Education Studies South Africa

Edited by Charl C. Wolhuter Education Studies in South Africa Charl C. Wolhuter Wolhuter C. Charl Education Studies (ed.) in South Africa The Quest for Relevance, Rigour and Restructuring Education Studies in South Africa The Quest for Relevance, Rigour and Restructuring Published by AOSIS Books, an imprint of AOSIS Publishing. AOSIS Publishing 15 Oxford Street, Durbanville 7550, Cape Town, South Africa Postnet Suite #110, Private Bag X19, Durbanville 7551, South Africa Tel: +27 21 975 2602 Website: https://www.aosis.co.za Copyright © Charl C. Wolhuter (ed.). Licensee: AOSIS (Pty) Ltd The moral right of the authors has been asserted. Cover image: Original design created with the use of free image. Free image used https://pixabay.com/photos/sea-sea-view-blue-water-sky-view-5331815/ is released under Pixabay License. Published in 2020 Impression: 1 ISBN: 978-1-928523-58-1 (print) ISBN: 978-1-928523-59-8 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-928523-60-4 (pdf) DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2020.BK155 How to cite this work: Wolhuter, C.C. (ed.), 2020, Education Studies in South Africa: The Quest for Relevance, Rigour and Restructuring, pp. i-379, AOSIS, Cape Town. Printed and bound in South Africa. Listed in OAPEN (http://www.oapen.org), DOAB (http://www.doabooks.org/) and indexed by Google Scholar. Some rights reserved. This is an open access publication. Except where otherwise noted, this work is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), a copy of which is available at https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. Enquiries outside the terms of the Creative Commons licence should be sent to the Rights Department, AOSIS, at the above address or to [email protected] The publisher accepts no responsibility for any statement made or opinion expressed in this publication. Consequently, the publishers and copyright holder will not be liable for any loss or damage sustained by any reader as a result of his or her action upon any statement or opinion in this work. Links by third-party websites are provided by AOSIS in good faith and for information only. AOSIS disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third-party website referenced in this work. Every effort has been made to protect the interest of copyright holders. Should any infringement have occurred inadvertently, the publisher apologises and undertakes to amend the omission in the event of a reprint. Education Studies in South Africa The Quest for Relevance, Rigour and Restructuring EDITOR Charl C. Wolhuter Social Sciences, Humanities, Education & Business Management domain editorial board at AOSIS Commissioning Editor Andries G. van Aarde, MA, DD, PhD, D Litt, South Africa Board Members Jan Botha, Professor in the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa Joan Hambidge, Deputy Dean at the Faculty of Humanities for the University of Cape Town and Professor for the School of Languages and Literatures, South Africa Sakari Häkkinen, Dean of the Diocese of Kuopio, Finland Glenna Jackson, Associate Editor, Professor Chair, Department of Religion and Philosophy, Otterbein University, Westerville, OH, United States of America Gregory C. Jenkins, Dean-Elect, St George’s College, Jerusalem, Israel Reina-Marie Loader, Director and Filmmaker, CinémaHumain, Vienna, Austria Babita Marthur-Helm, Senior Lecturer Organisational Transformation and Development; Managing Diversity Gender Empowerment, University of Stellenbosch Business School, Stellenbosch, South Africa Christopher Mbazira, Professor of Law and Coordinator of the Public Interest Law Clinic, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda Piet Naudé, Professor Ethics related to politics, economics and business and Director, University of Stellenbosch Business School, Stellenbosch, South Africa Charles Neill, Professor Department of Business Administration, The British University in Egypt, El Sherouk, Cairo Governorate, Egypt Cornelia Pop, Full Professor at the Department of Business, Faculty of Business, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Michael Schratz, Professor, Institut für LehrerInnenbildung und Schulforschung, Dekan der School of Education, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria Johann Tempelhoff, Professor, Research Niche for Cultural Dynamics of Water (CuDyWat), School of Basic Sciences, Vaal Triangle Campus of North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa Anthony Turton, Professor Centre for Environmental Management and Director TouchStone Resources, University of Free State, South Africa Willie L. van der Merwe, Professor and Chair Philosophy of Religion, Apologetics and Encyclopaedia of theology and Professor Extraordinary Stellenbosch University, South Africa, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Christi van der Westhuizen, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria, South Africa Joke van Saane, Professor, Amsterdam Center for the Study of Lived Religion, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands Paul van Tongeren, Professor Department Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Robert G. Varady, Deputy Director and Research Professor of Environmental Policy, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, The University of Arizona, Tucson, United States of America Anné H. Verhoef, Associate Editor, Professor, Faculty of Arts, School of Philosophy, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa Xiao Yun Zheng, Professor and Assistant President of Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences (YASS) and Director International Center for Ecological Culture Studies (ICECS-YASS), Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, Kunming City, China Peer review declaration The publisher (AOSIS) endorses the South African ‘National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum Best Practice for Peer Review of Scholarly Books.’ The manuscript was subjected to rigorous two-step peer review prior to publication, with the identities of the reviewers not revealed to the author(s). The reviewers were independent of the publisher and/or authors in question. The reviewers commented positively on the scholarly merits of the manuscript and recommended that the manuscript be published. Where the reviewers recommended revision and/or improvements to the manuscript, the authors responded adequately to such recommendations. Research Justification The thesis of this volume is that the fields of scholarly enquiry of education – internationally as well as in South Africa in particular – despite being fields of virile scholarly activity and output, are in need of a major overhaul. In this collected work, this want in research is encapsulated in three words: relevance, rigour and restructuring. Research in the scholarly field(s) of education is predominantly of small scale, non-accumulative, widely condemned as not of a comparable standard to research conducted in other social sciences, much less at par with research in the natural sciences, and lacking structure in the sense of being anchored in a firm theory. To make matters worse, scholars in education internationally have till very recently and in South Africa still eschew discussion as to the packaging or structuring of knowledge produced by education research. The book consists of chapters all containing original research unpacking these desiderata from a variety of angles. The authors had them served by a variety of methods, from deductively argued position papers to empirical research, the latter both quantitative (survey research) and qualitative. In the concluding parts of the book, three main objectives are tabled as to how to proceed to produce rigorous, relevant and structured research. The first is that a unified theory of education should take education as it appears in the world, as its prime object of research, rather than attempt to construct a theory of education deduced from theories extant in cognate social sciences or humanities, such as sociology, psychology or philosophy. Secondly, a theory of education should have a normative superstructure, and in this regard, the creed of human rights is suggested as a place to look for such a normative superstructure. Even in the miniscule amount of research abroad recently devoted to the structuring of education knowledge, scholars have contended with an analysis of existing practices in packaging education knowledge in different national settings, and have refrained from assessing these, much less made suggestions as to how to proceed to the construction of a theoretical edifice superseding national boundaries. Thirdly, in construction of a comprehensive theory of education, scholarship should carefully negotiate the field of tension between striving towards the scientific ideal of universally valid statements and reflecting the specificities of different contexts. In this regard, the tools and expertise of scholars in the field of comparative and international education are highlighted as a valuable resource. In bringing into the spotlight of scholarly investigation the need to bring rigour, relevance and above all structure in the production of knowledge of education, the book offers original research. The similarity report of an iThenticate analysis confirms that the work contains no plagiarism. The book is a scholarly book, aimed at scholars of education, with a message as to how they can raise the state of scholarship in education. Charl C. Wolhuter, Department of Comparative and International Education,

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