1. Academic Wits Research Publications (Faculties submissions)
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Item Education service delivery: the disastrous case of outcomes-based qualifications frameworks(SAGE Publications, 2007) Allais, Stephanie MatselengInternational trends towards outcomes-based qualifications frameworks as the drivers of educational reform fi t in well with trends in service delivery and public sector reform. Education reform in South Africa provides a particularly interesting case study of this phenomenon, because of the very comprehensive outcomes-based national qualifications framework that was implemented shortly after the transition to democracy. Problems with the framework as a basis for education reform became rapidly apparent, and the system is now deadlocked in a series of unresolved policy reviews. A key to understanding this collapse is the role of knowledge in relation to education. The outcomes based qualification framework approach turns out to have very little to do with education, and in fact to have the potential to increase educational inequalities, particularly in poor countries.Item Why the South African NQF failed: lessons for countries wanting to introduce national qualifications frameworks(Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Allais, Stephanie MatselengThis article examines the South African National Qualifications Framework as a case study of a particular approach to the design of qualifications frameworks, which revolves around the specification of learning outcomes separate from educational institutions or programmes. It shows how an outcomes-led qualifications framework was seen as a desirable policy intervention by educationalists and reformers across the political spectrum, as outcomes were thought to be a mechanism for improving the quality and quantity of education as well as its relevance to the economy and society, for increasing access to education, and for democratising education. All these claims are based on the idea that outcomes statements are transparent. The article demonstrates that outcomes-based qualifications cannot provide the clear, unambiguous, and explicit statements of competence that would be required for everyone to know what it is that the bearer of a qualification can do. This lack of transparency leads to a further specification of outcomes. This in turn leads to a downward spiral of specification, which never reaches transparency, and an upward spiral of regulations, which is also caught in the logical problem of the downward spiral of specification. This model is not just unnecessary, but could in fact undermine the provision of education. The article suggests that while this type of model appears attractive particularly to poor countries, it is in these countries that it is likely to do the most damage.Item Substantive equality and transformation in South Africa(Juta and Co, 2007) Albertyn, CatherineThis article considers whether ‘substantive equality’, as a transformative idea and legal mechanism in the South African Constitution, can generate legal solutions and court decisions that may result in transformative change. It does so by establishing a framework for analysing the ‘inclusionary’ or ‘transformatory’ effects of equality cases in relation to gender and sexual orientation. It argues that the idea of substantive equality is capable of addressing diverse forms of social and economic inequality, and that the legal form of substantive equality adopted by the Constitutional Court, emphasising context, impact, difference and values, has some potential for achieving meaningful social and economic change by and through courts. However, the manner is which the Court has engaged with this legal form suggests that the transformative possibilities of equality are constrained by a number of factors. These include institutional concerns, the capacity and willingness of judges to recognise and address the multiple systemic inequalities that still pervade our society as well as their ability to develop a consistently transformative jurisprudence that applies the ideas of substantive equality to the concepts and doctrines that underpin many equality claims.Item Data to action: An overview of crime, violence and injury in South Africa(Medical Research Council, 2008) Suffla, Shahnaaz; Van Niekerk, Ashley; Bowman, Brett; Matzopoulos, RichardItem Applying upstream interventions for interpersonal violence prevention: An uphill struggle in low- to middle-income contexts(Health Policy, 2010) Matzopoulos, Richard; Bowman, Brett; Mathews, Shanaaz; Myers, JonnyIn South Africa’s Western Cape province, interpersonal violence was identified among the key prevention priorities in the provincial government’s Burden of Disease (BoD) Reduction project. To date, there are no adequate systematic reviews of the full range of potential intervention strategies. In response, available data and the literature on risk factors and prevention strategies for interpersonal violence were reviewed with a view to providing policy makers with an inventory of interventions for application. Given the predominance of upstream factors in driving the province’s rates of interpersonal violence, efforts to address its burden require an intersectoral approach. Achievable short-term targets are also required to offset the long-term nature of the strategies most likely to affect fundamental shifts. Documentation and evaluation will be important to drive long-term investment, ensure effectiveness and enable replication of successful programmes and should be considered imperative by interpersonal violence prevention policymakers in other low- to middle-income contexts.Item Children, pathology and politics: a genealogy of the paedophile in South Africa between 1944 and 2004(South African Journal of Psychology, 2010) Bowman, BrettBy the early 1990s the paedophile as a ‘type’ of child sexual abuse (CSA) perpetrator was prioritised for study and intervention by the South African socio-medical sciences and cases of paedophilia featured prominently in the media reporting of the time. Drawing on the genealogical method as derived from Michel Foucault, this study aimed to account for this relatively recent emergence of the paedophile as an object of socio-medical study and social anxiety within the South African archive. Based on an analysis of archival texts against the backdrop of international biopolitics and local conditions of political possibility, the genealogy contends that the early figure of the paedophile was an instrument and effect of apartheid biopolitics. The paedophile was prioritised for research and escalated as social threat in the public imagination as part of the broader apartheid project aimed at protecting white hegemony through the ongoing surveillance of and health interventions directed towards South Africa’s white children. While the apartheid project constructed black children as posing fundamental threats to white supremacy, discourses beginning in the mid-1980s repositioned them as vulnerable victims of apartheid itself. It was from within these discourses that child sexual abuse (CSA) as a public health concern began to crystallise. By locating blackness within the fields of discipline and desire, the material conditions for an ever-expanding net of sexual surveillance were established. The study thus demonstrates that even the paedophile cannot be effectively researched without considering the historical co-ordinates that so powerfully contoured its emergence as an important object of study and social intervention within South Africa’s highly racialised systems of thought.Item Constitutional Court for South Africa(Centre for Applied Legal Studies, 1991-11) Haysom, N. R. L.Item Mabangalala: The Rise of Right-Wing Vigilantes in South Africa(Centre for Applied Legal Studies, 1996) Haysom, NicholasItem Who owns South Africa? can the repeal of the Land Act de-racialise land ownership in South Africa?(Centre for Applied Legal Studies, 1991-02) Claassens, AninkaItem Report on the Rabie Report: An Examination of Security Legislation in South Africa(1982-03-01) Dugard, John; Marcus, G. J.; Benjamin, P.; Doctor, B.; Mathews, A. S.; Rudolph, H. G.; van Zyl Smit, D.