For over two decades South African higher education has been dominated by three successive and contending waves of thinking and organisation. They are: neo-liberal managerialism the decolonialisation of knowledge and, most recently, the idea of a Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). More...
Is indigenous knowledge important in education? Can it be discussed in the formal science curriculum?
I posed this question to university foundation students for a research project into place-based science learning. The group of about 18 isiZulu-speaking students told me one after the other that their “local knowledge” was irrelevant. No, they weren’t interested in traditional ways of knowing. Their grandparents may have had “indigenous knowledge”, but this wasn’t for them. More...
Kinematics describes the motion of objects through numbers, diagrams, words and equations and is taught in schools around the world as part of the physics curriculum.
But our ongoing research in Mauritius shows that the people who are meant to teach kinematics in the classroom – physics teachers – don’t understand the concepts that underpin it. More...
South Africa is training a group of teachers to learn how to code and how to teach coding. The subject will be piloted at 1000 schools across five provinces, starting in the 2020 academic year. The announcement has resulted in debates around the country's ability to deliver on such a commitment, particularly when considering the low literacy and numeracy skills of learners. More...
Australia has been ranked as one of the top destinations to study internationally. The QS Best Student Cities Ranking released yesterday, which incorporates feedback from more than 87,000 current and prospective international students, ranked Melbourne as the third-best city to study. Sydney came in ninth. More...
Among the many touching gifts following the March 2019 shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, were two paintings by artists from South Australia’s remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. More...
This means next year, only about A$80 million of funding will be subject to performance measures. The proposed scheme would grow year-on-year above 2017 levels until a maximum of 7.5% of a university’s funding is allocated on a performance basis. More...
A new report from the Grattan Institute – Risks and rewards: when is vocational education a good alternative to higher education? – looked at the employment outcomes for students leaving school with a lower Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) (their main entry criteria into most undergraduate university programs). More...
Concerns are growing about Chinese influence on Australian universities. Some universities are reviewing research partnerships with Chinese state-owned companies after the ABC’s Four Corners revealed links to technology being used by the Chinese Government to carry out mass human rights abuses against the Uyghur ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. More...
Memorising poetry was once common in classrooms. But it has, for the most part, gone out of style. There are good reasons for this. More...
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