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Mobilising stories about cultural beliefs and practices on traditional foods to contextualise the topic on nutrition in a Grade 6 township class

  • Authors: Nuntsu, Sipho Nimrod
  • Date: 2021-10
  • Subjects: Culturally relevant pedagogy South Africa , Science Study and teaching (Elementary) South Africa , Nutrition Study and teaching (Elementary) South Africa , Traditional ecological knowledge South Africa , Storytelling , Reasoning , Contiguity Argumentation Theory (CAT) , South African Curriculum Assessment and Policy Statement (CAPS) , Socio-cultural theory
  • Language: English
  • Type: Master's theses , text
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/190940 , vital:45043
  • Description: The South African Curriculum Assessment and Policy Statement (CAPS) document stipulates that science teachers should integrate indigenous knowledge (IK) into their science teaching. The rationale for this is to contextualise the content and make science accessible and relevant to learners. Despite these ideals, however, CAPS seems to be silent on how science teachers should go about doing this. Instead, it assumes that all teachers know how to integrate IK in their science teaching. As a result, many teachers are still not sure of how to integrate IK into their science classrooms. Such rhetoric and tension between curriculum formulation and implementation triggered my interest to do a study on how to mobilise stories about cultural beliefs and practices of traditional foods to mediate learning of nutrition in a Grade 6 Natural Sciences township class. The study was underpinned by an interprevist paradigm complemented with an Ubuntu paradigm to enhance explanations. Within these paradigms, a qualitative case study research design was adopted. It was conducted at Mdoko Primary school (pseudonym) in a semi-urban community in the Amathole West district of the Eastern Cape. The participants were 34 Grade 6 learners (15 boys and 19 girls), a Grade 6 Natural Sciences teacher who was my critical friend, and two expert community members. To generate data, I used a focus group discussion, group activities, classroom observations, and learners’ reflective journals. Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory and Ogunniyi’s Contiguity Argumentation Theory (CAT) were used as theoretical and analytical frameworks, respectively. A thematic approach to data analysis was employed. That is, data were analysed inductively to identify sub-themes and subsequently similar sub-themes were grouped together to form themes. The two expert community members’ presentations equipped my learners with stories on cultural beliefs and practices that were used in the olden days (past) and how such stories are used in our days (present). For instance, the findings of this study revealed that women during menstruation must not drink amasi as it is believed that it would prolong the menstruation time. The findings also revealed that eating of amaqanda and inside meat by youths should be minimised as it is believed that it can stimulate their sex hormones. It also revealed that there is no relevance to science that men eating imifino would be weak among other men who do not eat them. The implications for this study is that science teachers should make some efforts to integrate IK in their teaching to make science accessible and relevant to their learners. To achieve this, the study thus recommends that science teachers should find ways of tapping into the cultural heritage and wisdom that is possessed by the expert community members to enable learners to cross the bridge from home to school. , Thesis (MEd) -- Faculty of Education, Education, 2021
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  • Date Issued: 2021-10

Nature, narrative and language in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

  • Authors: Moore-Barnes, Shannon-Lee
  • Date: 2010
  • Subjects: Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat , Narration (Rhetoric) , Storytelling , Women and literature -- South Africa , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:8453 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/1235 , Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat , Narration (Rhetoric) , Storytelling , Women and literature -- South Africa , Afrikaans fiction -- 21st century
  • Description: Conrad Aiken’s observation that the “landscape and the language are the same, and we ourselves are language and are land,” depicts the material terrain we inhabit as necessarily informing the language we speak. An important corollary to Aiken’s observation is language itself writes the land. I argue that the binary division between culture and nature, as well as the attempts to universalise languages, abstracts discourse from necessary situated knowledges, alienating the land from the language it embodies. The severing of culture and nature as implied by Aiken’s observation is indicative of humanity’s progressive isolation from the land through language, as well as from their embodied natures. Remoteness results in what Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat (2006) terms a “poverty disease” (2006: 251). Michiel Heyns confirms that the character Agaat relates this barrenness of spirit to her “diagnosis of spiritual ills through human dealings with the soil” (2009: 132). I illustrate the novel’s revitalisation of language as an act of ecological recuperation that alleviates dis-eased consciousnesses by potentially recognising, valuing and responding to situated knowledges revealed in land narratives.1 My argument therefore uncovers the challenges that the novel directs at an unreformed and universal Western2 To this end I use critiques of colonialism that reveal culture’s assimilation of the Other, rationalist discourse that continues to appropriate nature as resource for a hierarchical culture. 3 By combining this literary analysis with a wider eco-theoretical enquiry I position my study in an interdisciplinary field of investigation. This is in response to the damaging consequences of the inherited and fragmentary nature of specialisation. In addition, by detailing literary and feminist especially the work of Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway and Nicole Brossard. I use these critiques to analyse self/Other oppositions that Western culture constructs and patrols to maintain a defensive culture of domination. I show how nature and all those feminised and marginalised by Western discourses that hierarchise culture have been consistently overlooked and under-represented by those who purport to ‘control’ the environment and privilege the symbolic language as the carrier of culture. Agaat provides fruitful terrain for the reflection of marginalised voices; voices that confirm the environment and language as necessarily both feminist and social justice issues. 1 My preference for the hyphenated usage of the word ‘dis-ease’ signals the equation between discomfort or unease and disease or sickness. 2 While I am concerned over emphasising words such as Western and Apartheid by capitalising them, I have decided to retain this form so as not to diminish the magnitude of the effect these discourses have had on global and regional communities. 3 When referring to Others I, like Karen J. Warren, capitalise the term. Warren defines Others as all earth Others subjected to “unjustified domination-subordination relationships” (2005: 252). responses to Western patriarchal discourse and its impact on nature, I show the ways in which literature negotiates the possible re-conceptualisation of our collective cultural imagination. Van Niekerk’s novel offers a sustained critique of the oppressive Western conceptual frameworks that have dominated Others through hegemonic constructions. Furthermore, I investigate what this writer might offer as an alternative to systems of social, political and ecological control and the violence it inflicts.
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  • Date Issued: 2010

Mbiriviri

Isele (The rapacious frog)

  • Authors: Nosayini , Hugh Tracey
  • Date: 1957
  • Subjects: Folk music--Africa , Folk songs, Xhosa , Storytelling , Africa South Africa Willowvale f-sa
  • Language: Xhosa
  • Type: sound recordings , field recordings , sound recording-musical
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/136179 , vital:37346 , International Library of African Music, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa , TR028-13
  • Description: Recorded in a Gcaleka hut. Most huts have one small window, about the size of a ship's porthole, but this had none. There was once a frog who swallowed a baby and took it down to the river.- It gave the baby to another frog, who in turn swallowed it. The second frog took the baby back to its village. It met some boys on the way to whom it explained what it was going to do. So it gave back the baby and the people gave it a cow. The next morning it went back and asked for another cow which the people gave. But when it asked for a third cow on the following morning the people grew hungry and killed it. The name of the headman at whose kraal we recorded was KRIKRI ZWELILLUNGILE HLOKOMILE. Although the story-teller sang a song during the course of the story, the others did not sing a refrain, which is commonly the African practice. A story.
  • Full Text: false
  • Date Issued: 1957

Isele (The rapacious frog)

  • Authors: Nosayini , Hugh Tracey
  • Date: 1957
  • Subjects: Folk music--Africa , Folk songs, Xhosa , Storytelling , Africa South Africa Willowvale f-sa
  • Language: Xhosa
  • Type: sound recordings , field recordings , sound recording-musical
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/136170 , vital:37345 , International Library of African Music, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa , TR028-13
  • Description: Recorded in a Gcaleka hut. Most huts have one small window, about the size of a ship's porthole, but this had none. There was once a frog who swallowed a baby and took it down to the river.- It gave the baby to another frog, who in turn swallowed it. The second frog took the baby back to its village. It met some boys on the way to whom it explained what it was going to do. So it gave back the baby and the people gave it a cow. The next morning it went back and asked for another cow which the people gave. But when it asked for a third cow on the following morning the people grew hungry and killed it. The name of the headman at whose kraal we recorded was KRIKRI ZWELILLUNGILE HLOKOMILE. Although the story-teller sang a song during the course of the story, the others did not sing a refrain, which is commonly the African practice. A story.
  • Full Text: false
  • Date Issued: 1957

Sathana na mantombaza mbili (Satan and the 2 girls

  • Authors: Composer not specified , Hugh Tracey
  • Date: 1957
  • Subjects: Storytelling , Africa South Africa Engcobo f-sa
  • Language: Xhosa
  • Type: sound recordings , field recordings , sound recording-musical
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/134927 , vital:37218 , International Library of African Music, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa , TR0022-03
  • Description: The story was told by a woman sitting in a hut with several others including children, many of whom continued their conversations while she spoke.- Dogs, cattle and sheep were all around the hut at the time. Story.
  • Full Text: false
  • Date Issued: 1957
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