Assessing the impact of globalization on South African education and training: a review of the evidence so far

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salim Akoojee1 ◽  
Simon McGrath 2,*
Author(s):  
Aslam Fataar

The notion of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has recently entered the public and policy domain in South Africa. It has rapidly found resonance in policy discourse and the popular media. It has also entered the language of educational policy and institutions. The impact of 4IR on educational thinking and practice has hitherto not featured in academic discussion on education in South Africa except for a keynote plenary session at the annual conference of the South African Education Research Association (SAERA) in Durban (October 2019). The South African Education Deans Forum recently published a call for the submission of chapters for a book on teacher education, 4IR, and decolonisation. In this article, I develop an address that I delivered at the SAERA 2019 conference as part of the plenary panel. The article consists of four sections. The first offers a consideration of the entry of 4IR discourse into the educational imaginary. I suggest in this section that 4IR discourse has installed a socio-technical imaginary in South Africa's unequal educational dispensation. The second section concentrates on the construction of educational governance. Based on research on 4IR-related policy making, I discuss the policy directions taken by the Department of Higher Education and Training and the Department of Basic Education in giving effect to ways of engaging with 4IR in each of their domains. The third section features a discussion of the impact of technological disruption on society, the economy and education. The final section presents a discussion of the emerging educational architectures in the 4IR and a critical consideration of the curriculum and pedagogical dimensions of 4IR, which, I argue, are informed by an orientation that prioritises the acquisition of generic skills. Sidelining knowledge and concepts as central to the structuring of the curriculum, a generic skills approach succumbs to what might be called a knowledge blindness that holds pernicious consequences for epistemic access in South Africa.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. e039939
Author(s):  
Sahdia Parveen ◽  
Sarah Jane Smith ◽  
Cara Sass ◽  
Jan R Oyebode ◽  
Andrea Capstick ◽  
...  

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to establish the impact of dementia education and training on the knowledge, attitudes and confidence of health and social care staff. The study also aimed to identify the most effective features (content and pedagogical) of dementia education and training.DesignCross-sectional survey study. Data collection occurred in 2017.SettingsHealth and social care staff in the UK including acute care, mental health community care trusts, primary care and care homes.ParticipantsAll health and social care staff who had completed dementia education and training meeting the minimal standards as set by Health Education England, within the past 5 years were invited to participate in an online survey. A total of 668 health and social care staff provided informed consent and completed an online survey, and responses from 553 participants were included in this study. The majority of the respondents were of white British ethnicity (94.4%) and identified as women (88.4%).OutcomesKnowledge, attitude and confidence of health and social care staff.ResultsHierarchical multiple regression analysis was conducted. Staff characteristics, education and training content variables and pedagogical factors were found to account for 29% of variance in staff confidence (F=4.13, p<0.001), 22% of variance in attitude (knowledge) (F=3.80, p<001), 18% of the variance in staff knowledge (F=2.77, p<0.01) and 14% of variance in staff comfort (attitude) (F=2.11, p<0.01).ConclusionThe results suggest that dementia education and training has limited impact on health and social care staff learning outcomes. While training content variables were important when attempting to improve staff knowledge, more consideration should be given to pedagogical factors when training is aiming to improve staff attitude and confidence.


2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynette Hunter

The essay explores Erasmus' development of a fourth category of rhetoric, the familiar, in its work as a rhetoric of the absent audience in both personal and sociopolitical contexts, and as a rhetoric resonant with early modern theories of friendship and temperance. The discussion is set against a background of Caxton's printing of the translation of Cicero's De Amicitia, because Erasmus casts friendship as the context for appropriate communication between people from quite different education and training, along with the probable rhetoric that enables appropriate persuasion. The probable rhetorical stance of temperate friendship proposes a foundation for a common weal1 based on a co-extensive sense of selfhood. This focus suggests that the familiar rhetoric set out in Erasmus' De Conscribendis epistolis draws on Cicero's rhetoric of sermo2 at the heart of friendship.3 It explores the effects of the rhetorical stance of probable rhetoric, both for personal and social writing, and for political action, and looks at the impact of sermo rhetoric on ideas of identity and civic politics in an age of burgeoning circulation of books (both script and print). The essay concludes with three post-Erasmian case studies in English rhetoric [Elyot, Wilson, Lever] that use probable rhetoric to document approaches to individual and civic agency and which offer insights into the Western neoliberal state rhetorical structures of today.


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