‘Exploring the practical adequacy of the human rights, social justice, inclusivity and healthy environment policy discourse in South Africa’s National Curriculum Statement’
- Schudel, Ingrid J, Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Authors: Schudel, Ingrid J , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/391180 , vital:68629 , xlink:href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504620701284860"
- Description: This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio-political and socio-ecological histories in postapartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer’s perspectives on the possibilities of enabling ‘situated universalism’ as a form of normative theory, and case-based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a ‘universalising’ normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the ‘norms’ as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts.
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- Authors: Schudel, Ingrid J , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/391180 , vital:68629 , xlink:href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504620701284860"
- Description: This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio-political and socio-ecological histories in postapartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer’s perspectives on the possibilities of enabling ‘situated universalism’ as a form of normative theory, and case-based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a ‘universalising’ normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the ‘norms’ as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts.
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Towards a better grasp of what matters in view of ‘the posts’
- O'Donoghue, Rob B, Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182693 , vital:43854 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620500169593"
- Description: This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives in social theory are opening the way for a break with features of environmental education as an institutional field. The review points to a reconstituting of the idea of environmental education research from scholastic field of/for environmental awareness and sustainable development, to a reflexive engagement within processes of social reproduction and reorientation in a changing world. A shift such as this would constitute a subtle change in a developing field of research, to situated design decisions of reflexive engagement (research) in social fields constituted within developing cultural contexts of risk.
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- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182693 , vital:43854 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620500169593"
- Description: This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives in social theory are opening the way for a break with features of environmental education as an institutional field. The review points to a reconstituting of the idea of environmental education research from scholastic field of/for environmental awareness and sustainable development, to a reflexive engagement within processes of social reproduction and reorientation in a changing world. A shift such as this would constitute a subtle change in a developing field of research, to situated design decisions of reflexive engagement (research) in social fields constituted within developing cultural contexts of risk.
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Environmental education research and social change: Southern African perspectives
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2004
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182709 , vital:43855 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462042000258143"
- Description: Environmental issues and risks in southern Africa have, like elsewhere in the world, their roots in the structures and orientations of modern societies. In modernist fashion, we draw on education and research to address socio-ecological concerns. In 1995 Eureta Janse van Rensburg, then Murray and Roberts Chair of Environmental Education at Rhodes University,1 undertook a study to identify environmental education research priorities, and through her study she provided a description of research in environmental education as a ‘landscape of shifting priorites’ (Janse van Rensburg, 1995). The papers in this journal offer a contemporary ‘snapshot’ of the landscape of environmental education research in southern Africa, illustrating a fresh range of ‘shifting priorities’.
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- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2004
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182709 , vital:43855 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462042000258143"
- Description: Environmental issues and risks in southern Africa have, like elsewhere in the world, their roots in the structures and orientations of modern societies. In modernist fashion, we draw on education and research to address socio-ecological concerns. In 1995 Eureta Janse van Rensburg, then Murray and Roberts Chair of Environmental Education at Rhodes University,1 undertook a study to identify environmental education research priorities, and through her study she provided a description of research in environmental education as a ‘landscape of shifting priorites’ (Janse van Rensburg, 1995). The papers in this journal offer a contemporary ‘snapshot’ of the landscape of environmental education research in southern Africa, illustrating a fresh range of ‘shifting priorities’.
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Being Brave: Writing Environmental Education Research
- Lotz-Sisitka, Heila, Burt, Jane C
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Burt, Jane C
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/184734 , vital:44267 , xlink:href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ654591"
- Description: The heroine came back from her very important quest and sat down to write a thesis . . . While mythical journeys do not always end this way, the stories have to be told. The work of telling the story in the hero’s journey is often left untold. This paper explores some of the headwork that goes into textwork (Van Manen, 1995) in environmental education research. We argue that writing is an integral part of the research process, and should not be viewed as an “add on” or a silent, untold part of the adventure. We reflect on some of the institutional and epistemological issues associated with writing social science (in our case environmental education) research texts. Writing research is never an easy enterprise, it is bound by history and tradition, convention, institutional habit, and regulation. It is also constrained by the uncertainty of the process of writing itself, by problems of power relations in research, and the difficulty of writing to represent experience rigorously and authentically while recognizing that all writing is a constructed symbolic representation of experience. The paper reflexively reviews our attempts at “being brave” in the construction of our research texts.
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- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Burt, Jane C
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/184734 , vital:44267 , xlink:href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ654591"
- Description: The heroine came back from her very important quest and sat down to write a thesis . . . While mythical journeys do not always end this way, the stories have to be told. The work of telling the story in the hero’s journey is often left untold. This paper explores some of the headwork that goes into textwork (Van Manen, 1995) in environmental education research. We argue that writing is an integral part of the research process, and should not be viewed as an “add on” or a silent, untold part of the adventure. We reflect on some of the institutional and epistemological issues associated with writing social science (in our case environmental education) research texts. Writing research is never an easy enterprise, it is bound by history and tradition, convention, institutional habit, and regulation. It is also constrained by the uncertainty of the process of writing itself, by problems of power relations in research, and the difficulty of writing to represent experience rigorously and authentically while recognizing that all writing is a constructed symbolic representation of experience. The paper reflexively reviews our attempts at “being brave” in the construction of our research texts.
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Some insights on the gap
- O'Donoghue, Rob B, Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182720 , vital:43856 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620220145410"
- Description: In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of instrumentalist assumptions associated with pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We also point to ideological blind spots and blockages that persist in disallowing social politics and history to illuminate the complexities of human social habitus, and we reveal some of the complexities that have been set aside in the Kollmuss and Agyeman article.
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- Authors: O'Donoghue, Rob B , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/182720 , vital:43856 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620220145410"
- Description: In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of instrumentalist assumptions associated with pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We also point to ideological blind spots and blockages that persist in disallowing social politics and history to illuminate the complexities of human social habitus, and we reveal some of the complexities that have been set aside in the Kollmuss and Agyeman article.
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Weaving cloths: Research design in contexts of transformation
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/184745 , vital:44268 , xlink:href="https://cjee.lakeheadu.ca/article/viewFile/259/136"
- Description: Through storytelling, I apply methodological and epistemological reflexivity to ask questions about the way in which environmental education research is framed in transformational settings. I ask questions about the role of research teachers/supervisors in the “weaving enterprise” or the research process. Do we have the dual task of developing contextually relevant frameworks, and of making sure that these frameworks are not adopted on an “industrial scale”—in other words, as new paradigms which have the potential to narrow research possibilities? The paper concerns itself with a broader question, notably the potentially debilitating effects of mass production of research, or the globalizing of knowledge production. The story I use to raise these, and other questions for consideration by teachers/supervisors of research is a research workers story (my own), constructed between 1992 and 1996, in a context of rapid socio-political and educational transformation in South Africa (Lotz, 1996). In addition to the above, the paper opens a debate about reflexivity as research methodological rigour.
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- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 2002
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/184745 , vital:44268 , xlink:href="https://cjee.lakeheadu.ca/article/viewFile/259/136"
- Description: Through storytelling, I apply methodological and epistemological reflexivity to ask questions about the way in which environmental education research is framed in transformational settings. I ask questions about the role of research teachers/supervisors in the “weaving enterprise” or the research process. Do we have the dual task of developing contextually relevant frameworks, and of making sure that these frameworks are not adopted on an “industrial scale”—in other words, as new paradigms which have the potential to narrow research possibilities? The paper concerns itself with a broader question, notably the potentially debilitating effects of mass production of research, or the globalizing of knowledge production. The story I use to raise these, and other questions for consideration by teachers/supervisors of research is a research workers story (my own), constructed between 1992 and 1996, in a context of rapid socio-political and educational transformation in South Africa (Lotz, 1996). In addition to the above, the paper opens a debate about reflexivity as research methodological rigour.
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Active learning in schools
- Lotz-Sisitka, Heila, Timmermans, Ingrid
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Timmermans, Ingrid
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/389696 , vital:68475 , xlink:href="https://eeasa.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Bulletin_vol21-_Sep-2001.pdf"
- Description: The Rhodes University Environmental Education Unit has initiated a project to support school-based environmental education work in Grahamstown. In line with national environmental education policy, the project supports a focus on environmental learning in the context of the OBE curriculum, and provides professional development support to teachers implementing the project (NEEP, 2000). An action research evaluation is taking place to monitor key aspects of the project and a number of interim evaluation reports have been produced (Mbanjwa, 2001).
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- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Timmermans, Ingrid
- Date: 2001
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/389696 , vital:68475 , xlink:href="https://eeasa.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Bulletin_vol21-_Sep-2001.pdf"
- Description: The Rhodes University Environmental Education Unit has initiated a project to support school-based environmental education work in Grahamstown. In line with national environmental education policy, the project supports a focus on environmental learning in the context of the OBE curriculum, and provides professional development support to teachers implementing the project (NEEP, 2000). An action research evaluation is taking place to monitor key aspects of the project and a number of interim evaluation reports have been produced (Mbanjwa, 2001).
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‘Environment as Text’: Initial Insights into some Implications for Professional Development in Environmental Education
- Lotz-Sisitka, Heila, Robottom, Ian
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Robottom, Ian
- Date: 1998
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438744 , vital:73496 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137410"
- Description: This paper describes part of a current international research capacity-building project in South Africa. In the project a research-based approach to professional development is adopted, one in which participants develop detailed case studies relating to their own changing practices in environmental education. It is argued that such an approach is consistent with the highly contextual nature of the field of environmental education. The article describes a central three-day 'moment' in the project, drawing on this experience to consider a number of issues concerning participatory research and the role of case study in professional development.
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- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila , Robottom, Ian
- Date: 1998
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438744 , vital:73496 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137410"
- Description: This paper describes part of a current international research capacity-building project in South Africa. In the project a research-based approach to professional development is adopted, one in which participants develop detailed case studies relating to their own changing practices in environmental education. It is argued that such an approach is consistent with the highly contextual nature of the field of environmental education. The article describes a central three-day 'moment' in the project, drawing on this experience to consider a number of issues concerning participatory research and the role of case study in professional development.
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Reflecting on socially transformative environmental literacy for Lesotho
- Mokuku, Tsepo, Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Authors: Mokuku, Tsepo , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 1997
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438769 , vital:73498 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137444"
- Description: This paper is an attempt to clarify the concept of environmental literacy from a socially transformative orientation. It resulted from our ongoing reflection on a conceptual framework in and for a three-year research project on education for environmental literacy within the integrated science curriculum in Lesotho.
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- Authors: Mokuku, Tsepo , Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 1997
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438769 , vital:73498 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137444"
- Description: This paper is an attempt to clarify the concept of environmental literacy from a socially transformative orientation. It resulted from our ongoing reflection on a conceptual framework in and for a three-year research project on education for environmental literacy within the integrated science curriculum in Lesotho.
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Addendum to the paper Landcare: New directions in professional development for environmental education
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 1995
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438672 , vital:73488 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137475"
- Description: During 1994-1995, we received correspondence from Tania Sadler of the University of Tasmania and from Debbie Heck, about the latter's paper published in volume 14. In response we publish the following addendum, which includes a list of references inadvertently left out of her paper. Ms Heck did supply these references to the SAJEE originally, and we apologise for any inconvenience to readers as a result of the mistake. (Ed.)
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- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 1995
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438672 , vital:73488 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137475"
- Description: During 1994-1995, we received correspondence from Tania Sadler of the University of Tasmania and from Debbie Heck, about the latter's paper published in volume 14. In response we publish the following addendum, which includes a list of references inadvertently left out of her paper. Ms Heck did supply these references to the SAJEE originally, and we apologise for any inconvenience to readers as a result of the mistake. (Ed.)
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Resource materials development in environmental education : Exploring some of the myths and tensions in participatory resource development in the We Care Primary Project
- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 1995
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438792 , vital:73500 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137472"
- Description: This paper on environmental education resource materials development represents some of my 'lived experience' (Malone, 1994:20) as a researcher involved in clarifying the processes of materials development for junior primary classrooms. The sites of inquiry, action and reflection have been focussed around the development of the We Care Primary materials, shifts in orientations to environmental education and current educational change.
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- Authors: Lotz-Sisitka, Heila
- Date: 1995
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438792 , vital:73500 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/137472"
- Description: This paper on environmental education resource materials development represents some of my 'lived experience' (Malone, 1994:20) as a researcher involved in clarifying the processes of materials development for junior primary classrooms. The sites of inquiry, action and reflection have been focussed around the development of the We Care Primary materials, shifts in orientations to environmental education and current educational change.
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