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03 March 2020 | Story Michelle Nöthling | Photo Supplied
Digital Storytelling
Universities, non-profit organisations, and community members collaborated in the recent symposium, Scholarship of Engagement through Digital Storytelling for the Common Good, hosted by the UFS. From the left, are Julie Adair (Glasgow Caledonian University), Prof Puleng LenkaBula (UFS), Prof Lesley Wood (NWU), and Prof Boiphelo Marilyn Setlalentoa (NWU).
A symposium that bridges the divide between academics and the community? This may sound like a contradiction in terms. However, this is exactly what the Directorate: Community Engagement and the Centre for Development Support at the University of the Free State (UFS) recently achieved. For the symposium, Scholarship of Engagement through Digital Storytelling for the Common Good, these two units at the UFS partnered to host a truly collaborative forum between international and local academics, NPOs, government officials, and Bloemfontein community members. For two days, from 26 to 27 February 2020, ideas and knowledge were exchanged on how to initiate and sustain social innovation and change.

Speaking on the topic of engaged scholarship, Prof Puleng LenkaBula, Vice-Rector: Institutional Change, Student Affairs, and Community Engagement at the UFS, remarked that “universities are not ivory towers that are disengaged in the lives and the well-being of their societies”. It is for this reason, therefore, that this symposium offered the opportunity to investigate the area of overlap between community involvement, social innovation, and digital storytelling in order to enhance engaged scholarship. 

Communities sharing knowledge

Karen Venter, Assistant Director: Community Engagement at the UFS, explained that ‘community’ not only refers to a group of people in a certain geographic location, but that communities are also formed on the basis of shared knowledge, values, experiences, or traditions. Engagement requires academics and students to build lasting relationships with people in the various communities in order to accomplish shared goals. These shared goals commonly include learning and research but should also span boundaries to cultivate multi-directional knowledge-sharing and even creating new courses with the input of the community. Ultimately, these interactions should enhance and benefit all participants equally in a relationship of shared power – a learning together through true reciprocity.

The second pillar of the symposium – the concept of social innovation – was introduced by Adelaide Sheik from the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Social Economy. Social innovation refers to those products, services, models, markets, and processes that offer effective and sustainable solutions for social and environmental problems. “The concept of social innovation,” Sheik said, “focuses attention on the ideas and solutions that create social value.” It is through partnering with institutions such as universities that these social solutions and values can find a bedrock in which to flourish through the sharing of skills and expertise.

Enhancing digital skills, informing scholarship, and sharing ideas 

Perhaps the golden thread that tied all the elements of the symposium together was digital storytelling. Julie Adair, Director of Digital Collaboration at Glasgow Caledonian University, and leader of the Common Good First project, underscored the great potential of digital storytelling – especially in higher education. Essentially, digital storytelling is a first-person narrative created by means of recorded voice, images, music, and sounds. Participants come together in a small facilitated story circle and share their experiences in an emotionally safe environment. Within these circles, participants then co-collaborate to shape and develop each other’s stories into personal scripts. Each participant is guided in the process to record and edit their script into a digital story, which is then shared among the group, or subsequently with even bigger audiences. In support of this initiative, the UFS Centre for Development Support recently opened a digital storytelling lab. As a methodology, digital storytelling is greatly adaptable to different contexts, giving voice to lived experiences. It is for this reason that digital storytelling is an excellent tool for identifying community needs, enhancing digital skills, informing scholarship, and sharing ideas. 

The success of the symposium can surely be measured against the response of the participants. In a mutually supportive environment, new networks were fostered between academics, community members, and NPOs, with renewed hope of finding solutions together.

News Archive

DF Malherbe Memorial Lecture
2005-05-19

DF Malherbe Memorial Lecture: Language and language activism in a time of transformation (summary)
Proff Hennie van Coller and Jaap Steyn

Language activism necessary for multilingualism
The awareness is growing that language activism will be needed to bring about a truly democratic multi-lingual society. What is quite clear is that a firm resolve must continuously resist the concentrated pressure on Afrikaans-medium schools (and universities) to allow themselves to be anglicised through becoming first parallel medium, then dual medium, and finally English medium institutions.

Proff Hennie van Coller and Jaap Steyn said this last night (Wednesday night) in the 24th DF Malherbe Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State. Prof van Coller is head of the Department Afrikaans, Dutch, German and French at the UFS. Both are widely honoured for their contributions to Afrikaans and the promotion of Afrikaans.

They discussed three periods of transformation since 1902, and said about the current phase, which started in 1994:  “Besides all institutions and councils having to be representative of South Africa’s racial composition, places of education were required to open their doors. Quite rapidly this policy has had the result that schools and universities may be solely English medium, but not solely Afrikaans medium. Afrikaans medium institutions — if they claim the right to remain Afrikaans — are quickly branded racist, even though their student body may include all races.

“Education departments are presently exerting great pressure on Afrikaans medium schools to become double or parallel medium schools.  Parallel medium education is an equitable solution provided it can be sustained. Established parallel medium schools, such as Grey College in Bloemfontein, have catered even-handedly for English and Afrikaans speakers for decades. But the situation is different in the parallel medium (and still worse in the double medium) schools that spring up usually at the behest of a department of education.

“Afrikaans schools are converted almost over-night into parallel or dual medium schools without any additional personnel being provided. Depending on the social environment, a parallel medium school becomes reconstituted as a dual medium school on average in five to eight years, and dual medium school becomes an English-only school in two to three years. Some Afrikaans medium schools have become English medium in just three years.

“Though the Constitution recognises mono-lingual schools, officials in the provinces insist that Afrikaans schools become dual or parallel medium; English medium schools are left undisturbed. One must conclude that the tacit aim of the state is English as the sole official language, despite the lip-service paid to multi-lingualism, and the optimistic references to post-apartheid South Africa as a ‘rainbow’ nation.”

They said a recent study has shown that the 1 396 Afrikaans schools in the six provinces in 1993 have dwindled to 844. The fall off in the Free State is from 153 to 97; in the Western Cape from 759 to 564; in Gauteng from 274 to 155; in Mapumalanga from 90 to 3; in the North West from 82 to 13; and in Limpopo Province from 38 to 12.

They said the changes at universities, too, have been severe, as university staffs well know. Ten years ago there were five Afrikaans universities. Today there are none. The government demanded that all universities be open to all, which has meant that all universities have had to become English medium. And no additional funding was forthcoming for the changes. The government policy amounts to a language “tax” imposed on the Afrikaans community for using Afrikaans.

“Only when all schools (and universities) are English will the clamor cease. Academics and educationists are beginning to speak openly of forming pressure groups to save Afrikaans schools, and of using litigation as one of their methods. 59% of Afrikaans parents have said they would support strong action if Afrikaans were no longer a medium of instruction at schools.”

 

 


 

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