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Science is the future: SANRAL expands its UFS maths and science investment programme

25 September 2019 | Story Zamuxolo Feni | Photo Liza Crawley

Read More Photo SANRAL — SANRAL Chief Executive Officer Skhumbuzo Macozoma and UFS Rector and Vice-Chancellor Prof Francis Petersen cutting a cake to mark 10 years of collaboration between the two institutions.

The Science-for-the-Future (S4F) programme is fundamental to generating the required pipeline for technologically skilled entrepreneurs and workers by focusing on Mathematics and Science support to learners, teachers, and parents.

This is according to the South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) Chief Executive Officer, Skhumbuzo Macozoma, who delivered a keynote address at the Annual Science for the Future Summit held at the University of the Free State (UFS) on 20 September.

The S4F is a partnership between the UFS and SANRAL, with the fundamental purpose to train Maths and Science teachers and to support learners and parents. The programme has now been extended to six other universities, namely Nelson Mandela University and Walter Sisulu University in the Eastern Cape; the University of Limpopo, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and the two recently established universities, the University of Mpumalanga and the Sol Plaatje University in the Northern Cape.

Dr Cobus van Breda, the Programme Director for the UFS S4S, said they developed the Family Math and Key Concepts in Science programmes to address issues that prevent learners from excelling in these critical subjects. It seeks to improve the content knowledge of teachers and provide them with more skills-teaching resources.

Macozoma said: “I am proud and deeply honoured to stand before you today in the strength of a successful 10-year partnership with the University of the Free State which we are celebrating here today, together with the hosting of the Annual Science for the Future Summit.” More than 300 teachers attended the summit.

Planning for the future

He indicated that SANRAL's long-term strategy, Horizon 2030, instructed the development of a new human-resources strategy for the organisation, which has identified three pillars that underpin SANRAL's human-capital development initiatives, namely people, skills, and performance.

“The strategic opportunities identified by SANRAL include capitalising on the opportunity presented by the digital revolution to create a new generation of technologically skilled entrepreneurs and workers; returning to good and ethical governance in both the public and private sectors; bringing back the prestige of serving the citizens of SA through state institutions: fashioning SANRAL as an employer of the future and delivering technical skills to address the glaring skills gap in engineering and other domains,” he said.

Macozoma stated that SANRAL has also decided to review and rationalise its support to institutions of higher learning in order to grow the footprint of its support programmes, increase the impact, and ensure equity.

Beyond this, he stated that SANRAL wanted to ensure that learners are equipped with fundamental competencies that are essential to complement academic teachings, including critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, information literacy, media literacy, technology literacy, and flexibility.

Facing 4IR head on

Macozoma said the most important characteristics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that must be taken into consideration by those who aim to survive it, drive it, and benefit from it, is a smart customer – who is informed and dictates what services he/she wants and how they should be delivered; technology at the fingertips – which will enable rapid, real-time, borderless services to information, services, and technology as an enabler – bringing efficiency to logistics, mobility, medicine, education, industries, the economy, the military, global trade, and politics.

Working closely with school and society

UFS Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Prof Francis Petersen, said the university has an important responsibility to generate knowledge that will impact society positively.

“We have a role to work closely with our schools and society so that we can understand each other’s needs,” he said.

“We need to strengthen collaboration with all our partners so that we can travel further and make an impact in our society,” said Prof Petersen.

One of the participating teachers in the S4F programme, Grace Molante, from a primary school in Zastron, said: “It is programmes such as these that instil hope in us as teachers. Some learners could find Maths and Science very difficult and challenging subjects, but this programme makes problem solving more enjoyable and practical.”

News Archive

Mellon Foundation awards R10 million research grant to Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies

2015-02-20

Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor in Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies, and Dr Saleem Badat, Programme Director at the Mellon Foundation.
Photo: Johan Roux

Through her profound insight, vast experience, and unfaltering belief in humanity, Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, has secured a R10 million grant from one of the world’s most prestigious foundations funding human sciences research.

“This is one of the biggest grants that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded to a university”, said Dr Saleem Badat, Program Director: International Higher Education and Strategic Projects at the Mellon Foundation. Prof Badat attended the press event that took place on 16 February 2015 on our Bloemfontein Campus.

UFS Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Studies, spearheaded by Prof Gobodo-Madikizela, will manage the research project.

Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the UFS, expressed great excitement “about this particular grant and the subject on which it focuses is so incredibly timely and germane to our own situation.”

Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past: Transforming Scholarship in the Humanities and Arts

This new-found partnership between the Mellon Foundation and the UFS will enable a five-year research programme. The focus area of this initiative will be ‘Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past: Transforming Scholarship in the Humanities and Arts’.

The research will pivot specifically around the question of how trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next. “South Africa lends itself to these questions,” Prof Gobodo-Madikizela said, “because we are now dealing with a generation of young people who were born after the traumas of the past.” These past experiences, though, are “passed on to the younger generation and become their own stories and narratives as if they themselves experienced the traumas directly.”

“This is an investment in how we can in fact create a different kind of community,” Prof Jansen said, “in which we eventually recognise each other – not by the accident of our skin, but by that elusive sense of a common humanity.”

Arts and theatre

Other aspects critical to this study are the inclusion of the arts and theatre. Many people have great difficulty in expressing their experiences of trauma in the spoken word. The arts and theatre provide an ideal platform to engage the public and stimulate conversation. As an example of the power these platforms possess, Prof Gobodo-Madikizela highlighted the success of the Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery – situated on the Bloemfontein Campus and curated by Angela de Jesus – in engaging the public in very productive ways.

Participants

Some of the artists, directors and scholars who will join in this project include:

• Lara Foot-Newton, Director/Playwright
• Sue Williamson, Activist Artist
• Angela de Jesus, Visual Artist/Curator
• Dr Buhle Zuma, Social Psychology Research
• Dr Shose Khessi, Social Psychology Research
• Prof Tamara Shefer, Women’s and Gender Studies
• Prof Kopano Ratele, Gender/Men and Masculinities
• Prof Jan Coetzee, Sociology of Developing Societies
• Prof Helene Strauss, Literary and Cultural Studies

New intellectual frontiers

“There is an aspiration in this proposal,” Dr Saleem Badat said. “We were born through this pain of colonialism and apartheid; we even went through the TRC. Our scholars in this country, our universities, should be at the forefront of this research. This is not research we can leave to the institutions in the north.”

Prof Gobodo-Madikizela agreed. “The overarching theme of this work is new knowledge production, focusing on the experiences in South Africa as experiences that can teach us something new.”

This will serve not only South Africa, but can also establish support for, and inform, countries facing similar dilemmas. In fact, “any part of the world in which genocide and murder and racism remains as legacies from the past,” Dr Badat said.

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