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Dr Eben Swanepoel
Editorial

The articles for this issue of Perspectives in Education 
create space within the interception between school-based 
research and higher education to form a pertinent point 
of departure for dialogues to emerge across educational 
platforms and disciplines. Specifically, the dialogues 
ensemble surpasses the boundaries of disciplines and 
cover content of broader application and further research 
stimulation. In essence, a core theme that emerges within 
this issue pertains to questioning the “how” of teaching, 
assessing and research methodologies and encapsulates 
perspectives reminiscent of “how can things be done 
differently?” Several articles in this issue capture new 
perspectives on often decontextualised or outdated ways 
of “doing”, focusing the reader on how inflexible methods 
of doing are not necessarily of optimal use within every 
context nor for every educator or researcher. These authors 
reflect on the need for modern-day adaptation to strengthen 
research practice and pedagogies dynamically. Further 
articles see authors call for the need to re-conceptualise 
and revitalise core aspects of “doing”, spanning from 
institutional level through to the methods and concepts 
underlying disciplines and research itself. The bridge 
between school-level education and higher education 
spheres of research and teaching is furthermore of note, 
as this link reflects the inextricably connected nature and 
fusion between the two platforms and their respective 
stakeholders. This in turn continuously reminds us about 
the importance of collaboration and cooperation across not 
only disciplines, but also educational platforms. 

The first article reveals the link between schools and 
higher education institutions through pre-service teacher 
induction. Moosa and Rembach commence the discussion 
in their article “Voices from the classroom: Pre-service 
teachers’ interactions with supervising teachers” and 
explore an often overlooked yet critical part of the teacher 
induction processes. The study is grounded in the lens 
of how voice is conceptualised in terms of the practical, 
epistemological and ontological. The authors established 
that pre-service teachers found supervising teachers to 
focus on teaching as primarily rooted in administration and 
management duties. The manner in which the negative 
conceptualisation of teaching manifests in supervising 
teachers’ narratives carries hostile attitudes. This often 
deters pre-service teachers from the profession. The need 
to re-examine how teachers supervise pre-service teachers 



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is of forefront focus and recommendations are made aligned with training supervising teachers 
to optimally fulfil supervision-based duties.

The second article, titled “Teaching assistants – a hit or a miss: The development of a 
teaching assistant programme to support academic staff at a university” sees Cupido and 
Norodien-Fataar continue the conversation about support and guidance. By placing support 
and collaboration as imperative to lecturing and ultimately stronger student engagement, the 
authors focus on support structures that relate to overall student success with their study 
framed through Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory. Through their participatory-based 
approach, the authors argue for the importance of teaching assistant programmes and the 
subsequent contribution teaching assistants make in relation to equity of access and success, 
specifically when collaboration is optimal between teaching assistants and academic staff. 

As the dialogue about support and collaboration continues, Behari-Leak and Le Roux, 
explore, through the article titled “Between a rock and a hard place, third space practitioners 
exercise agency”, how new academic staff position themselves within spatial and institutional 
boundaries; framing a hybrid identity as a means to work in creative, responsive and relevant 
ways. Using critical discourse analysis, the authors set out to explore the “third space”, a space 
within which educational and academic transformation are often underlined by ambiguity by 
accounting for how practitioners navigate between the different contexts, residing within a 
space between academic support work, roles of leadership and advocacy and other roles they 
embody. The authors find that while resistance and struggle are central to the third space, 
they are necessary components that legitimise identity construction through critiquing and 
contesting the traditional roles of the institution (universities). 

Reddy enters the higher education conversation with the article “Research methods for 
undergraduate delivery: Evaluation of problem-based learning”. The author draws on a key 
aspect of research-led institutions; this being the link between undergraduate students and 
research integration and competencies. Using a cross-sectional descriptive case study, the 
author investigates the often-complex nature of teaching research methods, specifically 
drawing on the teaching thereof within the realm of public health professions at undergraduate 
level. Through the evaluation of a research methods course based on problem-based learning, 
the author discusses how participants found group interaction and consultations with the 
instructor enjoyable while in turn they found literature review writing difficult as well as how to 
go about successfully selecting and integrating relevant information. Statistical concepts and 
terminology were further found to be problematic for participants. 

Swarts, Rens and De Sousa begin the new discussion at school level with their article “(Re)
connect social and environmental responsibility to learners’ living environments: Curriculum 
challenges and possible solutions for teaching-learning in Life Orientation”. This article speaks 
to the connected nature of learning not just between local and international contexts, but 
between local-centred realities and contexts of learners and teachers as well. The authors 
pose the question “Do Life Orientation teachers (re)connect their teaching-learning on social 
and environmental responsibility with learners’ living environments to adhere to curriculum 
requirements of relevance and meaningfulness?” Through the qualitative based classroom 
observations grounded in the topic of social and environmental responsibility, the authors 
draw on the difficulty teachers experience when connecting the topic with the divergent and 
contextually different backgrounds of learners. They conclude by discussing the need for 
place-based education to bridge the gap between the classroom teachings and learners’ 
living environments. 

As the discussion continues about collaboration across contexts and spaces, Munje 
and Mncube reflect in turn on the vital role that parents’ involvement, or lack thereof, play 
within schools. In their article titled “The lack of parent involvement as hindrance in selected 
public primary schools in South Africa: The voices of educators” the authors engage with the 



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role parental collaboration plays within learner experiences and performances, specifically 
focussing on a disadvantaged community within South Africa. They found that teachers often 
do not consider contextual factors as mediating reasons as to why parents are not involved, 
causing further rupture and alienation for parents. The article concludes with the importance 
of empowering teachers regarding school-parent relationships as a core means to assist 
teachers to better understand and engage with contextual difficulties that may strain parental 
involvement in communities. 

From crossing contextual boundaries to spanning over the interdependent nature of 
institutions and stakeholders, Dempster and Kirby join the conversations through their 
analysis of inter-rater agreement and evaluators’ subsequent engagement with assessment 
in the article titled “Inter-rater agreement in assigning cognitive demand to life sciences 
examination questions”. The authors speak to the viability of the traditional application of 
Bloom’s taxonomy as a means to assess the standards of life sciences examination papers. 
Specifically, the authors found that the reliability of such standardisation is questioned when 
individual differences and contexts are accounted for. 

Lisene and Jita expand on the discussion pertaining to modern time adaptations of 
traditional ways of “doing” with their article “Exploring the integration of modern technologies 
in the teaching of physical science in Lesotho”. The authors investigate the knowledge of high 
school level physical sciences teachers, specifically in Lesotho, where the use of information 
and communication technologies (ICTs) has been incorporated as a required component 
within the curriculum. Using the technological pedagogical content knowledge model (TPACK) 
questionnaire they found that even though the sampled teachers lack the needed knowledge 
to use ICTs, this was not a deterring factor and they do use ICTs in their classroom. The 
question as to whether the teachers use ICTs for lesson delivery however brings to the fore 
whether teachers use ICTs correctly and aligned with curriculum prescriptions or whether ICTs 
are used to search for content and information on the part of the teachers themselves. The 
authors conclude with the call for more support to be made available to teachers to optimally 
use ICTs within the classroom context. 

Gumbo, in the article “Addressing the factors responsible for the confusion of technology 
education with other subject fields” reconceptualises the manner in which technology 
education is perceived and represented. Specifically, the author critiques how technology 
education is often misunderstood and confused with other traditional subjects such as 
educational technology and science education. The article bridges the gap in literature (from 
South African perspectives) through the lens of meaningful learning in technology education 
and has the author enter the discussion as to how the subject and its proper conceptualisation 
will be beneficial not only to the field and discipline itself, but to teachers and learners as well. 

In the final article, “Analysing historical enquiry in school history textbooks”, Bharath 
and Bertram explore the practical application and “doing” of the history curriculum through 
investigating how textbooks link to the aims of learning the process of historical enquiry and 
understanding the related concepts. The authors found that even while textbooks sampled 
saw the increase of sources used between grade 7 and grade 9, there is still a lack of 
contextualisation. This leads to the challenge of teaching the process to developing historical 
thinking. The authors further note that specialised procedural knowledge only becomes 
apparent at grade 9 level within textbooks; thus, leading to a deficit learning platform where the 
aims of the official learning curriculum in South Africa are not realised at primary school level. 

The articles in this issue follow the theme of reconsidering and reconceptualising traditional 
ways of teaching and research that may have rigidly become inflexible to the needed contextual 
change and modern imperatives. At the core of teaching and research, there is furthermore 
the call to not become entangled within theory and thus the question as to “how can things 
be done differently?” moves toward innovative ways of also considering the “doing” thereof. 



For this reason, the articles collectively span across disciplines and educational platforms 
and reflect the manner in which a unified link across boundaries are critical in establishing 
a socially-just way of “doing”, reflecting different contexts and adding value to research 
expanding on the challenges characterising the cultural relativity of South Africa and global 
education imperatives. This issue considers theory and practice, encompassing schooling 
level as well as the higher education sector, while accounting for a multiplicity of stakeholders 
who work in conjunction toward establishing a socially just and transformation-based culture 
of “doing”.

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