3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Picking up the bill: unravelling the truth and paying for the damage incurred(2018)This Performance as Research attempts to address the difficulties of having a constructive conversation around race and colonialism in the public square with a theatrical work. The research is creative and artistic in nature. Storytelling, ritual and ceremony are the primary performative devices used in the work. The researchers embarked on a process of writing and performing stories of mythical, symbolic and personal relevance, with the aim of investigating the effect upon themselves as researchers. Drawing from a range of mythologies, stories may evoke empathy and understanding in the listener, vital elements when entering conversation about emotionally charged topics. The aim, therefore is to propose a creative solution to the conversation – telling out stories through theatre may give them fuller expression and invite the listener to hear them with open ears, to have compassion, and to perhaps to reach for a place of greater understanding. The research consists of a performance, theorising around the principles that informed it, and reflection upon the performance once it had been staged. The findings take the form of questions around our willingness to share ourselves with others, the fear that evokes, and possible routes forward in the conversation. These will be addressed in a final performative submission to be made at a later date after conversation with witnesses of the original performance.Item Telling and illustrating additive relations stories: a classroom-based design experiment on young children's use of narrative in mathematics(2016) Roberts, NickyIn South Africa, difficulties with learners solving word problems has been a recurrent problem identified through national standardised assessments extending from Foundation Phase into the Senior Phase. As is evident globally, particular difficulties have been identified with young children solving ‘compare-type problems’ where the numbers of objects in two disjoined sets are compared. This design experiment provides empirical data of young South African learners trying to make sense of compare-type problems. The task design from this design experiment suggested that engaging learners in narrative processes where they are expected to model the problem situations and then retell and vary the word problems, to become fluent in using the sematic schemata may assist them to become more experienced and better able to make sense of compare-type problems. This finding contradicts the advice offered in official South African government documentation. The study was a three-cycle classroom-based design experiment which took place over 10 consecutive school days with Foundation Phase learners in a full service township school where the majority of learners were English Language Learners (ELLs), learning mathematics in English when their home language has not English. This study set out to research a ‘narrative teaching approach’ for a specific mathematics topic: additive relation word problems. At the heart of the study therefore, was a question relating to the efficacy of a teaching strategy: To what extent do young children’s example space of additive relations expand to include compare type word problems? This design experiment reveals that when adequately supported with careful task design and effort in monitoring and responding to learner activity, Grade 2 ELL children in a township school can improve their additive relations problem solving, in a relatively short time frame. The majority of the learners in this design experiment were able to solve compare-type problems at the end of the 10-day intervention. These learners were also able to produce evidence of movements towards more structured representations, and towards better learner explanation and problem posing using storytelling. III The design experiment intervention showed promise in expanding young children’s example space for additive relations word problems. In both cycles the mean results improved from pre-test to post-test. The gains evident immediately after the intervention were retained in a delayed post-test administered for the third cycle which showed further improvements in the mean with a reduced standard deviation. The effect sizes of the shifts in means from pre-test to post-test was 0.7 (medium) in both cycles, while the effect size of shifts in the mean from pre-test to delayed post-test was 1.3 (large). T-tests established that these shifts in means were statistically significant. The core group showed the greatest learning gains, suggesting that the intervention was most successful in ‘raising the middle’ of the class. Particular patterns of children’s reasoning about additive relations word problems are documented from the South African ELL children in this design experiment. For example many ELLs in this design experiment initially responded to compare word problems like ‘Mahlodi has 12 sweets. Moeketsi has 8 sweets. How many more sweets does Mahlodi have than Moeketsi?’ with: ‘Mahlodi has 12 sweets’. New actions and contrasts relating to additive relations are brought into focus. For example the empirical results indicated that inserting attention to 1:1 matching actions was found to be useful to helping learners to deal with static compare situations. This study has helped to extend the theoretical foundations of what is meant by a ‘narrative approach’ as the theoretical features of the narrative approach are now situated within a broader theoretical framework of orienting theories, domain specific instructional theories, and related frameworks for action. The findings of this design experiment have been promising in the local context of the focal school. Should the intervention task design be found to yield similar results in other South African Foundation Phase contexts, when implemented by teachers other than the researcher, then it may be appropriate to use the research findings to improve the guidance provided to Foundation phase teachers (in curriculum documentation and through professional development offerings).Item Item ‘The Old Iron Cooking Pot of Europe’ Storytelling, Sleuthing and Neo-colonialism in the Botswana novels of Alexander McCall Smith(2006-11-02T12:27:25Z) Finnegan, LesleyIn this study I will interrogate some of the issues and contradictions raised by Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana novels. These texts feature a black African woman protagonist in a developing society, and have achieved huge popular and commercial success, but they are written by a white European man. I will examine briefly whether the books can be considered as ‘African Literature,’ and how the author has negotiated the interface between history and literature to convince readers and critics in ‘the West’ that he is portraying ‘the real Africa.’ I will investigate the strategies used by the author to create this ‘authentic’, ‘traditional’ effect, how he writes convincingly as, about and on behalf of women, and the use he makes of the detective fiction mode. Ultimately I will consider whether these novels represent a restorative ‘writing back’ or whether they constitute a continuing appropriation of African history, culture and identity, a further re-invention of Africa by and for ‘the West’.