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04 December 2018 | Story Lacea Loader | Photo Stephen Collet
Regional confrence read more
From the left: Prof Henk de Jager, Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Central University of Technology; Prof Yunus Ballim, Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Sol Plaatje University; Mrs Dipiloane Phutsisi, Principal of Motheo TVET College; Prof Puleng LenkaBula, Vice-Rector: Institutional Change, Student Affairs and Community Engagement at the UFS; Prof Nicky Morgan, Coordinator of HERDIC, and Mr Mr Brian Madalane, Principal of the Northern Cape Urban TVET.
Five post-school education institutions in the central inland region have established an initiative to collaborate in a number of focus areas to the benefit of communities in the region.
 
Established during an inaugural meeting in Bloemfontein on 14 November 2018, the Higher Education Regional Development Initiative of Central South Africa (HERDIC - SA) will collaborate in a manner that delivers operational and academic benefits to each institution, increase benefits to communities in the region, and responds to the need for high-level learning opportunities in South Africa. The collaboration with critical stakeholders in support of development in the region, as expressed in the partnership of teaching, learning, research, and engaged scholarship aspirations and the pursuit of mutually beneficial synergies and benefits of scale in critical support structures, was highlighted.

During the inaugural meeting, it was unanimously agreed that working together for enhanced access to higher education, staff development, and student welfare initiatives, as well as regional collaborations with the wider public sector and business, could have a transformative effect on the capacity and sustainability of the communities in the central inland region. The five institutions that form part of the initiative are: Motheo TVET College (Bloemfontein); Northern Cape Urban TVET College (Kimberley); Sol Plaatje University (SPU) (Kimberley); University of the Free State (UFS) (Bloemfontein and Qwaqwa Campuses); and the Central University of Technology, Free State (CUT) (Bloemfontein and Welkom).
 
During the meeting, the importance of collaboration between higher-education institutions and colleges of technical and vocational education training in creating synergies and leveraging joint capabilities to enhance development, was highlighted. The focus areas that HERDIC – SA will work on, include operational efficiencies (including shared services), articulation between the institutions (including teaching and learning), research and innovation, community engagement (including marketing and communication), and staff development.
 
The operational model will consist of task teams for each of the focus areas, consisting of representatives from each member institution. The task teams will report to a steering committee. It is envisaged that HERDIC – SA will be operational by March 2019.


News Archive

Rhodes professor calls for accountability in teacher education
2013-11-14

 

 Prof Jean Baxen of Rhodes University and Prof Dennis Francis, Dean of the Faculty of Education of the UFS.
Photo: Stephen Collett
15 November 2013

 



Lecture (pdf)

 

“Our education system needs quality teacher education.”

This was the message from Prof Jean Baxen, Deputy Dean of Research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. She delivered the Education Public Lecture on ‘The lives of children, citizenship and teacher education: challenges and opportunities’ at the University of the Free State’s Bloemfontein Campus.

Growing up in White River, the rural areas of Eastern Transvaal (as it was previously known), Prof Baxen took the audience on a journey of the imagination. She shared stories of how she and fellow learners walked miles to get to school and how her son found himself in a situation of being unsure about his own racial identity, questioning what it meant to be ‘coloured’. She also related stories of how teachers are not sufficiently prepared to mediate information on HIV/Aids.

These stories revealed how little teachers cared, and also how difficult and challenging it is for learners to cope in such teaching and learning environments – thus calling for quality teacher education.

She stressed the fact that quality teacher education is needed in South Africa to assist in curbing the challenges children and fellow citizens come across in our broader society. “It is important that, as teacher educators, we should groom teachers to find and understand their identity, sexuality, and also the world they live in. There is an urgent need for us to hold ourselves and others accountable and to not distance ourselves and make it someone else’s responsibility – it is our joint responsibility as citizens,” she said.

We need a pedagogy that would navigate and start formulating a language that we could use to face these challenges, she proposed.

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