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Institutional Identity and Multilingualism at University of Limpopo
Abstract
South Africa has generally been lauded for having a progressive language policy framework valorising diversity and multilingualism. Despite this, current governmental and institutional efforts made to support and empower historically marginalized (indigenous) languages have yielded poor or unimpressive results. This form of marginalization reflects larger problems of policy implementation not only by higher education but in the entire country. Since the new socio-political dispensation that began more than two decades ago, there has been very few studies that documented institutional reforms with regard to language planning and policy There has been a predominant focus in the literature on the implementation and the measurement of the policy outcomes, which predominantly identifies the lack of resources and political will as the cause of this problem. However, this focus mutes criticisms of institutional structures of higher education and elides questions about institutional cultures and unequal relations of power, which are crucial for understanding institutional identities and ideologies that undermine efforts for the promotion of African languages. In this chapter we review debates on language policy and institutional identities are framed within and by social and cultural structures. Locating the South African higher education as a structure, we show that through practices and policy, universities have not only embraced historical practices manifesting through the hegemony of English, they have also normalized a peculiar monolingual identity. On the other hand, we show sample redefining institutional identity through curriculum repackaging of the Bachelor of Arts in Contemporary English and Multilingual Studies BA (CEMS). Through the voices of selected practitioners as agents of change and insider, we demonstrate how the university may be a good candidate for bringing about the higher education structural reforms for wider institutional changes in the post-Apartheid era. In the end we offer suggestions for transformed institutional identity and areas of both practice and future research.
With coloniality, thought itself became discriminatory and was categorized into racial forms. That discrimination and categorization of thought gave rise to the idea that philosophy itself must be differentially categorized as either Western, Eastern, or African as if thought has a race and geographic location. The issue at this age is that those categorizations get serious to the extent that it is unthinkable that African scholars can benefit from any thought system except from African philosophy. This paper argued that those vices dent human enlightenment and developmental progress. Within that purpose, this paper used an analytic theoretical framework to argue that it is an unguided racist view that there is no benefit for African scholars in Western philosophy. The adoption of Critical Social Theory was selected as one case whereby an African rural university received a plethora of criticisms as being hypocritical in the decolonization mission. Among the findings of this study one important aspect came out more clearly, that humans love unity rather than division according to race, class and so on. This study recommends that decolonization should be embraced willingly with a clear realization that humanity is one race rather than a divided existence. This study posits that having a proper perspective of decolonization will eliminate hypocrisy among scholars and create that realization of human knowledge as one racial epistemology. Keywords: Coloniality, Philosophy, Academic Discrimination, Decolonization, Theoretic Operandi.
Background: The year 2020 will mark five years since the watershed #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa. This was a student-led series of protests, at campuses across the country, calling for higher education to be made accessible through free decolonised education for black people. In light of this, the time has come to ascertain how students perceive the developments in the sector following this demand, which, among other things, included a call for tertiary education to reflect the country’s multilingual context.
Objective: This study explored how journalism students, at a university of technology in South Africa, perceive the multilingual teaching and learning strategies, and their influence on the culture of communication in this discipline.
Method: The study employed a mixed methods sequential design, beginning with an online survey, followed by focus group discussions. A semantic thematic analysis was undertaken using a ‘top-down’ approach based on themes identified through James Carey’s theoretical framework of communication as culture.
Results: The findings are that even though students have been exposed to various multilingual teaching and learning strategies, they perceive the way language is used in this discipline as perpetuating a culture of communication that is still predominantly monolingual. They see the multilingual interventions as being inadequate in addressing the challenges created by this particular culture of communication. They expressed mixed views on the influence of multilingualism on their academic performance.
Conclusion: The culture of communication used in this discipline continues to make students feel out of place in lectures and higher education as a whole and perpetuates certain student-lecturer power dynamics. For journalism students in particular, this has further implications in how they perceive their professional prospects as aspiring communications practitioners.
Background: Reading is a functional academic literacy ability needed by students in higher education. In the South African context, inadequate reading ability is one of the reasons for high undergraduate attrition rates. It seems that role players within this sector are of the opinion that students have reading ‘problems’ that need to be ‘fixed’, often by generic reading courses. This article differs from the perception of reading ‘problems’, as reading is viewed from a lifespan developmental perspective. According to this perspective undergraduate students do not have reading ‘problems’ but experience reading barriers hindering their reading development and in effect their academic literacy.
Objectives: This study aimed to uncover some of these barriers by means of an empirical study conducted at the North-West University (NWU).
Method: The setting of this study was the Potchefstroom campus of the NWU. A qualitative methodology was chosen whereby 14 individual interviews and 7 focus group interviews were used. The purpose of these interviews was to better understand lecturers’ and students’ perceptions about the variables of the reading process, namely the reading ability of the reader, the text to be read, the task, and the socio-cultural context.
Results: Lecturers and students perceived a number of reading barriers within each variable, namely students’ non-compliance and lack of abilities, elements of the textbook and availability of lecturer notes, the format of the task, throughput pressures, and lecturers’ assumptions.
Conclusion: Knowledge of these barriers and knowledge of the interconnectedness of the reading process could enable role players to collaboratively rethink undergraduate reading support, in which the lecturer has a crucial role to play.
This paper seeks to provide an analysis of obstacles that hinder progress in promoting the functional status of African languages in the South African higher education sector. African languages suffer marginalisation despite the existence of various empowering and restorative legislative provisions and policies. In this study, we argue that African languages have a central role in driving the transformation agenda in the South African higher education sector. In particular, marginalising African languages has disastrous implications for the achievement of social justice and cohesion, and the access to and success of indigenous African language-speaking students. A language management approach was adopted as a foregrounding theory for this paper. A language planning and policy framework was also employed as a complementary theory. The study is based on data collected through semi-structured interviews with academics in the college of humanities at a university in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. The study revealed a number of challenges, ranging from negative linguistic ideologies, orthography, weak bilingualism, among other factors. In rising to these pertinent challenges, higher education institutions need therefore to consider language management strategies designed to address language problems, particularly in multilingual contexts.
Critiquing the positioning of children from non-dominant groups as linguistically deficient, this book aims to bridge the gap between theorizing of language in critical sociolinguistics and approaches to language in education. Carolyn McKinney uses the lens of linguistic ideologies-teachers' and students' beliefs about language-to shed light on the continuing problem of reproduction of linguistic inequality. Framed within global debates in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, she examines the case of historically white schools in South Africa, a post-colonial context where political power has shifted but where the power of whiteness continues, to provide new insights into the complex relationships between language and power, and language and subjectivity. Implications for language curricula and policy in contexts of linguistic diversity are foregrounded. Providing an accessible overview of the scholarly literature on language ideologies and language as social practice and resource in multilingual contexts, Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling uses the conceptual tools it presents to analyze classroom interaction and ethnographic observations from the day-to-day life in case study schools and explores implications of both the research literature and the analyses of students' and teachers' discourses and practices for language in education policy and curriculum.
African multilingualism has always been construed from a monoglossic (i.e., one language at a time) lens despite the pretensions of plural language policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study reported in this paper explored the efficacy of alternating languages of input and output in the same lessons in order to offset linguistic fixity that is often experienced in monolingual classrooms. I present two case studies of translanguaging practices, one at an institution of higher learning and another in the intermediate phase (primary school). The results from these cases show that the use of more than one language by multilingual learners in classroom settings provides cognitive and social advantages for them. Using what I refer to as the ubuntu translanguaging model, I make a case that fuzziness and blurring of boundaries between languages in the translanguaging classes are (i) necessary and relevant features of the 21st century to enhance epistemic access for speakers in complex multilingual spaces, and that they are (ii) indexical to the pre-colonial African value system of ubuntu. Useful recommendations for classroom applications and further research are considered at the end of the paper.
After the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, 11 languages (English, Afrikaans and 9 indigenous African languages) were given official status. In the higher education landscape, English remains the dominant language of scholarship. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, English is the main medium of instruction but the institution's language policy provides for the use of isiZulu (one of the indigenous African languages) as an additional medium of instruction. The paper discusses how three of the four colleges of the University are employing isiZulu in this role. This use of isiZulu is analysed through the following four theoretical perspectives: African scholarship, Africanization of higher education, the African Renaissance, and transformation. Whilst there are obviously some challenges in using isiZulu as a medium of instruction, it is very clear that the project deflates the myth that indigenous African languages can only serve in lower levels of education (such as primary schools) and not higher education. The paper is of relevance not only to South African universities, but also to other African (and even non-African) universities that plan to use indigenous languages as media of instruction.
The language policy of the University of the Western Cape (2003) reflects the tempered traces of historically and politically charged negotiations. We argue that a reinterpretation of ‘policy failure’ as responsive engagement with complex new forms of linguistic and social diversity can lead to a critical rethinking of the nature of multilingualism and language policy in a South African tertiary education sector in transformation. We submit that university language policies need to consider (a) how the complex linguistic and non-linguistic repertoires of students can be mobilised for transformative discipline-specific curricula and pedagogies, and (b) the concept of multilingualism both as a resource and a transformative epistemology and methodology of diversity. We suggest a policy development process that moves from micro-interaction to macro-structure, tracing processes of resemiotisation, interrogating legitimised representational conventions, and reshaping institutional practices and perceptions. We discuss the implications for register formation and for broader epistemological access and ownership.
From an Africanist standpoint, the paper maps the frontiers of the emerging language management paradigm in the study and practice of politics of language from the perspectives of theory, method, discipline, and practice. The discussion advances two core arguments. First, an Africanist interpretation of the discourse of the politics of language that underpins language management brings to the fore the peculiarities of language management within the African space. Second, it is imperative to develop the theoretical and practical advances in language management concurrently, especially in a continent that is known to rely on intellectual advances from other continents.
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the problematic of public policies and leadership challenges for socio-economic transformation in South Africa. The paper illustrates that policies and laws of socio-economic reform have been introduced in democratic South Africa. However, socio-economic transformation remains a challenge. Lack of trust in the leadership relationships amongst political and economic agents is pointed as a contributing factor. Hence, LE emerges as a leadership strategy to help mitigate the problem.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper starts by presenting the current economic situation of South Africa touching on some important economic indicators to illustrate the consequences of poor leadership in public policy implementation process. The paper then analyses the leadership challenges to drive socio-economic reforms that have been introduced in South Africa since the end of apartheid with focus on the current National Development Plan. Lack of trust in leadership is identified as a problematic factor and leadership ethos (LE) emerges as a leadership strategy to enable the building of trust in leadership for the purpose of a successful implementation of public policies.
Findings
Lack of trust in leadership is identified as a problematic factor contributing in the absence of cooperation and collaboration in the leadership relationship amongst public servants (from up to bottom) and citizens for the purpose of successful implementation of public policies. Hence, there is need for a new leadership paradigm that would enable the building of trust in these leadership relationships. LE emerges as such a leadership strategy.
Practical implications
The paper calls for an exploration into the understanding and practice of LE and its inherent critical success factors (CSFs) considered as a leadership strategy that can help drive particularly public policies implementation process. LE intends to promote moral leadership that helps public servants to build good character and thus the will to do the right thing, and mutually trusting relationship is a CSF of LE. Therefore LE enables build the much needed trust in leadership relationships for a successful organisational leadership and management.
Originality/value
This paper provides significant implications by identifying lack of trust as a problematic factor in the leadership relationships amongst political and economic agents in South Africa, contributing thus in the poor implementation of public policies. LE emerges as a leadership strategy that would help mitigate the problem by enabling the building, the maintenance and restoration of trust in organisational and or institutional management for a successful public policy implementation process.
In 2002 in a special issue of Perspectives in Education on multilingual education, we outlined the thinking underlying a proposed dual-medium degree (in Sesotho sa Leboa and English) at the then University of the North. This article theorises the experience of teaching and learning since 2003 when the degree, BA in Contemporary English and Multilingual Studies (BA CEMS), was first launched. We do this by describing the curricular structure of the degree, and by analysing how students researched 'Small Talk' in a first-year module taught in Sesotho sa Leboa. We use Cummins' four-quadrant model to show how the learners are,forts to deploy higher-order thinking and to produce Sesotho sa Leboa of a Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) level. The pedagogy used is discussed and an example of a student's academic writing in Sesotho sa Leboa is provided.
When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. This book discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we are not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. The book argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which it calls the "social connection" model. The book develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live.
These essays describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. They combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residencies. Aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory are analyzed, such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. The phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing are also considered.
This article interrogates the notion of “glocalization” (Moja, 200430.
Moja , T. 2004. “Glocalization: A challenge for curriculum responsiveness”. In Curriculum responsiveness: Case studies in higher education, Edited by:
Griesel , H. 21–38. Pretoria, , South Africa: South African University Vice Chancellors’ Association. View all references, based on Castells, 20019.
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This paper considers the concept of English as a global language in the context of South African educational policy. The paper first notes that the richer a country is the more possible it is for the rulers to take the social costs of language policy into account, i.e., the Netherlands and Canada can spend vast sums on different aspects of language policy, especially on the learning of foreign languages and on the accommodation of the languages of immigrant minorities, whereas most African countries are constrained to implement language in education policies that might seem irrational. It points out that for reasons that have to do with the modalities of colonial oppression in the 19th and 20th centuries, it seemed as though every newly independent African state was doomed to take the same language policy detour by accepting in practice the primacy of the ex-colonial language. It also discusses the existence of what has been called the "ESL industry" and its marginalizing effects on the African languages and the consequent disempowerment of the speakers of those languages. The paper then concentrates on the new language policy in education in South Africa and discusses the dilemmas and the problems to which this has given rise. It states that the most important features of the policy in regard to language medium is its commitment to an additive bilingualism approach as the desirable norm in all South African schools. The paper discusses the implications of this policy in detail. (Contains 31 references.) (NKA)
There is no politically neutral theory of language planning, in spite of the fact that the power elites tend only to examine language policy under conditions of crisis. In South Africa, language planning was associated with the discredited racist social engineering of the apartheid era, especially because of the deleterious effects of Bantu education and because of the stigma of collaboration that came to be attached to the Bantu language boards. The same conditions, however, gave rise to an enduring ethos of democratic language planning (by NGOs and by some community-based organisations). This tradition, together with the peculiarities of the negotiated settlement, has had a lasting influence on the character and modalities of language planning agencies in post-apartheid South Africa. The article explores the implications of consociational and orthodox liberal democratic approaches for language planning in South Africa and underlines the persuasive effects of integrating a costing component into every language planning proposal, given the tendency of middle-class elites to exaggerate the economic cost of any policy change.
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