Browsing by Author "Fataar, Aslam"

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    Countering testimonial injustice: The spatial practices of school administrative clerks
    (University of KwaZulu-Natal on behalf of the South African Education Research Association, 2018) Bayat, Abdullah; Fataar, Aslam
    In this article we discuss the phenomenon of how people's voices or opinions are taken up in relation to their professional status. We focus on administrative clerks in school contexts, people who occupy a professional category that is regarded as one of voicelessness and therefore easily ignored. Their low occupational role and status mean that their testimonies are deemed less credible than the testimonies of school principals and teachers. We refer to this situation as a form of testimonial injustice that is visited daily on these clerks. We illustrate how selected administrative clerks go about exercising their agency in the light of their experiences of such testimonial injustice and go on to establish a range of spatial practices that confer on them a credible professional status. This article is based on a qualitative study of three administrative clerks in selected South African public schools undertaken over a 12-week period, followed up by further interviews and site observations. Combining the theoretical constructs of testimonial injustice and rhetorical space, we argue that the administrative clerks we studied engendered transformed rhetorical spaces, which are negotiated social spaces that allowed for their voices and opinions to challenge the testimonial injustice they experience. We suggest that they achieved these rhetorical spaces through their continual and active presence in their work environments. They engender rhetorical spaces in which their voices are deemed legitimate by forming close relationships with others in their work environments, enhancing their professional capacity by furthering their educational qualifications, and the successful accomplishment of additional role tasks. Our main argument is that these clerks, despite occupying a marginalised occupational status and suffering testimonial injustice, are able to exercise their reflexive agency to improve their credibility and thereby resist the testimonial injustice visited upon them. This article contributes to nascent scholarship on school administrative clerks' contributions to their professional environments at their schools. We argue that their contribution is undergirded by spatial practices that can be understood partly as a type of resistance to their negative status and position at their respective schools. We suggest that while they are discursively projected as peripheral figures in their school environments, they nonetheless make valuable, yet under-valued, contributions to the functioning of their school.
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    Die impak van onderwysers se identiteitsbasis op hul ontvang en implementering van kurrikulum 2005 in sekere verafgelee skole van die Wes-Kaap
    (University of the Western Cape, 2006) Visagie, Clarence Vernon; Fataar, Aslam; Faculty of Education
    This thesis was undertaken as an empirical study which focused on curriculum implementation in a remote geographical region in post-apartheid South Africa, known as the Overberg. The identity basis on which teachers receive and implement CUrriculum 2005 in the Overberg region, served as the cenrtal focus for undertaking this study. Accordingly, it was found that the personal, ontological, contextual, training, professional and pedagogical influences have had an impact on the composition of the identity basis of teachers in the Overberg region. The teachers received and implemented Curriculum 2005 in the light of the impact of their prior identities.
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    An ethnographic study of the learning practices of grade 6 students in an urban township school in the Western Cape: a sociological perspective
    (University of the Western Cape, 2010) Du Plooy (Mocke), Lucinda Lucille; Fataar, Aslam; Faculty of Education
    The study's main starting premises is that there is a disjuncture between the rich educational engagements of these students in their environmental space and how their learning practices are framed, informed and positioned in the institutional space. My study is underpinned by an interpretivist paradigm in terms of which I set out to describe and understand the meanings that the student respondents assign to their learning practices when they are involved in discursive practices of speaking, knowing, doing, reading and writing. Qualitative research instruments: field notes, participant and non-participant observations and formal and informal interviews were used in order to answer my research question and achieve the desired research aims of this thesis. The findings are presented in a narrative format after deriving at categories and themes using narrative analysis. Finally, my research shows how these students are positioned in and by their lived spaces (whether environmental or institutional) in specific ways, and they, based on their own resources, networks and interactions, and by exercising their agency, actively construct their own spaces of learning. I describe these active constructions by these students as their 'conceptual space of learning' to highlight the complex ways in which they go about to establish their learning practices in their lived spaces. The study provides an analysis of the basis upon which each of these four students go about constructing their learning practices.
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    Exploring agency in marginalised occupations: School administrative clerks’ deployment of “participatory capital” in establishing practice-based agency
    (University of Free state, 2020) Bayat, Abdullah; Fataar, Aslam
    Popular conceptions of school administrative clerks and school secretaries imply that they have little agency because they are deemed as subordinate support staff. However, the literature across a range of fields suggests that these subordinates exercise agency. We set out in this article to explore the workings of subordinate agency. The article suggests that it is through their involvement and interaction in the socio-cultural context of the school that school administrative clerks are able to expand the range of their agency and thereby reposition themselves at school.
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    The role and impact of Shaykh Shakier Gamieldien in the establishment of modern Rational Islam in the Western Cape, with specific reference to his educational endeavours, 1950 - 1996
    (University of Western Cape, 2012) Behardien, Eghsaan; Fataar, Aslam
    This thesis discusses the impact of modern Rational Islam on the Muslim community of the Western Cape between 1950 and 1996. It is particularly concerned with the role of Shaykh Shakier Gamieldien in establishing and propagating this discourse in the region through the use of education as his means of propagation. The study defines modern Rational Islam as a discourse that emerged as a response to the incursion of modern Western culture into traditional Muslim regions during the 19th Century. The study further reflects on the local conditions in the Western Cape and assesses the progress that modern Rational Islam had made under Gamieldien’s guidance in the period immediately after the Second World War. It investigates the negative impact that the forced removals of the community of District 6 from their urban homes in Cape Town had on Rational Islam who had lived in this area. It explores the emergence of alternative interpretive and discursive tendencies in the Townships and the apathy of the rationalists during this period. Two issues come under critical scrutiny in the thesis in order to provide clarity on the changing strategy used by Rational Islam during period of forced removals. First, the creation of new structures that could be employed for purposes of Islamic education within the rational discourse. The second was its attempt to reach a wider audience because of the destruction of its primary base in District 6. In assessing the impact of Rational Islam on the community of the Western Cape consideration is given to the changing contexts that existed between 1950 and 1996. The thesis examines the effect of the disintegration of the Muslim community and then the emergence of other discursive tendencies in the townships on Rational Islam. It also considers the indirect influence that Gamieldien’s discourse had on the other Islamic discursive tendencies in its assessment of Rational Islam’s impact. The study is based on qualitative research methods, mostly oral interviews with groups of students who studied and worked with Gamieldien as well as with individual informants such as family members, friends and his leading students. This thesis investigates the emergence and impact of Rational Islam in the Western Cape and the contribution made by Shaykh Shakier Gamieldien in its establishment in this region. It further investigates the role of education as used by Gamieldien as a means of propagating modern Rational Islam as an accepted local Islamic discourse.
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    An understanding of HIV and AIDS discourses of teachers in Cape Town, South Africa, and its' relevance for HIV prevention in schools
    (University of the Western Cape, 2010) Davids, Mogamat Noor; Lees, James; Fataar, Aslam; Meerkotter, Dirk; Faculty of Education
    This study investigates the content and nature of the HIV and AIDS "discourses" of teachers, which I have identified as a knowledge gap in the existing HIV and AIDS education literature that, presumably, is informing practice. The argument is that, without an understanding of teachers' HIV and AIDS discourses, we will continue to speculate about why HIV education often does not have the effect we expect of it - reduced HIV infection, reduced risk behaviour, reduced teenage pregnancies - and why it has been regarded as a failure by many. The public media often expose rampant teenage sexual behaviour, such as abortions, pregnancies, and an addiction for electronically generated pornographic materials, causing consternation and sending shockwaves through schools and society. These reports attest to the kind of risky sexual behavior which makes children vulnerable to HIV infection. In spite of more than twenty years of HIV and AIDS education, teachers and society at large remain uncertain and uncomfortable about teenage sexual behavior, HIV infection and the inability of adults to protect young people from sexual exploitation.