The Street Law Plus programme, under the auspices of the UKZN Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS), conducted a democracy education workshop for refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to enable them to educate voters for the forthcoming elections in that country.
The two-day workshop was conducted by the volunteer KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Street Law Co-ordinator based at the CSLS, Ms Phumzile Xulu, assisted by Ms Janine Hicks who teaches the UKZN LLB Street Law course, and the Acting Director of the CSLS, Professor David McQuoid-Mason.
After being exposed to the rationale behind interactive teaching methods and the different ways of teaching interactively, the participants were required to prepare and teach lessons based on those in the second edition of Democracy for All Educator’s and Learner’s Manuals, published in 2017 by Street Law South Africa and Juta & Co.
Topics at the workshop included a selection of lessons from the six chapters in Democracy for All, which covered the following: What is democracy? How does government work in a democracy? How do you control abuse of government in a democracy? How do human rights underpin democracy? How do elections work in a democracy? How can citizens participate in a democracy.?
The first edition of Democracy for All was a generic text prepared immediately prior to South Africa’s first democratic elections, and has been translated into Mongolian, Romanian, Croatian, Haitian French, Arabic and Turkish.
The second edition of Democracy for All is filled with up-to-date examples of what has happened in South Africa and elsewhere in the world in the field of democracy – with the main emphasis on South Africa.
The second editions published under the titles: David McQuoid-Mason, Lloyd Lotz and Lindi Coetzee Democracy for All: Education towards a Democratic Culture – Educator’s Manual 2 ed (2017); and David McQuoid-Mason, Lloyd Lotz and Lindi Coetzee Democracy for All: Education towards a Democratic Culture – Learner’s Manual 2 ed (2017), are available on open access for the next few months at the Juta & Co website (http:// juta.co.za/law/) or in hard copy directly from the publishers or at university bookshops.
Words: Ndabaonline