ICED: Not Yet Ubu-Ntu Event
This webinar questions the notion of knowledge building to cultivate African agency in Educational Development in the ‘post’ colonial-apartheid South African Higher Education (HE) context. It is inspired mainly by the recent (2021) quest to repurpose and restructure Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA) into being a relevant, responsive and resilient professional entity, committed to the strengthening of HE practices, research and policy. We view this commitment to be aligned with ICED’s conference call which propagates for strengthening of roles and responsibilities of educational developers in advancing higher education ecosystems that serve to enable learners to build competencies for the 21st century and beyond. However, contrary to the notion of decontextualised and apolitical ‘competencies, ’ we consider strengthening roles and responsibilities of education developers to be key in widening relational student capabilities integral in the struggle for epistemic justice for all.
The provocation will be delivered by Prof Chrissie Boughey who will explore the evolution of Educational Development as a knowledge field to highlight achievements and flag weaknesses constraining cultivation of African agency in the SA HE context. We support Boughey’s honest reflection that ‘we are not yet there’ and invoke the philopraxis of ‘ubu-ntu’ to call for mothafatso to be key if we are to cultivate African agency in this context. While acknowledging strides that have been made in this sector thus far, we draw on Letta Mbuli’s song ‘not yet uhuru’ to signal urgency for the need to assert African agency (ubuntu) in the field of Educational Development through development of the endogenous scholarship of teaching and learning.
Following the address:
- We open up a conversation and consider what could be done to contribute to the unfinished business of knowledge building in the field of educational development in our context.
- We reflect on the recent strides aiming at repurposing and restructuring HELTASA to appraise the extent to which this new programme of action might enable or constrain cultivation of African agency.
Provocateurs:
Event Information
Topic: Not Yet Ubu-Ntu : Knowledge building to assert African agency in educational development in the South African Higher Education context.
Date: 28 May 2024
Time: 12:30 (SAST)
Event Type: Webinar
Event registration link: Click Here.
Prof Boughey
Prof Boughey has worked in Academic Development at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Zululand before taking up the post of Director of the CHERTL at Rhodes in 1999. Since then, she has been involved in a number of national initiatives directed at the assurance of quality and the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education.
She supervises widely at doctoral level and, in 2005, was awarded a fellowship by the South African Association for Research and Development in Higher Education because of her work in Academic Development.
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