Websites of the Month
Unisa's Counselling and Career Development
You need to properly manage your studies to succeed at Unisa. This includes preparing to study, effective planning and study strategies, time management, managing study-related challenges and the exam preparation process.
We help you develop your academic literacies (reading, writing, quantitative skills) to help you have a successful study journey.
Current awareness is the term used to describe staying informed by keeping up to date with the latest publications, research and news in your field.
The perspective of current awareness is the present and the forthcoming, as opposed to the retrospective.
Current awareness ranges from looking for information on specific topics on a regular basis (and this usually involves the assistance of your Personal Librarian to help you set up a search profile matched to your research interests) to embracing a wider, more general, and cross-disciplinary view that brings an element of serendipity into your search for the latest information.
Informally, researchers remain alert in all contexts for useful information and insights that will inform their daily practice, their research, and spark off innovative and creative ideas for new avenues of research
The year is marked with many special days, weeks, and months dedicated and devoted to raising awareness about important issues.
This monthly post, compiled by the Information Search Librarians Team, will note special dates and themes, and draw your attention to possibly interesting cross-disciplinary topical references intended to inform and to inspire ideas for research.
Selected Noteworthy Days
28 Jan 2018 World Leprosy Day 2018
Leprosy is an infectious disease of the skin and nerves which, if not diagnosed and treated quickly, can result in debilitating disabilities. The effects of leprosy are exacerbated by the negative stigma surrounding the disease
Leprosy Mission Southern Africa
World Health Organization: Leprosy elimination
27 Jan 2018 National Police Day 2018
On National Police Day the South African Police Service (SAPS) remembers the sacrifices that our men and women in blue have made and continue to make as they provide safety for all who live in South Africa
Should you wish to read Current Awareness guides of previous years, visit the Archive.
If you are looking for 2017's forthcoming conferences, the following websites are helpful:
Author
Source : Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL), Volume 1, Issue 1, Jan 2013, p. 53 - 79
The purpose of this essay is to reflect on how we in South Africa are managing the task of higher education in an environment marked by poverty. The paper makes the argument that the question of how to proceed when considering the relationship between the phenomenon of poverty and the experience of education is regularly resolved through invoking the syllogism that increased levels of education will bring about increased levels of income. Drawing on Sen and his ideas of capability deprivation, it is contended here that income-deprivation ideas by themselves do not adequately encompass the full complexity of how deprivation works. The approach taken here, therefore, is different. It works with the proposition that education needs to respond to the full range of social, cultural and other inhibiting factors with respect to the development of capabilities. Positing, therefore, the contention that human beings need to flourish in all the areas of their social lives and not just the space of work, the paper argues for the need to develop an education system that works with capabilities that are valuable in the full range of social spaces young South Africans inhabit. Using this introduction as a point of departure, the paper begins with an attempt at characterising the phenomenon of poverty and then moves on to look at the challenges the sector faces in teaching and learning with respect to it. Thereafter it provides an overview of the sector's responses to these challenges and finally, drawing on the idea of capability deprivation, makes a critical assessment of these responses.
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Author Kimberley Porteus
Source : Perspectives in Education, Volume 21, Issue 3, Sep 2003, p. 13 - 23
In his comprehensive review of the notion of social inclusion and exclusion in the South, Sayed demonstrates that there is not yet a consensus among analysts from the South about the applicability and meaning of social inclusion and exclusion as analytic tools. His review calls for a deepened critical engagement with the notion of social inclusion and exclusion in the diverse context of the South. This article constructs an analytic approach to inclusion and exclusion consistent within a decolonising context. The article begins by providing a critical analysis of the notion of inclusion and exclusion within a post-colonial project, and affirms inclusion / exclusion as important analytic tools to the extent that they are constructed as active processes bounded within a human rights framework. The second half of the article applies this decolonising framework for inclusion / exclusion to the South African system of education, and suggests three analytic lenses for analysis - equity, quality, and knowledge. Using the process of transformation within the South African system of education as a point of departure, the article seeks to suggest the range of analytic questions that emerge from this approach.
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