Browsing by Author "Patel, Mahmoud"

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    Co-constructing a rubric checklist with first year university students: A self-assessment tool
    (University of Jyv�skyl�, 2017) Bharuthram, Sharita; Patel, Mahmoud
    This paper reports on a study in which students co-constructed a rubric checklist with their lecturer and which they used to assess themselves. Data were collected by means of a student questionnaire, tutor feedback, as well as tutors� and lecturers� observations to ascertain students� experiences and opinions of the design process and of using the tool to self-assess. The findings show that co-designing the rubric checklist with students increased their motivation and enhanced students� confidence in completing the task. In addition, students gained enormous benefits from using the rubric checklist as a self-assessment tool. Reflecting critically on the feedback received from students and tutors the authors argue that for enhanced student engagement in the teaching and learning process they should be involved as active participants in the assessment processes. In addition, students need to learn to assess the quality of their own work early in their academic career with continuous guided practice throughout their studies with the intention of making the practice of self-assessment a norm rather than an exception, thereby creating independent reflective learners.
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    The topoi of Mandela's death in the Arabic speaking media: A corpus-based political discourse analysis
    (Frontiers Media, 2022) Mohammed, Tawffeek A. S.; Banda, Felix; Patel, Mahmoud
    The present study attempts a political discourse analysis of a spoken Arabic corpus on the death of Nelson Mandela. The corpus mainly consists of the coverage of some Arabic-speaking TV channels that was broadcasted in the aftermath of the announcement of Nelson Mandela�s death in 2013. The discourse-historical approach was employed with a view to finding out the various topoi and ideologies deployed in the corpus. For this purpose, the spoken corpus used in this study was first transcribed using EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN), a transcription tool for multimodal texts. Afterward, the corpus was compiled using Sketch Engine to enable researchers to process the data automatically and hence to use different computational tools that can assist in finding the various topoi. A computational analysis using collocations, wordlists, N-grams, and concordance features can provide a more precise analysis of the various topoi in context and hence to uncover the ideologies of participants/politicians.
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    Ubuntu in post-apartheid South Africa: educational, cultural and philosophical considerations
    (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), 2024) Patel, Mahmoud; Mohammed, Tawffeek; Koen, Raymond
    Ubuntu has been defined as a moral quality of human beings, as a philosophy or an ethic, as African humanism, and as a worldview. This paper explores these definitions as conceptual tools for understanding the cultural, educational, and philosophical landscape of post-apartheid South Africa. Key to this understanding is the Althusserian concept of state apparatus. Louis Althusser divides the state apparatus into two forces: the repressive state apparatus (RSA); and the ideological state apparatus (ISA). RSAs curtail the working classes, predominately through direct violence or the threat of violence, whereas ISAs function primarily by ideology, including forms of organised religion, the education system, family units, legal systems, trade unions, political parties, and media. This paper discusses the link between increasing inequality in post-apartheid South Africa and education, with specific reference to Althusser’s ISAs and the abuse of Ubuntu as a subterfuge for socio-economic inequality.