A SOUTH AFRICAN CULTURAL CONSTRUCT OF AUTONOMY IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES

In South Africa, the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in educational contexts is an emerging practice. Kaplan’s (1995) and Feenberg’s (1991) views of online environments as sites of struggle are evident in South African university classrooms where ICTs are utilized, yet students from under-resourced schools and home backgrounds might have had limited previous access to such modes of delivery. This paper explores the implementation of an online course, which was designed to run parallel to a face-to-face first year university English course. Recognising that autonomy is a means of transforming possible sites of struggle into sites of opportunity, the aim of the paper is to find out the extent to which participants perceived themselves to have engaged autonomously in the online environment, given that the notion ‘autonomy’ is a cultural construct. Autonomy is theorized primarily from the characteristics established by Guglielmino (1997) as well as other theorists in the field, while notions cultural appropriateness are drawn on from the work of Pennycook (1997) and Benson (1997).