A Foucauldian analysis of discourses shaping perspectives, responses, and experiences on the accessibility, availability and distribution of condoms in some school communities in Kavango Region
- Authors: Ngalangi, Naftal Sakaria
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984 -- Methodology , Condom use -- Namibia , Sex instruction for teenagers -- Namibia , HIV infections -- Prevention -- Namibia , AIDS (Disease) -- Prevention -- Namibia , Education, Secondary -- Namibia , Teenage pregnancy -- Namibia , Sexual abstinence -- Moral and ethical aspects
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2061 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1019990
- Description: Condom use is promoted as an effective method for prevention and contraception for people who practice or are at risk of practicing high-risk sexual behaviors. According to the UNAIDS (2009) report, condoms are the only resource available to prevent the sexual spread of the HI-Virus; and with regard to family planning, the same report proposes that condoms expand the choices, have no medical side effects, and thus provide dual protection against pregnancy and disease. However, in Africa as elsewhere in the world, condom use has been fiercely debated. The debates on the accessibility, availability and distribution of condoms in schools are not new nor are they uncontested. In Namibia, the HIV and AIDS policy in education does not explain how, when and by whom condoms should be made available to learners. This leaves it to schools to decide on how (and whether) to make condoms available to learners. As a result, individual school‘s choices not only vary, but are mediated by different factors that are not always in the best interest of learners who, as the foregoing discussion suggests, continue to participate in behaviour that, amongst other things, puts them at risk of HIV infection and falling pregnant. Relying on Foucault‘s theory of discourses, this study investigated the dominant discourses that shape learner, teacher, parent religious and traditional leader and traditional healer perspectives, responses, and experiences with regard to the accessibility, availability, and distribution of condoms in school. The study was conducted in nine schools in Kavango Region in Namibia using a mixed methods approach. The study used triangulation in the data collection process through the use of questionnaires where 792 learners participated in this component, and focus group discussions and individual interviews targeting four groups namely, learners, teachers, parents and religious leaders, traditional leaders and traditional healers. The quantitative data were analyzed using the Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS), and findings from the focus group discussions and individual interviews were analyzed identifying themes and patterns and then organizing them into coherent categories with sub-categories. The study revealed that the majority of adult participants opposed the idea of making condoms available in schools; advocating abstinence instead. This was despite evidence on the prevalence of sexual activity amongst youth in the community. Reasons had to do with various competing and hierarchized discourses operating to shape participant beliefs, perspectives, and responses in a highly regulated and surveilled social and cultural context. Put differently, the dominant discourses invoked a particular sexual subject; authorized and legitimated who invoked such a subject; who was and was not allowed to speak on sexual matters; as well as how sexual matters were brought into the public space of schools. Such authorization and legitimation regulated the discursive space in which discussions on sexual health, safe sex, and resources such as condoms were permitted; with negative consequences for the sexual well-being of youth in Kavango Region. The study also highlighted the tension between freedom, choice, and rights, showing how complex in fact is decision to make condoms available in school. On the one hand, teenagers positioned themselves as capable subjects who had the right to exercise choice over their sexual lives. Requesting parent consent was thus viewed as a violation of this right to choose. Such a position displayed authority and agency by learners that was pitted against views amongst adults in this study that positioned youth as having no agency. In their view, youth (a) were still children and thus innocent and pure, (b) ought to abstain, and (c) were difficult to control given the modern context. Adults believed that early sexual involvement by learners did not result from lack of vigilance and control on their part, but rather from exposure to modern social mores. The study concluded that (a) schools remain difficult spaces not only for mediating discussions of sex and sexuality, but also for providing resources to mitigate sexual risk amongst leaners, (b) in highly regulated societies, dominant religious discourses are produced and reproduced in and through existing institutions such as family, church, and schools; highlighting how these serve to normalize beliefs and perspectives, (c) the dominant discourses shaping communities in which schools find themselves remain inconsistent with school discourses that are shaped by modernist conceptions of childhood and youth, and (b) adult choices to sanction and obstruct schools from making condoms available (and in the case of teachers, not accessible and distributable) put the very children at risk that they propose to be protecting.
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- Date Issued: 2016
An overview of language policy implementation in the City of Tswane Metropolitan Municipality with a focus on translation as an activity of language policy implementation
- Authors: Seshoka, Keaobaka Omphile Precious
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/932 , vital:20004
- Description: The South African Municipality Systems Act (2000) states that language should not act as a barrier of access for citizens with no or limited proficiency in English to municipal services, or in ensuring the right of citizens to participate in, and contribute to the social, cultural, intellectual, economic and political life of South African society. In that regard, it recommends that South African municipalities develop a culture of public participation by providing services in a language preferred and used by citizens within their municipality through translation, amongst other things. This study examines how the translation services, as articulated in the language policy and plan of the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, is used as a language implementation strategy and in facilitating public participation. It further assesses the quality of the translated information accessed by the different residents of the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality against theories of translation appraisal. The main focus area of this research is on extent of the use of translation as an activity of corpus planning, to facilitate language policy implementation in the City of Tshwane Municipality to enable better public participation. It is hoped that the study will be able to give policy makers and those tasked with implementation, especially at government municipalities‘ strategies to assess and determine the state of translation services to improve functionality, quality and the extent to which translation activities contribute to corpus planning.
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- Date Issued: 2016
A critical investigation of the interpretation and implementation of the Parzival main lesson within the context of the Waldorf curriculum : a multiple case study
- Authors: Swanepoel, Elizabeth
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Waldorf method of education Education -- Philosophy Teaching -- South Africa Perceval (Legendary character) Perceval (Legendary character) -- Study and teaching Grail Legends -- Study and teaching
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MEd
- Identifier: vital:1483 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003364
- Description: The Steiner/Waldorf school movement is currently one of the fastest growing independent school movements internationally. In several countries it seems to have developed into the most popular form of alternative education. South Africa has 17 Waldorf schools and one full-time teacher training facility. This study investigated the interpretation and implementation of the Parzival main lesson within the wider context of the Waldorf curriculum. The main lesson system is an essential constituent of the Waldorf curriculum. Most academic subjects in a Waldorf school are taught in a three- or four-week main lesson block. The main lesson occupies the first two hours of the school day. A main lesson consists of a particular three-part structure, and the main lesson book is the keystone to the Waldorf evaluative process. The Parzival main lesson is specifically taught in Class 11, and most Waldorf schools consider it as one of the most important main lessons in the high school. The interpretivist model was ideally suited to this research. The investigation was conducted as a multiple case study, and the main source of data was provided by classroom observation. This was supported by interviews and classroom artifacts. The study involved two South African Waldorf schools at which the Parzival main lesson is taught. This main lesson is presented at only three South African Waldorf schools. I teach at the remaining school, and therefore conducted my research at the other two schools. The teachers who facilitated the Parzival main lesson, as well as the Class students at the selected schools voluntarily participated in the research. My research findings indicate that the possibility exists for the teacher to exercise a certain degree of freedom and creativity within the parameters of Waldorf methodology and the Waldorf curriculum. The study also determines that teachers often find it difficult to integrate the three-part structure, as indicated by Waldorf methodology, in a single main lesson. Furthermore, my research establishes that main lesson books can indeed serve as both text and as an assessment tool. I therefore conclude and maintain in this study, with particular reference to the Parzival main lesson, that despite the prescriptive structure of the Waldorf system and Steiner pedagogy, teachers need not necessarily sacrifice their freedom and creativity within the classroom.
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- Date Issued: 2010
A study of the reading interests and reading habits of English (first language) secondary-school pupils in South Africa: with particular reference to the Province of Natal
- Authors: Gardner, John Murray
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: Reading interests English language -- Study and teaching (Secondary) -- South Africa -- KwaZulu-Natal Books and reading -- South Africa -- KwaZulu-Natal Readership surveys -- South Africa -- KwaZulu-Natal
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:1781 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003666
- Description: The study derives from a belief, based on many researchers' writings, that wide and frequent book-reading aids the development of knowledge, emotional maturity and human sympathy, which are all essential attributes in a fragmented culture such as South Africa's. It is not accepted that conventional secondary-school literature-teaching in this country promotes a lifelong reading habit among the majority of pupils and a plea is made for the recognition of Reading as a curricular entity in its own right. The study suggests that, owing to a paucity of local research in this field, South African teachers and educational authorities are severely disadvantaged. If they are unable to offer advice based on a proper study of their pupils as readers, they run the risk of guiding many pupils' reading along paths that cannot promise satisfaction and fulfilment. Such stultifying of reading habits would contradict the aims of the present National Core Syllabuses for English (First Language). The thesis sets little store by the investigation of specific bookchoices, pointing out that the validity of such incidental findings, if gleaned from a latitudinal survey, is questionable. Instead, using the findings of questionnaires administered to nearly 2 800 pupils and their teachers, the thesis investigates the relationships between voluntary leisure-time reading and such factors as age, gender, intelligence, academic achievement and standard of living. It also looks at the influences of parents, teachers, peers, contemporary literature-teaching practices, school and public libraries, and leisure- time pursuits other than reading. Many suggestions are offered for further research into finer aspects of those considerations. Many of the findings serve merely to corroborate research from abroad, particularly in respect of age, gender and intelligence. That is none the less alarming when a striking decline in reading is found to occur in the early years of the secondary school. A number of other interesting findings emerge. Standard of living is shown to be inversely correlated with amount of reading, and television-viewing is not found to displace reading. Nor are other leisure-time pursuits found to affect amount of reading: avid readers are by and large extremely active and committed pupils. Reading emerges from the study as providing its own peculiar satisfaction, as does each of the other leisure activities investigated. The challenge is to ensure that infrequent readers become aware of what reading has to offer, and strategies for attempting to achieve that are posited, particularly with regard to the roles of public and school libraries. The roles of teachers and parents are found to be crucial to the development of an appetite for books, and it is suggested that schools and parents liaise formally and closely in this matter. The study groups pupils by a number of personal variables, and investigates their reactions to common forms and genres as well as to certain specifics of style, thereby discussing the relationship between reading, social maturity and academic achievement It argues strongly for recognition of the fact that educating secondary-school pupils in the development of keen and sensitive lifelong reading habits is a process which cannot be systematically taught as a set of skills.
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- Date Issued: 1990