Languages & Arts EducationWelcome to the Thematic Group: Languages & Arts Education
Languages & Arts Education (LAE) is a group of specialists working in the broad area of literacies, languages, and expressive arts. There is one postgraduate specialisation: Language and Media Studies at the Honours and Masters levels. Many modules are offered within the School across a range of phase specialisations (ECD, Foundation, Intermediate, Senior, FET), but in general these are our areas of academic and educational expertise:
- Afrikaans education
- English education
- Language pedagogy and acquisition
- Literary critical studies
- Media education
- Teaching creative writing
- Visual methodologies
- Zulu education
We believe these areas are central to the educational enterprise in South Africa since they promote multilingualism, human rights, and respect for diversity and difference.
This awareness can only be created and sustained through human interaction and our work as educationists in the broad area of multilingual education is to open and foster communication that is both sensitive to the needs of others, and also explicit in both its intentions and manifestations.
The development of articulate and nuanced communication and literacy skills is also key to the maintenance of academic freedom and civic responsibility. Our Discipline is thus devoted to providing inservice and preservice education in aspects of the language arts through various qualifications offered by the school of Education.
We offer postgraduate courses in:
- popular media and the classroom,
- communication and the new literacies,
- visual literacies in research,
- narratives in education,
- language in education.
This broad range of work includes a focus on relatively new areas of academic interest in South Africa, such as ‘language and gender’, ‘language and culture’, ‘language and HIV/AIDS’, and ‘language and citizenship’, as well as more established areas such as ‘language and curriculum development’, ‘language across the curriculum’, ‘language policy’, ‘language in education’, ‘language and power’ and ‘language, narrative and the media’. The postgraduate modules are all interdisciplinary, taught by specialists in various languages and language arts, although the medium of instruction is English.
For a list of undergraduate modules we advise you to consult the school of Education Handbook (available from the School Office) for more details. The undergraduate curriculum is divided into five departments, each of which consists of a discipline. The disciplines are Afrikaans, English, Drama, Media, and Zulu Education. Our interdisciplinary focus means, however, that aspects of language methodology, literacy, and literature are shared between the departments, or are taught jointly by members of staff.
For information about our modules and majors (undergraduate and postgraduate) please follow our link: