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Robert Morrell, Tamara Shefer and Crain Soudien Launch Books and Babies and Realising the Dream

by HSRC Press on Oct 12th, 2012
Crain Soudien Tamara Shefer Robert Morrell

 
Two HSRC Press titles looking at different questions surrounding youth and their education in South Africa were launched yesterday evening at the Upper Eastside Hotel in Woodstock, Cape Town.

Books and Babies, edited by Robert Morrell, Tamara Shefer and Deevia Bhana, explores teenage pregnancy and the reaction towards young parents who still have to attend school, while Realising the Dream by Crain Soudien, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, looks at the way in which the “logic of race” is played out in the lives of post-apartheid school students. Morrell, Shefer and Soudien addressed the guests at the launch, discussing their respective books.

Books and BabiesRealising the Dream

Relating how Books and Babies came about, Morrell said that they were interested in “the way young people coped when returning to school after having babies”. While the right to education is entrenched in the Constitution, the Department of Education’s 2007 Measures for the Prevention and Management of Learner Pregnancy suggests that young mothers should wait up to two years before returning to school.

Research for Books and Babies started as far back as 2005 and over a thousand learners in Cape Town and Durban were interviewed. “On a positive note we found that the majority of learners are in favour of pregnant girls attending schools,” Morrell said. He also mentioned that many of the young people interviewed are involved in care work, which helps in terms of parenting skills.

Shefer, however, pointed out that a gender bias exists as male and female learners are treated differently when they become young parents. Overall, the researchers found that the notion persists that pregnant girls should not be attending school.

Similar to the disjunction between their Constitutional right and the way pregnant girls are treated in schools is the disjunction that Crain Soudien sees between the theoretical approach to race that students are taught and the practical way in which we still respond to each other.

“Realising the Dream was born out of a frustration with the way people treat one another,” Soudien said. “On the one hand we say that we want to be kinder more compassionate, but on the other hand we are still defining people by their race.”

Soudien upholds the idea that race is a social construct. This is the theoretical approach that lecturers teach students, but, says Soudien, “we buckle when trying to explain the idea and we have difficulty in realising it”.

“We say that race is a social construction, but then we fall back on racial biology in our everyday thinking.”

In his book, Soudien looks at the role of education to help us “unlearn the logic of race”. If, over the decades, we have made progress in unlearning prejudiced thinking about Jews, women and black people, Soudien says, there is hope that we can move past the ubiquity of race and race-thinking which ignores the nuances of social complexity. Teachers and lecturers should unpack the notion of race as a social construction to learners and students, Soudien said.

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Carolyn Meads livetweeted from the launch using #livebooks:

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Book details

Cats: Academic, Events, Non-fiction, South Africa
Tags: Academic, Book Launches, Books and Babies, Crain Soudien, Deevia Bhana, Education, English, Events, HSRC Press, Launch, Non-fiction, Pregnancy and young parents in schools, Race, Realising the Dream, Robert Morrell, Schools, South Africa, South African education system, Tamara Shefer, Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school, Upper Eastside Hotel, Woodstock Cape Town
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