Book Review: Chinedu I. O. Okeke & Comfort B.S. Mndebele (2013) Education Reform in the SADC Region: Challenges and Responses in the 21st Century. Scientific & Academic Publishing, USA.

Wolfenden, Freda

Book Review: Chinedu I. O. Okeke & Comfort B.S. Mndebele (2013) Education Reform in the SADC Region: Challenges and Responses in the 21st Century. Scientific & Academic Publishing, USA.

dc.contributor.author	Wolfenden, Freda
dc.coverage.placeName	South Africa	en_US
dc.coverage.spatial	Africa	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2016-01-19T11:45:22Z
dc.date.available	2016-01-19T11:45:22Z
dc.date.issued	2014
dc.description.abstract	This book promised much; a series of vignettes and critical studies of innovations, initiatives and debates across different education sectors in Southern Africa from local academics with a variety of discipline backgrounds and deeply familiar with the contexts in which they are teaching and researching. The scope of the book is huge, ranging from reports of small-scale enquiries to broader overviews of shifts and developments at the national level. I hoped this would be something to celebrate, an invitation to engage with insights from the South. But the reality was a little disappointing. Most problematic for me is the lack of a sense of a coherent whole in the book, an absence of intellectual threads through the narratives and signposts to help the reader link the empirical studies and the more theoretical or rhetorical pieces. The variety of styles, subjects and multiple perspectives sharing a common geographical location are the book’s strengths but I had no sense of why these particular subjects and articles had been included. In some chapters the abstract made reference to the broader picture but this was often not followed through in the body of the piece. Taken as a whole the book portrays a context with interesting developments but there is no sense of how these complex issues interrelate across the landscape, and the dominant theoretical ideas or debates are only implicit, never openly discussed. Perhaps this is not the intention?	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v1i1.35
dc.identifier.issn	2311-1550
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/11599/1771
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.publisher	Commonwealth of Learning (COL)	en_US
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Journal of Learning for Development;vol. 1, no. 1
dc.source.uri	http://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/35/11	en_US
dc.subject	Education Policies	en_US
dc.subject	Curriculum Planning	en_US
dc.subject	Education for All	en_US
dc.subject	Open and Distance Learning (ODL)	en_US
dc.title	Book Review: Chinedu I. O. Okeke & Comfort B.S. Mndebele (2013) Education Reform in the SADC Region: Challenges and Responses in the 21st Century. Scientific & Academic Publishing, USA.	en_US
dc.type	Journal Article	en_US