Dialogue in Places of Learning ─ Youth Amplified in South Africa

Showing how youth from one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in Cape Town, South Africa, learn differently in three educational contexts— in classrooms, in a community hip hop crew, on a youth radio show—this book illuminates how South African schools, like schools elsewhere, subtly reproduce inequalities by sorting students into social hierarchies linked to assessments of their use of language. Highlighting the voices and perspectives of young South Africans, this case study of youth in the global South explores how language is linked to cultural mixing which occurred during colonialism and slavery and continues through patterns of global mobility.Dialogue in Places of Learning: Youth Amplified in South Africa demonstrates how language and learning are bound to space and place.

Adam Cooper is a research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council in Cape Town, South Africa, a research associate in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Stellenbosch University, South Africa and a fellow of the Centre for Commonwealth Education, University of Cambridge.