominated the curriculum pre-1994. This contestation initiated the reconceptualisation of religion in curriculum-m...

Human trafficking is a form of modern day slavery and is often collectively referred to as a human rights violation.However, human trafficking is more complex than this suggests as this article attempts to demonstrate. It begins bydescribing the landscape of international trends in human trafficking, with particular attention to child trafficking....

The introduction of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) and how it positions religion in the curriculum requires rethinking. This article first argues that Religion and Education (RaE) has the propensity to engage a broader perspective than Religion in Education (RiE) in curriculum inquiry. The opportunity to engage in RaE in curr...

Human rights play a vital role in citizens' political, religious and cultural life (Wang 2002, 171). Due to the prominence of human rights in the everyday life of citizens, including those of South Africa, human rights education has been included in many school curricula. Human rights education aims to develop responsible citizens who inter alia fo...

Human rights are multifaceted and the many spheres encompassing human rights have been contested and endorsed for centuries. From an education context, the influence of human rights programs, initiatives and policies have created a new discourse around human rights and education. Keet (2009:216) argues that this “rights revolution” in education ins...

It is imperative to take account of the many faces of justice when exploring the elements of a curriculum for justice. Justice is not only about equity, equality and fairness, but about creating spaces where people can learn to prioritise a significant Other and practise doing so. The curriculum needs to provide a space where the legal, restorative...