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25 October 2018 Photo Tello Theletsane
UFS Postgraduate Education students attend orientation programme
Postgraduate students from the Faculty of Education at the World of Work teacher orientation held at the university.

Postgraduate students in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Free State (UFS) were subjected to an enlightening theoretical orientation of what to expect in the actual world of teaching.

Delivering an address to the students, Dean of the Faculty of Education, Prof Loyiso Jita, said the annual World of Work session was meant to ensure that “our students are not surprised when they enter the working environment, but are prepared and are able to make their own calculations.”

Qualities of a best teacher

In his speech that sought to evoke the conscience of students about the qualities of the kind of teacher they should be, Prof Jita encouraged them to learn from the best model teachers they had seen during their schooling days and to do away with the habits of the bad teachers they had met.

Prof Jita outlined five features that characterise a good teacher: a love for children; a love for books; a love for helping others; developing expertise in your subject area; and remembering that you have a role to play in developing the country’s leaders of tomorrow.

Teachers have to undergo development programmes

The Provincial Director of the South African Council of Educators (SACE), Marupi Marumo, took the students through a series of ethics, morals, and development programmes for teachers which include internet, digital content, and broadcast ways of teaching. “Teachers have to be members of SACE and government has made it mandatory for teachers to undergo educational programmes as constantly as possible,” he said. 

Marumo warned that the teaching profession is nowadays infested with fraudsters who fake their educational qualifications, from a matric certificate up to a tertiary qualification.

“It is on this this premise that all incoming teachers will have to register with us and have their qualifications verified,” he said.

The session was attended by officials from the provincial Department of Education, Labour, Xhariep District, local school principals, and teachers’ unions.

News Archive

Centre for Africa Studies goes quadruple
2014-09-02

The Centre for Africa Studies at the UFS hosted a book launch on 27 August 2014. Prof Heidi Hudson expressed her excitement as she welcomed the audience and authors that evening, “This has not happened yet at our department where we launch four books at the same time, thus it is a happy and glorious moment for us.”

Book 1: Sacred Spaces and Contested Identities. Space and Ritual Dynamics in Europe and Africa. Edited by Paul Post, Philip Nel and Walter van Beek.

This book deals with the fundamental changes in society and culture that are forcing us to reconsider the position of sacred space, and to do this within the broader context of ritual and religious dynamics and what is called a ‘spatial turn’. Conversely, sacred sites are a privileged way of studying current cultural dynamics. This collection of studies on sacred space concerns itself with both perspectives by exploring place-bound dynamics of the sacred spaces in Africa and Europe.

Book 2: Understanding Namibia. The Trials of Independence. Written by Henning Melber.

This study explores the achievements and failures of Namibia’s transformation since independence. It contrasts the narrative of a post-colonial patriotic history with the socio-economic and political realities of the nation-building project.

Book 3: Peace Diplomacy, Global Justice and International Agency Rethinking Human Security and Ethics in the Spirit of Dag Hammarskjöld. Edited by Carsten Stahn and Henning Melber.

This tribute and critical review of Hammarskjöld's values and legacy examines his approach towards international civil service, agency and value-based leadership, investigates his vision of internationalism and explores his achievements and failures as Secretary-General. The book is also available in print. Melber is a Senior Adviser and Director Emeritus of The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Uppsala, Sweden. He is also Extraordinary Professor at both the University of Pretoria and the Centre for Africa Studies, University of the Free State.

Book 4: Au commencement était le Mimisme: Essai de lecture globale des cours de Marcel Jousse ( In the beginning was mimism: A holistic reading of Marcel Jousse’s lectures). Written by: Edgard Sienaert

This publication allows us to hear the voice of Marcel Jousse, professor of Anthropology of Language, who taught in Paris between 1931 and 1957. Edgard Sienaert, after having edited and translated in English all publications of Jousse, returns here to Jousse’s one-thousand lectures, synthesised through the lens of an anthropology of human mimism. Jousse’s train of thought leads us to question our own thought categories stuck in antagonisms: spirit and matter, concrete and abstract, body and mind, science and faith. Sienaert is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Africa Studies, University of the Free State, with an MA and PhD in Romance Philology. He published widely on medieval French literature and on orality. 
 

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