3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Curriculum development in an urban refugee centre in South Africa.(2010-11-12) Pausigere, PeterThe Zimbabwean refugees sheltered at Holy Cross Church* in central Johannesburg have taken the initiative to develop their own curriculum. There have been many orientations to curriculum development with current reconceptualisations emphasising practical and descriptive curriculum development approaches. This research is framed specifically by Walker’s naturalistic curriculum development model, the community-based approach to education development, literature on refugee education and generally by broader theories of curriculum. The study employed the ethnographic research method and gathered data through non-participant observation, interviews and document analysis. Taking a wider approach to curriculum development and in the context of displaced people, the research redefined the term curriculum developer to mean ordinary people and refugees in their communal social setting. This study provides an analysis and description of how the refugees successfully initiated and developed effective learning and training programmes which resulted in the establishment of a school, early childhood, adult-education and vocational training centres. The refugee meetings and school council deliberation forums guided by common values and political, social and economic factors made practically defensible, education and training resolutions on language, school policies, curriculum options, pedagogy, knowledge and certification issues. On the forms of refugee-emergency education, the refugee school curriculum followed that of the country of origin, with some minor modifications thereby preparing learners for return to their country. The training programmes utilised a slightly adjusted curriculum of the host country in synergies with local private colleges and prepared the refugees to integrate into the host country’s economic communities. To improve the quality of education and training at Holy Cross there is need for intervention from government and international humanitarian organisations. In addition to the academic curriculum, subjects with a social reconstructionist ideology, double-shift schooling and democratic teaching and learning approaches must be introduced as well as awarding refugees with regionally recognised training certificates.Item Legislative Committees and Deliberative Democracy: the Committee System of the South African Parliament with Specific Reference to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA).(2007-03-02T11:26:11Z) Obiyo, Robert EgwimThis thesis examines the status and role of parliamentary committees in democratic theory with a view to critically assessing the performance of one such committee, the South African version of the PAC, SCOPA. It advances a pluralist theory of popular sovereignty according to which there is no single institutional complex or site, which exclusively expresses the will of the people. The latter is the case in monist theories, which reduce democracy to its practice in a single site. Rousseau and Weber are critically examined in this connection. In the pluralist notion advanced in this thesis the popular will is expressed and realized in a plurality of institutional sites and modalities of exercise. On this perspective parliamentary committees perform a function vital to the constitution of popular sovereignty itself. They are indispensable to the formation by the people of an accurate perception by it of what the Executive is doing in its name. Their investigative work is thus constitutive of the formation of a democratic subject and will. Parliamentary committees are thus central to the satisfaction of the conditions of the deliberative dimension of democracy. On this definition, parliamentary committees must in addition themselves conform to the principles of deliberation in their own practice. This specifically deliberative conception of democracy is then further delineated by distinguishing it from the aggregation – majoritarian perspective and defending it against a variety of criticisms, including that of Chantal Mouffe. With this conceptual and normative framework in place, the British and American committee systems are examined in order to establish some reference points in terms of the institutional practice of parliamentary committees. The focus then shifts to the parliamentary committees of the South African Parliament. The constitutional and legal foundation for parliamentary committees (in the South African system) is examined with particular reference to SCOPA itself and the first five years of the new parliamentary committee system identified as a period during which several South African parliamentary committees, including SCOPA, effectively exercised their “oversight” function. Once the Government’s SDP entered the scene all things changed. This thesis examines the formation of the JIT, paying particular attention to the exclusion of the HSIU and the interventions of the Speaker, Hon Frene Ginwala. It identifies in close detail all the flaws in the SDP procurement process as well as the contradictions and lacunae in the final JIT Report itself. These are of such a magnitude as to render unreasonable any claim to the contrary and in endorsing the Report SCOPA thus clearly failed in its essential function. The notion of a threshold concept of reasonable adequacy is introduced as limiting the conditions under which committee decisions can legitimately be taken via majority voting. The argument is advanced that these were clearly not met in the case of the SCOPA decision under discussion. The implications of this “collapse” of SCOPA for South African democracy more broadly are then identified and discussed in terms of deliberative democratic theory.