From the particularities of practice to the generalisation of theory.
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Date
2012-02-28
Authors
Bhyat, Faizul
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Abstract
This thesis has situated the Government’s new integration of education and training
policy within post-apartheid South Africa’s wider socio-economic and political
context. It has shown, how in its relation to education, post-Fordism required a highly
skilled labour force that was able to employ the new technologies and add value to
goods and services. This, it was argued, would enable South African goods to
compete more effectively in the global market. There is a strong stress related to the
notion of ‘continuous innovation’ with it’s implication of skilled workers constantly
adapting existing technology through incremental innovative steps. The study has
among others, drawn on South African academic Kraak’s (1994) segmented labour
market thesis (which has decisively influenced both ANC and Cosatu’s educational
policy process) to argue that this notion of ‘continuous innovation’ was highly
dependent on the presence of two knowledge forms in society and work – an
abundance of formal (scientific and technological) knowledge and skilled worker
‘know-how’ or tacit knowledge. The implication was that, in sharp contrast to jobspecific
or a narrow Taylorist oriented enskilling process reminiscent of South
Africa’s past industrial training system, the new skill needs in late industrial societies
now required the worker to understand the deeper conceptual underpinnings of his
product/process nexus of work. This was to be instituted through South Africa’s new
learnership programme.
These developments came under strong attack from a left critical discourse that had
taken issue with the policies neo-liberal underpinnings of subjugating education to
the dictates of capital. However, such an integrated system had a particular
significance for South African trade unionists. It offered an alternative to the divisions
that were such a dominant feature of racial capitalism by providing for the possibility
of occupational mobility through training that had been systematically denied to black
workers under apartheid education. The new possibilities of linking tacit, or working
knowledge to scientific knowledge, or theory to practice, through the integration of
education and training would thus provide the capacity to bridge the social
stratification divide related to race, class and gender which was historically
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SCHOOL OF EDUCATION : UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND iv
entrenched and prevalent in the racial economy, and maintained and mediated
through high and low status knowledge forms.
The process of policy implementation, however, is proving to be exceedingly difficult
in South Africa. The problem reportedly lies in the epistemological difficulty of
integrating working knowledge with the more formal disciplinary knowledge domains.
This affects both its redressive aims of achieving quality education and training,
occupational mobility for workers, and enskilling for the new technological needs of
late industrial society. This argument was derived from the Bernsteinian theoretical
distinction between two discursive knowledge forms, characterised as horizontal and
vertical discourse. It is stressed that formal and informal, working and scientific forms
of knowledge are structured differently, and therefore are associated with different
learning processes or modes of learning. Describing the two knowledge domains as
‘epistemologically’ and ‘sociologically’ distinct however, tended to present them as
mutually exclusive, which further polarised the mental/manual divide. At issue, was
its implication for the division between high and low-status knowledge forms. This
thesis through its argument effects a synthesis between working and scientific
knowledge by positioning the technologies that form an integral part of the workers
tacit working knowledge as a modality of vertical discourse characterised by a
horizontal knowledge structure and tacitly transmitted. Repositioned in this manner,
the different modes of learning are brought into collaboration with each other. This
also bridges the stark polarisation between contextualised and de-contextualised
knowledge forms.
A second problem that needed serious consideration was the difficulty that
candidates encountered in terms of understanding formal scientific syntax. These
resembled wider general trends, where, in relation to these formal discourses,
historically disadvantaged students struggle to master the ‘curricular version of its
rigorous language’. As previously mentioned, verbal proficiency is an entrance
requirement for occupational mobility. In this way it constitutes symbolic capital, and
confers symbolic power. Thus, the problem in understanding the difficult syntax of
these formal scientific discourses has been identified by concerned educationalists
as an exclusionary mechanism needing radical reform.
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SCHOOL OF EDUCATION : UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND v
The thesis drew on participatory action research as its methodological approach to
address this challenge. This was strongly informed by neo-Vygotskian insights, that
stressed that language acquisition – and especially formal conceptually underpinned
language acquisition – was extremely context bound, and could consciously be
pushed to more complex levels through the aid of a tutor. This takes place within the
‘zone of proximal development’ – the necessary interplay between inductive,
experiential learning of the subject which gives rise to word sense, and the deductive
generalising instruction of the teacher and the curriculum which helps expand
understanding of generalised and abstract word meaning. The methodological slant
of the thesis draws on ‘action research’ because of its abiding concern with social
issues of justice, and in this way resonates well with the concerns raised in the
political economy of knowledge debate within which the aims and objectives of this
thesis are also grounded. The stress on the dialectical relationship between theory
and practice, as advocated in participatory action research compliments further the
study’s theoretical underpinnings which supports the generalisation of theory from
the particularities of practice. Through a dialectical process from practice to theory
and back to practice again, we believe we were able to make incremental shifts in
terms of the zone of proximal development of our students. This led me to re-assert
the role of the educator as a crucial participant in the process of transformative
learning. It was especially important within the context of the new outcomes-based
education with its stress on a learner-centred approach.
This thesis draws on its empirical findings to raise some important problems related
to the conceptual coherence of South Africa’s new integration of education and
training policy. It shows through argument that the integration of education and
training stressed through this policy was not rooted in socio-cognitive theory, and
argues that a more conceptually coherent alternative should root itself in new
emerging socio-cognitive theories on learning. This stresses the importance of reconceptualising
the learning process within a socio-cognitive approach, as opposed
to a fundamentally ‘mentalist, or ‘biological’, view of the learning process. I believe
that the nature and findings of this research could contribute both theoretically and
conceptually towards a wider evolving social theory of learning.