WP80 Class in class: Ideological processes of class in desegregated classrooms in South Africa

This paper examines data from a desegregated school in South Africa and will focus on the way in which particular forms of English schooled literacy reflect and articulate class distinctions. After Apartheid, South Africa embarked on a wholesale democratisation of the education system, offering a new curriculum in which equal opportunities and respect for ethnocultural and linguistic differences are central. Ideologically, however, we see the persistence of pre-1994 social, cultural and linguistic stratification through the micromethodologies of teaching ?black? children. In a socio-economic environment characterised by explosive urbanisation, especially schools in poor immigrants? settlements become a battlefield for enfranchisement, and especially there we see how ?old order? patterns of inequality persist.