Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

From the angle of critical discourse analysis,based on the theory of systemic functional linguistics,taking transitivity,modal verbs,and transformation as analytical tools,the author analyzes the function of political discourse in order to grasp the methods of critical discourse analysis.

Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Discourse

'When will I be free': Lessons from COVID-19 for Child Protection in South Africa.

Community engagement professionals experience numerous barriers even though community engagement is the third mission of the university alongside first, teaching and learning, and second, research. Community engagement professionals often refer to community engagement as the “stepchild” of higher education. Yet there are also inter-related successful drivers. This article identifies the barrier–driver duality and makes a case for their systemic interconnectedness, an area that has thus far been underexplored. A prominent barrier for community engagement professionals is that there is a lack of substantive conceptualisation of community engagement, intensified by the contradictory placing of community engagement within community and university structures. Interconnected to such barriers, prominent drivers demonstrate the value of scholarly, reflective practice and to enhance the leadership role of the South African Higher Education Community Engagement Forum, inclusive of the views of pertinent members such as academic leaders, students and communities.

/pdf/community-engagement-barriers-and-drivers-in-south-african-28xyqqfviu.pdf

Community engagement: Barriers and drivers in South African higher education

New frontiers in local government community engagement: Towards transformative place-based futures

This article seeks to address what it means to be an ‘engaged’ university and, in so doing, to contribute to current discourses – in a fast growing field – about how to collaborate with communities...

What does it mean to be an ‘engaged university’? Reflections from a university and school-community engagement project:

This study explores what South African township youth presented as significant elements in their identity shaping. The youth participants were invited to take photographs and engage in reflective w ...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02673843.2018.1463853

Hope and future: youth identity shaping in post-apartheid South Africa

This article draws upon our experiences of participating in a Literacy Hub in South Africa. The aim is to describe and analyse how dialogue among grade 8 teachers in a Literacy Hub around literacy ...

/pdf/teachers-professional-development-awareness-of-literacy-2xjm0lbybz.pdf

Teachers' Professional Development: Awareness of Literacy Practices.

Despite the fact that Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges are seen as instrumental in addressing South Africa’s labour market skills shortages and high youth unemployment rate, the extremely low throughput and certification rates at these institutions prevent colleges from achieving this goal. The vast majority of students enrolled at TVET colleges come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and speak English as a second or additional language, yet English is the language through which teaching is conducted at all South African TVET colleges. Prior research has shown that there is a definite relationship between poor academic performance (AP) and learning in an additional language. Existing research of this nature has focused on schools and universities, but there is a dearth of research about the relationship between AP and English Language Proficiency (ELP) in the TVET sector. In order to address this gap, a mixed method study was conducted at one Eastern Cape TVET College to investigate whether the poor AP of National Vocational Certificate (NC (V)) Level 2 Engineering students can be related to their ELP. The initial quantitative phase of the study confirmed prior research by showing that NC (V) students’ ELP is indeed significantly associated with their throughput rate and their performance in each specific subject. This article reports in particular on the second qualitative phase of the study, which was based on interviews with TVET college staff involved in teaching Engineering students. The most significant finding is that teaching staff, who daily work at the proverbial coal face of TVET training, are from their practical experience, very well aware of the fact that there is a crucial link between the ELP and AP of their students, that they employ a variety of strategies to address associated problems, but that they feel these are often insufficient and ineffective in the face of students trying to learn in a second language. This study extends the research about the role of language as a cognitive tool in learning in the Engineering disciplines. It also provides an opportunity to rethink the hegemonic, normalised position of English in Engineering studies and consider possibilities to mobilise indigenous languages as resources for epistemological access in higher education.

“Some of them are afraid of the language”: Perceptions of TVET college staff about the relationship between English language proficiency and academic performance among Engineering students

Various studies have shown that South Africa has low levels of school literacy. This is exacerbated when schools are located in low socio-economic settings where schools have a dearth of resources to be mobilised to develop literacy practices. This article reports on a qualitative study of classroom reading clubs where learners read novels in groups once a week. In particular it focuses on discussions within two reading clubs to explore how learners took up different positions to talk about books and how together they constructed a shared understanding. The study suggests how through talk learners have an opportunity to think and this thinking is made visible to researchers. The article suggests that classroom reading clubs can sites to develop reading strategies reasoning in response to literature. Keywords: reading clubs, critical thinking, booktalk, dialogism, discussion

pdf/mediating-meaning-in-booktalk-reading-clubs-as-third-spaces-3b8p141s.pdf

Mediating meaning in booktalk: Reading Clubs as third spaces

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Eileen Scheckle

Author Tools

Chat about Author