The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has created opportunities and challenges for secondary education, particularly in resource-constrained contexts. This study examines the integration of ChatGPT in classroom learning through a qualitative instrumental case study conducted in a public secondary school in Indonesia. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and focus group discussions involving students, teachers, and school leadership. The findings reveal that ChatGPT is primarily used in concept-driven subjects such as Economics, Indonesian Language, and English, while its application in Mathematics remains limited. Students reported that ChatGPT supports learning efficiency, facilitates conceptual understanding, and enhances confidence in completing academic tasks. However, challenges related to information accuracy, potential dependency, and uncritical use were also identified. Importantly, the study highlights the central role of teacher mediation in shaping responsible and reflective ChatGPT use, particularly through strategies such as verification of ChatGPT-generated content and guided explanation in students’ own words. Based on these findings, the study proposes a teacher-mediated and context-sensitive framework to support pedagogically grounded ChatGPT integration. The study contributes empirical evidence from a Global South context and offers transferable insights for the responsible pedagogical integration of ChatGPT in under-resourced secondary education settings.

Introductory note

African universities face challenges regarding retaining postdoctoral research fellows (postdocs) within the continent and their inclusion in the academic research profession. However, there exists a scarcity of research addressing the disparity between policy and practice. Acknowledging this gap, the present study poses significant questions about how universities with established postdoc policies conceptualise and articulate these provisions for postdocs. We explore how these institutions define postdocs in their policies, identifying potential silences, gaps, and recommendations that could enhance the policy framework for postdocs. The evidence for this analysis was sourced from publicly accessible policy documents available on the websites of six South African universities. Employing key themes from the frameworks of “What’s the problem represented to be” and institutional logics, we analysed the postdoc policies. The findings indicate that the characterisation of postdocs as professional trainees within these policies results in an ambiguous operationalisation of their roles across all the studied universities, leading to complexities in the governance and management of these researchers. This study contends that the framing of postdocs is significantly shaped by a capitalist perspective that emphasises a cost-benefit analysis of their research roles. Consequently, it recommends that a national policy framework be established to provide standardised definitions, outline criteria for postdoctoral positions, delineate clear pathways for career advancement, and acknowledge the vital contributions of postdocs, thereby assisting universities in developing effective policies.

This study challenges the technologically optimistic narrative that artificial intelligence (AI) naturally promotes educational democratisation by delving into systemic inequalities in AI education across urban, suburban, and rural primary schools in China. Utilising a constructivist grounded theory approach, the research conducted six months of qualitative fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with 15 students, five parents, and five teachers, along with classroom observations at three primary schools located in Shenzhen (urban), Anqing (suburban), and Shangluo (rural). The findings unveil four interconnected layers of inequality: policy-driven infrastructure disparities favouring elite urban schools, regional stratification exacerbating urban-rural divides under standardised policies, intergenerational transmission of cultural and economic capital reinforcing educational privilege, and individual disparities in AI literacy widening the “new digital divide”. These insights resonate with the maximally maintained inequality theory, highlighting how AI education policies may inadvertently perpetuate existing inequities. The study advocates for equity-oriented reforms in AI education, emphasising the necessity to address structural barriers such as unequal resource allocation, inadequate teacher training, and disparities rooted in family backgrounds. By illuminating the socio-technical dynamics of AI integration in education, this research not only contributes to theoretical understandings of educational inequality but also offers practical implications for policymakers and educators striving to achieve more equitable AI education outcomes.

This article documents curriculum and assessment policy changes over four years (2020 to 2024) in South Africa in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures. Early on, some changes were made to the national CAPS curriculum documents in the form of trimming content (2020), identifying “fundamental” knowledge (2020), and reviewing subject content (2022). The focus was on retaining the curriculum while allowing for flexibility in coverage through weakened controls over moderation, assessment, and promotion requirements, ceding most curriculum and assessment decisions to the school and classroom levels. Given a very unequal system, this meant that curriculum coverage and learning losses mapped onto and deepened pre-COVID-19 patterns of educational disadvantage. Post-COVID, a similar approach of devolution of curriculum decision-making to school and teacher level was taken. There were no attempts to recoup time in order to remediate learning losses, apart from later attempts in one province. Post-COVID, the Department of Basic Education tightened controls over coverage again but maintained leniency with respect to assessment and progression. During the pandemic the Department of Basic Education claimed remote solutions as a key mechanism for addressing curriculum coverage, despite very few learners having access to these. There were few mechanisms to address the severe educational impact of the pandemic, especially on learners in the poorest communities. The article argues that rather than address learning losses directly government strategies have masked them.

From the Bernsteinian perspective, education policy interpretation and translation, as a process of recontextualising policy discourse into proposed pedagogic modes, follow certain regulative discourses and rules of social orders. This study illustrates this argument by investigating 15 discipline heads’ experiences concerning their exposure to the interpretation and translation of the higher vocational education curriculum reform policy in China. The policy emphasised industry-led curricula, which is opposite to the general regulative discourse of state dominance in the Chinese education system. Given this contradiction, the government and its vocational colleges attempted to find a compromise, and thus their agents interpreted and translated the policy discourse into regionalised modes where the official education system could still control knowledge selection with limited influence from employers. It is argued that the regulative discourse in an education policy originating in realistic and economic considerations might be contrary to the general regulative discourse in official education systems, so that the policy could not be faithfully interpreted based on its own regulative discourse but had to be interpreted by largely following the general regulative discourse that is opposed to that of the policy. Thus, the policy was distorted and reoriented into a pedagogic mode that diverges from the aim of the policy.

It is broadly understood that postdoctoral research fellows (hereafter postdocs) play a significant role in higher education’s research outputs, teaching and learning, and the rating and ranking of an institution. Largely shaped by the neoliberal turn(s) in higher education from the late 1970s and 1980s, postdocs have become an indispensable yet precarious labour force that higher education institutions have come to rely on. In the South African context, research on postdoc fellowships is relatively new, with limited scholarship focusing on the narratives and voices of these marginalised scholars. In this article, I purposively recruited and interviewed 23 former and current postdocs in three research-intensive universities in South Africa as well as a university vice dean of research, and a former senior official of the Department of Higher Education and Training. I also consulted and analysed various South African higher education policy documents and ministerial articulations regarding postdocs in the country. Through the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews, two competing narratives emerged from the data—that is, the deeply rooted and entrenched idea of the postdoc system as a pipeline for novice researchers to transition into established scholars, and the idea of the postdocs as precarious scholars whose academic labour is insecure, unstable, and exploited in the university. I conclude the article with some broad systemic implications on the role and function of postdocs in South African higher education, and the need for more research to understand these marginalised scholars.

Neoliberal policies since 1978 have caused severe regional inequality in China. Cities in regions with high levels of marketisation attract top academic experts due to their proximity to economic incentives and prestigious universities. However, little is known about how economic reform has shaped the distribution of experts in the social science and humanities disciplines as they are less in demand on the market and often rely on support from the state. Using sociology as a unique case, this study investigates market and state influences on the regional distribution of sociology experts in Chinese universities based on city-level measurements. Sociology has a unique historical and paradigmatic connection with the state of China, which complicates any straightforward relationship between neoliberal policies and higher education inequality in sociology departments. Through a manual collection of 1,041 faculty profiles from 66 university websites, it was determined following the fractional logistic regression method that both the market and the state facilitate distribution. The city’s marketisation increases the internationalisation of faculty members in sociology departments, while the city’s position in the state’s administrative hierarchy maintains the sociology departments, regardless of the city’s marketisation. In general, the state still plays an important role in shaping academic expert distribution after 40 years of market reform in China.

Based on the external impetus of social development and the internal demand for universities to return to the cultivation of abilities, modern universities are actively exploring the reform of the academy system, constructing high-quality ability-cultivation models, doing “addition” in the process of learning and living, and doing “subtraction” in the evaluation of the results of cultivation, achieving certain educational results. However, at the same time, the construction of academies is also facing difficulties in changing concepts, allocating quality resources, and the realistic dilemma of collaborative education between “academy” and “college”. The bottleneck of academy development should be addressed by actively exploring the school’s distinctive model, optimising top-level design, and enriching its spiritual culture. Facing the wave of reform in the academy system, universities should promote the localisation of the academy system in an orderly manner through deliberate thinking.