Teaching is a major employer of women in south Africa and yet is largely ignored and underrated. Drawing on different disciplines, this study breaks new ground by filling a gap in knowledge about the impact of class, race and gender oppression on women teachers and those in senior management positions in Lebowa, South Africa. The study relies heavily on the feminist theory and methodology in an attempt to explore the historical, political, economic and social structures that have shaped the position and careers of black women teachers within the apartheid social formation.

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women’s education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students’ experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women’s social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education—introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

African women’s history is a vast topic that embraces a wide variety of societies in over 50 countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. Africa is a predominantly agricultural continent, and a major factor in African agriculture is the central role of women as farmers. It is estimated that between 65 and 80 percent of African women are engaged in cultivating food for their families, and in the past that percentage was likely even higher. Thus, one common thread across much of the continent is women’s daily work in their family plot. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on individual African women in history, politics, religion, and the arts; on important events, organizations, and publications; and on topics important to women in general (marriage, fertility, employment) and to African women in particular (market women, child marriage, queen mothers). This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Women in Africa.

The book will focus on the emergence of a racially-divided system of teacher preparation and its dismantling post-apartheid. It will explore the policies and politics of discrepant pathways to teacher preparation within the context of international and comparative trends.

Globally, children are highly vulnerable and unjustifiably affected by the difficulties afflicting society. They face social, physical, psychological, and emotional turmoil that stems from varying degrees of violence, abuse, neglect, abandonment, bereavement, and other psychosocial needs that often affect their education. Parental and other key stakeholders’ involvement is essential in ensuring that children develop to their full potential. Provision of Psychosocial Support and Education of Vulnerable Children highlights the plight of children and explores a transdisciplinary and multisectoral approach in providing sustainable psychosocial support to have quality education that is inclusive of 21st century skills. Childhood is an inimitable experience that is common to every individual child in the world irrespective of their ethnicity, culture, or any other arbitrary extractor we choose to apply. Covering topics such as life skills education, psychosocial support, and holistic integration, this book is an essential reference for education stakeholders, school personnel, private pre-primary schools, teacher training institutions, parents, pre-service teachers, human services professionals, researchers, and academicians.

Memory work – the conscious remembering and study of individual and shared memories – is increasingly being acknowledged as a key pedagogical tool in working with children. Giving students opportunities and support to remember and study their selves as individuals and as communities allows them to see their future as something that belongs to them, and that they can influence in some way for the better. This edited volume brings together essays from scholars who are studying the interconnections between pedagogy and memory in the context of social themes and social inquiry within educational research. The book provides a range of perspectives on the social and pedagogical relevance of memory studies to the educational arena in relation to the themes of memory and method, revisiting childhood, memory and place, addressing political conflict, sexuality and embodiment, and inter-generational studies.