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30 October 2018
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Story Rulanzen Martin
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Photo Peet van Aardt
Some of the student writers who contributed to the anthology that tells their stories in Sesotho, isiXhosa, isiZulu, English and Afrikaans.
How do you transform the higher education curriculum? You involve the exact people the curriculum is intended for. The book, Initiative for Creative African Narratives (iCAN,) illustrates how decolonisation can be achieved through literature for students by students.
iCAN is an initiative by the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at the University of the Free State (UFS) to mentor students in creative and narrative writing. Under the mentorship of Dr Peet van Aardt, project coordinator, and Ace Moloi, author and UFS alumnus, iCAN Volume 1 was recently launched with 47 short stories written by UFS students.
“The project is a response from the centre for the ever-increasing need for decolonised curricula, steeped in the local cultural perspective of ubuntu,” said Dr Van Aardt.
“This book is an example for how decolonisation can be implemented,” said Prof Francois Stydrom, Senior Director of CTL. The overall aim of the iCAN project is to have the content that materialised from it to be included in the curriculum of first-year students at UFS in the near future.
Book provides multiple voices
Starting in May 2018, CTL presented a series of creative writing workshops on all three of the UFS campuses. “It’s a medium that allows a diverse range of students to express their views and develop their voices as writers,” said Prof Strydom.
It is a form of empowerment, to pass the baton to students to improve the UFS curriculum by writing and publishing their own stories, thereby contributing to larger bodies of knowledge through their lived experiences.
“I believe we as a university need to enable students so that they move away from just being users to becoming contributors to the curriculum,” Dr van Aardt concluded.
Spanish academic discuss frameworks for successful higher education
2013-08-29
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Prof Melanie Walker, Senior Research Professor at CHECaR, Prof Sandra Boni and Dr Sonja Loots, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the CHECaR seminar.
29 August 2013
Photo: Thabo Motsoane |
In the latest Centre for Higher Education and Capabilities Research (CHECaR) seminar, Prof Sandra Boni from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain presented on ‘Competencies in Higher Education: A Critical Analysis from the Capabilities Approach.’ The presentation focused on the significant transformation taking place in universities and how that is affecting teaching and learning practices. The competencies approach plays a key role in this transformation process by associating the mastering of certain skills with successful completion of higher education qualifications.
Prof Boni and her colleagues argue that the competencies approach is flawed and too narrow to be used in evaluating successful higher education and that a broader human development perspective has to be applied. She argues that the capabilities approach represents a more inclusive framework for guiding the holistic development of students through the expansion of all human choices to achieve what they value most, not just to benefit economically from education. The inclusion of the human development framework in universities’ training would lead to generating ‘public-good professionals’ who are equipped prepared with the necessary competencies to enter their chosen career – but who will also be the bearers of a social consciousness.