It is uncontested that education systems globally are under constant pressure to respond to the changing needs of societies. The outbreak of Covid-19 has reminded us that the complexity of education needs responsive practices to facilitate effective teaching and learning across all levels of schooling globally. All over the world, the normative ways of teaching and learning evolved drastically in the first quarter of the 2020 academic year when teachers and students found online offerings to be the dominant option available as a consequence of the pandemic conditions. In South Africa specifically, students and teachers were thrust into virtual teaching and learning situations with the majority of them having no preparation for this shift. This conceptual paper considers education in the current and post-Covid-19 era as the greatest paradigm shift in the history of education. I examine measures taken by higher education institutions to support the provision of education to ensure learning continuation. In this paper, I provide some suggestions for carrying out educational activities during the continuing Covid-19 situation. Educational leaders need to rethink content creation and content sharing and establish working communities to meet the demands of the new paradigm in education.

In South Africa, there is no adequate research that explored mathematics learning and teaching within rural schools and classrooms. Various literature posits that mathematics education research has virtually over-concentrated on urban and township schools and consistently ignored rural contexts and schools. Arguments exist that rural education and rural education research have been understudied in South Africa. Presumably, this would include mathematics education research as well. This paper explores the relationship between witchcraft beliefs, which is considered as an entrenched cultural phenomenon, and learners' mathematics learning within rural classrooms. In this paper, the local influences include that the learners end up not demonstrating their full understanding of mathematics contents because of the beliefs that if they exhibit their knowledge of the subject, they may be bewitched. Cultural Relativism was used to theorise the study within qualitative critical phenomenology as a methodology for the study. The study comprises 12 mathematics learners from a rural Acornhoek region in Mpumalanga Province, and data were collected using individual semi-structured interviews while the collected data were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. Findings from this study illuminated that local beliefs and knowledge such as witchcraft exert significant influence on schools and learners' learning, including learners' not demonstrating their optimum understanding of mathematics.

Rural contexts and their schools have continuously been overlooked by researchers of mathematics education in South Africa. This is despite the assumption that the educational landscape may vary markedly in rural areas compared to urban and township areas which have been solely researched in the post-apartheid dispensation. To address the dearth of mathematics education research located within South Africa's rural contexts, the study explored five Grade 10 rural mathematics teachers' discourses and approaches of teaching algebraic functions with five teachers from five different school sites. This qualitative multiple case study, using Sfard's commognitive theory, draws attention to rural mathematics teachers' classroom practices and views about the teaching of algebraic functions which is unexamined in the South African context. Three data generation tools were used to gain insight into teachers' discourses and approaches while teaching the topic. These are individual semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and Video-Stimulated Recall Interviews (VSRI). Research findings focus primarily on the data generated through classroom observations. To analyse the data, I use Sfard's commognitive theory to give meaning to teachers' classroom practices. Focusing on the distinction between two tenets of commognitive theory, ritual and explorative routines, the findings demonstrate that four participating teachers acted in an extremely ritualised way. The other teacher was more explorative in her classroom observable actions. The findings illuminate that teachers need to move more towards the participationist approach during teaching to enable them to think, observe, and communicate about mathematical objects that commognitively link more with explorative routines.

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