Dissertation (MTech (radiography))—Peninsula Technikon, Cape Town, 2003 / Five of the seventeen countries with Nuclear Medicine facilities in Africa have training programmes for Nuclear Medicine Technologists (NMT's). Four of the countries are in Northern Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt) and only one in Southern Africa (South Africa). The training programmes vary from country to country and therefore there is no common basis to facilitate regional co-operation. Nuclear Medicine Technologists working in sub-Saharan countries do not have formal training in Nuclear Medicine and have mostly been recruited from related fields of Radiological Technology. A number of NMT's in these centres have enjoyed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) fellowship training in other countries or have attended regional training courses. Knowledge and skills, learned in well established Nuclear Medicine departments with supportive infrastructure, are on the whole difficult to transfer to a local situation without such support. Because of the nature of the specialty the numbers required for training are small and it would therefore not be cost-effective for Higher Education Institutions in these countries to set up training programmes. There is also a lack of expertise in this field in Africa. Training was initially supported outside the countries with loss of personnel to the departments and in many instances loss of manpower as these trainees leave their countries and do not return. Under an IAEA/African Regional Co-operative Agreement (AFRA) project; "Establishing a Regional Capability in Nuclear Medicine", the following related to training of NMT's: 1. Harmonisation of training programmes for Nuclear Medicine Technologists in AFRA countries 2. Assess the feasibility of running a Distance Assisted Training (DAT) programme for Nuclear Medicine Technologists It was hoped that in this way, full use could be made of available expertise and facilities in the region, the cost of training could be reduced and the standard of patient health care improved.

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This study was aimed at understanding how networking can enable or constrain professional development and institutionalisation of environmental education courses in southern Africa in the context of the Course Development Network (CDN), a project of the Southern Africa Development Community Regional Environmental Education Programme (SADC REEP). The study involved 12 institutions (each institution was represented in the CDN by a staff member) in eight SADC member states. It was contextualized through a review of social, political, environmental and educational developments in southern Africa, with specific reference to regionalization processes, as the SADC REEF is constituted under this post-colonial political framework. Relational philosophy informed the research process and methodology. The philosophy underpinned three distinct, yet related theoretical perspectives namely: critical realism, which provided the ontological perspectives of the study; Actor Network Theory; and Community of Practice, which provided the epistemological perspectives. Data was generated during a 33-month period in southern Africa and 12 months in the United Kingdom (and on a one week visit to Italy). During a 12 month Split Site Commonwealth Scholarship award, tenable at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, I studied the Environment and School Initiative (ENSI) and the Sustainability Education for European Primary Schools (SEEPS), to examine whether the same mechanisms that made them successful would apply to the CDN in the context of southern Africa. While these two case studies provided useful insight into the relationship between networking, professional development and institutionalization of environmental education programmes, they were not the main focus of the research. Data analysis was mainly through inductive, abductive and retroductive modes of inference. Inductive data analysis was done by means of Nvivo – a computer software package used for qualitative data analysis. The software aided in revealing features and relationships in the data in more depth as it allowed flexibility in working with data. Abduction is the interpretation of a phenomenon by means of a conceptual framework. In this study, I used Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Callon, 1986) and Community of Practice (COP) (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Fullan, 2003) as analytical conceptual frameworks to probe networking and professional development respectively. Data on institutionalisation of environmental education courses was analysed by means of retroductive mode of inference, which is a thought operation that enables the understanding of social reality beyond what is empirically observable or experienced. This study reveals that there were a number of necessary (internal) and contingent (external) factors that enabled or constrained networking, professional development and institutionalisation of environmental education courses in the context of the CDN. The key factors included existing cultural capital, donor political economy, power relations, poverty related factors and social transformation trends. The study found that relational approaches and the use of three relational theoretical lenses provided a broader lens which enabled this study to identify different dynamics, greater ontological depth and understanding of the relational dynamics and relations at play in the CDN beyond the participants' experience and observable events. The study also contends that networking can provide a support structure for social transformation and change in environmental education.

The study takes place in the context of the Southern African Development Community’s Regional Environmental Education Programme (SADC REEP). The SADC REEP is a programme of the Food Agriculture and Natural Resources Directorate of the SADC Secretariat. The programme is implemented through four components namely policy, networking, training and learning support materials development. The bulk of the policy budget is in the form of seed funding to support policy initiatives in the member states. The intention of this study is to illuminate factors that influence the deployment and use of seed funding to support environmental education policy processes within the SADC REEP. To sharpen the understanding of the context within which these activities take place, the study looks at the global and regional landscape of policy events and their influence on policy in the sub-region. The study also looks at the landscape of the fields within which environmental education is embedded, the power relations, and the notion of agency in environmental education policy processes. The discourse in environmental education policy processes is analyzed by drawing on Bourdieu’s constructivist structuralism to highlight some of the social and institutional complexities in dynamic fields, capital and policy context. The research takes a qualitative interpretative approach using case study methodology to explore the processes and influences that have a bearing on the SADC REEP policy sub-component, specifically the deployment and use of seed funding for policy initiatives. The findings show the complexity of the variables at play in shaping the processes of developing and reviewing environmental education policies in the sub-region. These variables include discourse that is used, economics and politics of the responsible institutions and actors, as well as relationships between the environmental field and education field. The results point towards a need to clearly understand the policy context within which the SADC REEP is operating in order to make correct assumptions, to develop realist expectations, and to put in place appropriate mechanisms that will effect the expectations. The study recommends further probing of the relationship between the actors and networks in relation to the success of policy processes. It also recommends a further exploration of the SADC REEP’s open-ended approach with respect to articulating the monitoring and consolidation of the successes in supporting environmental education policy processes.

This study was developed around concerns about how indigenous knowledges have been represented and applied in environment and development education. The first phase of the study is a genealogical analysis after Michel Foucault. This probes representations and applications of plant-based indigenous knowledge in selected anthropological, botanical and environmental education texts in southern Africa. The emerging insights were deepened using a Social (Critical) Realism vantage point after Margaret Archer to shed light on agential issues in environmental education and development contexts. Here her morphogenetic/morphostatic analysis of social transformation or reproduction is used to trace changes in indigenous knowledge representations and applications over time (from the pre-colonial into the post-colonial era). The second phase uses the same perspectives and tools to extend the analysis of power/knowledge relationships into the interface of indigenous communities and modern institutions in two case study settings in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This study reveals colonially-derived hegemonic processes of modern/Western scientific institutional representations/interpretations of the knowledges of indigenous communities. It also tracks a continuing trajectory of their dominating and prescriptive mediating control over local knowledges from the pre-colonial context through into the post-colonial period in southern Africa. The analysis reveals how this hegemony is sustained through the deployment of institutional strategies of representation that transform local knowledges into the disciplinary knowledge discourses of modern scientific institutions. These representational strategies therefore generate/reproduce and validate disciplinary discourses about the other, constructing disciplinary 'regimes of truth'. In this way modern institutions appropriate and displace indigenous/local knowledges, silence the voices of local communities and regulate individual and community agency within a continuing subjugation of indigenous knowledges. This study reveals how working within modern institutions and disciplinary knowledges in participative education and development interactions can serve to implicate indigenous researchers in these institutional hegemonic processes. The study also notes evidence of a continued resistance to hegemonic Western knowledge discourses as indigenous communities have sustained many knowledge practices alongside Western knowledge discourses. There is also evidence of a recent emergence of counter-hegemonic indigenous knowledge discourses in environmental education and development practices in southern Africa. It is noted that these have been contingent upon the changing political terrain in southern Africa as this has opened the way for alternative discourses to the dominant conventional Western knowledges in formal education and development contexts. The counterhegemonic discourses invert power/knowledge relations, decentre hegemonic discourses and reposition indigenous knowledges in formal education and development contexts. This study suggests the need to foreground indigenous knowledges as a process of knowledge decolonisation that gives contextual and epistemic relevance to environmental education and development processes. This calls for a need for new strategies to transform existing institutions by creating enabling spaces for the representational inclusion of indigenous knowledges in formal/conventional knowledge discourses and their application in social contexts. This opens up possibilities for plural knowledge representations and for their integrative and reciprocal co-engagement in situated contexts of environmental education and development in southern Africa.

A Research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities in partial fulfilment of the requirements for obtaining the degree of Masters in International Relations, 2016 / International attention to the issue of girls’ education has grown dramatically over the past several decades. Gender parity and equality in education has become a significant global development priority. The Dakar Framework for Action (DFA), which set the agenda for achieving Education for All (EFA) commitments by 2015, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were aimed at the reduction of global poverty, also by 2015, serve as the main policy blueprints with respect to the global agenda for achieving gender equality in education. Despite widespread acceptance that states ought to decrease gender disparities in education, progress with respect to achieving the related DFA and MDG goals has varied between states. Although sub-Saharan Africa continues to lag far behind other regions, there are some countries in the region that have achieved better results than others. This variation in outcomes raises pertinent questions about the constitutive influence and diffusion of norms at the national level. This research report seeks to identify the mechanisms that determine the constitutive effects of the norm vis-à-vis gender parity in education in the context of sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Gambia and Chad as case studies, the study tests whether domestic political structures and domestic norms have a significant impact on norm diffusion processes at the national level, as well as how these factors will predict the pathways for diffusion and, ultimately, the constitutive effects of the norm. The study begins by tracing the evolution and documenting the existence of a global norm with respect to gender parity in education. The norm’s emergence is shown to correlate with changes in policy and practice amongst African states at both the regional and national level; however, there remains significant differences amongst states with regards to their performance in relation to gender parity targets/goals. The central finding of the study is that domestic political structures and domestic norms explain this variation between countries and predict the key drivers of normative change. In the cases of Gambia and Chad specifically, the extent of civil society participation has significantly determined the countries’ performance with respect to gender parity in education goals. / MT2017

Over the past decade, research in the field of service-learning with a special focus on the notion of social justice has been growing progressively. Distance service-learning, being a fairly new concept, has not been researched to the same extent as more traditional approaches to service-learning. Located within a social justice framework, this qualitative interpretive study explored the challenges, benefits, and experiences of a distance service-learning programme in an African context (Malawi, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Lesotho). Students and members of community organisations from these countries participated in a pilot programme of the “REPSSI/UKZN certificate programme”. This study focussed on their experiences of the service-learning module. Telephonic interviews were conducted with the participants. The experiences of the students and the community organisations that hosted them are analysed and discussed in the context of an Afrocentric perspective. With regards to doing service-learning by distance learning students reported struggling with a lack of face-to-face interactions with their instructors. Another main finding in this research was that some student participants’ personal economic instability complicated their experiences. The notion of Ubuntu was very present in the findings, students explained the many ways in which their service-learning was driven by an Afrocentric paradigm. Both student participants and members of community organisations explained how beneficial it was for them to be exposed to this programme as it provided the opportunity to receive new knowledge. Although the programme appears to have been mutually beneficial, the lack of learning reported by the students and their emphasis on the service aspect of service-learning is of concern. Students limited reports of engaging with reflection, and the absence of any details of what they learnt from the programme or from engaging with communities, raises concerns about any level of social justice being achieved. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

I have in my possession a first edition, hard copy of Ruth Finnegan’s quintessential work, Oral Literature in Africa. It has a yellow cover, preserved by a plastic sheathe, it is a little frayed around the edges and has that old, musty library smell about it. I love and treasure this book. It is dedicated by Professor Finnegan ‘[t]o all my teachers’. Professor Finnegan is indeed one of my teachers. I properly met Ruth Finnegan at the second International Society for Oral Literature (ISOLA) conference in 1998, which I hosted at the University of Cape Town. She gave a keynote address which included reference to her seminal work and the future of oral literary studies. She has continually influenced our work as researchers following in her footsteps: Isidore Okpewho, Harold Scheub, Abiola Irele, Graham Furniss, Elizabeth Gunner, Karin Barber, Isobel Hofmeyr, John Foley, Olayibi Yai, Edgard Sienaert, Brian Street, Noverino Canonici, Mark Turin, Daniela Merolla, Jan Jansen, Jeff Opland, and many others; some younger, some older, some living, some departed, scholars influenced by this great and humble intellectual and her body of work.

In keeping with international trends in education, South Africa has embraced inclusive education as the means by which diverse learners, including those who experience barriers to learning, should be educated. Premised on the need for schools to change and become responsive to diverse learners by offering the support necessary for access and participation, inclusion is beginning to be realised in South African schools. Independent schools comprise a small but significant sector in South African education, and, despite not having access to state resources, are implementing inclusive education. This study investigates the schools belonging to the oldest and largest independent schools' association, the Independent Schools' Association of Southern Africa (ISASA) to establish the extent to which learners who experience barriers to learning are included in ISASA schools and the practices that facilitate their inclusion. Data gathered from a self-administered questionnaire completed by principals of ISASA schools reveals that the majority of ISASA schools include at least some learners who experience intrinsic or extrinsic barriers to learning. The most common intrinsic barriers are AD(H)D and learning disability and the most common extrinsic barriers are family problems and language barriers. Support for these learners is provided at school-wide and classroom level through the implementation of various inclusive practices that have been described in the international literature on inclusion and in local policy and guideline documents. These include developing policies that guide the support of learners who experience barriers to learning; ensuring that personnel are available to provide appropriate support; harnessing support for learners, their parents and teachers both from within the school and from the wider community; ensuring wheelchair access and employing classroom and other strategies that facilitate access and participation. ISASA schools differ in the extent to which they are inclusive. A few are not inclusive at all, but most are showing progress and commitment to inclusion. In so doing, these schools are implementing ISASA's Diversity and Equity Policy that requires member schools to be inclusive of learners who experience barriers to learning wherever this is feasible educationally, and also realising Constitutional values of equality, dignity and freedom of discrimination. / Educational Studies / D. Ed. (Inclusive Education)

In keeping with international trends in education, South Africa has embraced inclusive education as the means by which diverse learners, including those who experience barriers to learning, should be educated. Premised on the need for schools to change and become responsive to diverse learners by offering the support necessary for access and participation, inclusion is beginning to be realised in South African schools. Independent schools comprise a small but significant sector in South African education, and, despite not having access to state resources, are implementing inclusive education. This study investigates the schools belonging to the oldest and largest independent schools' association, the Independent Schools' Association of Southern Africa (ISASA) to establish the extent to which learners who experience barriers to learning are included in ISASA schools and the practices that facilitate their inclusion. Data gathered from a self-administered questionnaire completed by principals of ISASA schools reveals that the majority of ISASA schools include at least some learners who experience intrinsic or extrinsic barriers to learning. The most common intrinsic barriers are AD(H)D and learning disability and the most common extrinsic barriers are family problems and language barriers. Support for these learners is provided at school-wide and classroom level through the implementation of various inclusive practices that have been described in the international literature on inclusion and in local policy and guideline documents. These include developing policies that guide the support of learners who experience barriers to learning; ensuring that personnel are available to provide appropriate support; harnessing support for learners, their parents and teachers both from within the school and from the wider community; ensuring wheelchair access and employing classroom and other strategies that facilitate access and participation. ISASA schools differ in the extent to which they are inclusive. A few are not inclusive at all, but most are showing progress and commitment to inclusion. In so doing, these schools are implementing ISASA's Diversity and Equity Policy that requires member schools to be inclusive of learners who experience barriers to learning wherever this is feasible educationally, and also realising Constitutional values of equality, dignity and freedom of discrimination. / Educational Studies / D. Ed. (Inclusive Education)