2. Academic Wits University Research Outputs (All submissions)
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Item The 'firstness' of male as automatic ordering: Gendered discourse in Southern African Business Studies school textbooks.(2018) Pillay, P.; Maistry, S.There is little contention that gender equity continues to be a challenge in many societies across the Southern African region. Dominant discourses that perpetuate inequality are often reflected in school materials such as textbooks, which have the potential to socialise girls and boys into particular gender performances. The aim of the study being reported on was to examine representations of gender in a sample of Business Studies school textbooks. The textbooks were selected from four Southern African countries: Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The study employed a sociolinguistic analytical framework, namely critical discourse analysis and was guided by the tenets of feminist poststructuralism in the analysis of this phenomenon. The findings of the study reveal superficial content changes in the texts under study. Gendered ideologies continue to prevail in a remarkably overt fashion. One key finding was at a semantic level, namely the mention of the male pronoun first in sentences and conversation and not the female pronoun, having the likely effect of endorsing the principle of the ‘firstness’ and superiority of the masculine. In the order of two words paired for sex such as ‘Mr and Mrs’, ‘brother and sister’ and ‘husband and wife’, the masculine word came first. This automatic ordering is likely to reinforce the second-place status of women. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of these findings for pedagogy and the textbook publishing industry. The findings also have the potential to ignite debate, as it relates to re-imagining the programmatic curriculum (school textbooks) as a contested genre.Item Affordances for learning linear functions: A comparative study of two textbooks from South Africa and Germany.(Publisher: AOSIS (pty) Ltd, 2018-09) Mellor, K; Clark, R; Essien, ATextbook content has the ability to influence mathematical learning. This study compares how linear functions are presented in two textbooks, one of South African and the other of German origin. These two textbooks are used in different language-based streams in a school in Gauteng, South Africa. A qualitative content analysis on how the topic of linear functions is presented in these two textbooks was done. The interplay between procedural and conceptual knowledge, the integration of the multiple representations of functions, and the links created to other mathematical content areas and the real world were considered. It was found that the German textbook included a higher percentage of content that promoted the development of conceptual knowledge. This was especially due to the level of cognitive demand of tasks included in the analysed textbook chapters. Also, while the South African textbook presented a wider range of opportunities to interact with the different representations of functions, the German textbook, on the other hand, included more links to the real world. Both textbooks linked 'functions' to other mathematical content areas, although the German textbook included a wider range of linked topics. It was concluded that learners from the two streams are thus exposed to different affordances to learn mathematics by their textbooks.