Latest News Archive
Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
08 December 2020
|
Story Dr Nitha Ramnath
![]()
The Directorate: Community Engagement will be virtually celebrating the launch of the new E-Engaged Scholarship Strategy on 10 December 2020.
Most of the face-to-face community engagement activities could not take place this year due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic and related physical distancing restrictions. Therefore, an E-Engaged Scholarship Strategy has been developed as an adapted virtual participatory learning environment in collaboration with our community, business, and government partners. This E-Engaged Scholarship Strategy seeks to make information accessible to communities through dialogue on engaged learning, training, and research for citizens to take actively part in developing their own lives and that of their surrounding communities.
Details of the launch:
Date: 10 December 2020
Time: 16:00 (CAT)
Platform: Microsoft Teams
Join on your computer or mobile app
Click here to join the meeting
For more information, contact Billyboy Ramahlele (Director: Community Engagement) ramahpm@ufs.ac.za
Transformation in higher education discussed at colloquium
2013-05-16
16 May 2013
Photo Gallery
The University of the Free State hosted the Higher Education Transformation Colloquium earlier this month on the Bloemfontein Campus.
On Monday 6 May 2013 till Wednesday 8 May 2013 the event brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including some members of university councils; vice-chancellors; academics and researchers; leaders of student formations and presidents of student representative councils; transformation managers; executive directors with responsibility for transformation in various universities, members of the newly established Transformation Oversight Committee and senior representatives from the Department of Higher Education and Training.
The event examined and debated some of the latest research studies and practices on the topic, as well as selected case studies from a number of public universities in South Africa.
Delivering a presentation at the colloquium, Dr Lis Lange, Senior Director of the Directorate for Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the UFS, said transformation in South Africa has been oversimplified and reduced to numbers, and the factors that might accelerate or slow the process have not been taken into account.
Dr Lange was delivering a paper, titled: The knowledge(s) of transformation: an archaeological perspective.
Dr Lange argued that “in the process of translating evolving political arguments into policy making, the intellectual, political and moral elements that shaped the conceptualisation of transformation in the early 1990s in South Africa, were reduced and oversimplified.”
She said crucial aspects of this reduction were the elimination of paradox and contradiction in the concept; the establishment of one accepted register of what transformation was and it is becoming sector-specific or socially blind. This means that the process was narrowed down in the policy texts and in the corresponding implementation strategies to the transformation of higher education, the schools system, the judiciary and the media, without keeping an eye on the structural conditions that can influence it in one way or another.
Dr Lange said the need for accountability further helped with reduction of transformation. “Because government and social institutions are accountable for their promises, transformation had to be measured and demonstrated.”