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Statistics lecturer on Qwaqwa campus, Christa Faber bags Master of Higher Education

07 December 2021 | Story Nonsindiso Qwabe

By working with students and being part of their development into successful young adults, Mathematics and Applied Mathematics Lecturer on the Qwaqwa Campus, Christa Faber, soon realised that she would like to proceed with her own studies, and she set her sights on just that. Obtaining her honours degree in Mathematical Statistics at age 40 inspired Faber to continue pursuing an education. She will be receiving her Master of Higher Education Studies degree during the December graduations.

Teaching has always been her passion, Faber shared fondly. She commenced her teaching career as a Mathematics teacher in a small town, Molteno, in the Eastern Cape. After four years of teaching, she worked as a Mathematics supply teacher in the United Kingdom for two years. Upon her return, she continued her teaching career in Harrismith, where she was appointed as a Science teacher at Harrismith High School, before receiving an offer to assist the UFS Qwaqwa Campus as a Statistics facilitator in 2003. She never looked back.

As a researcher, Faber has spent the past eight years using technology as an educational tool to determine whether it can be used to improve students’ performance and understanding of basic statistics. “I believe students learn best when they expect to be successful and see the value of the course for their personal development,” she said.

Faber conducted an experiment on how an online assessment tool (OAT) could be incorporated into the Statistics module to enhance student engagement, and consequently, the performance of students in a rural setting. The transition from face-to-face teaching to online learning has been a topic across all institutions of higher learning, with students’ response to learning on blended platforms being of great importance.

The learning experiment, conducted pre-COVID, showed the benefits that online assessment tools could have on the performance and engagement of students at a rural university. Faber said she considers it important to know how students engaged in key online and general learning practices as a way of managing and developing rural university education. For the experiment, a pragmatic parallel mixed methods design was used to divide students into two groups to compare the performances of those with online assessment tool interventions and those without.

The intervention recently won Faber the Innovative Methods in Assessment Practices award for the Qwaqwa Campus at this year’s Centre for Teaching and Learning awards. The purpose of the category was to showcase how assessment strategies, tools, and assessment activities are used to assess students in new, original, or inventive ways. She said she was grateful to receive recognition for a research project inspired by her passion for teaching and learning, combined with the use of online assessment technology, to enhance students’ learning experience in the field of statistics. “My ongoing research supports the promotion of student engagement in statistics education, as well as in the general educational field.”

News Archive

Prof Antjie Krog speaks on verbalising revulsion and the collusion of men

2015-06-26

From the left are Prof Lucius Botes, UFS: Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities; Prof Helene Strauss, UFS: Department of English; Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, UFS: Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies; Prof Antjie Krog, UCT: Department Afrikaans and Dutch; Dr Buhle Zuma, UCT: Department of Psychology. Both Prof Strauss and Dr Zuma are partners in the Mellon Foundation research project.

“This is one of the bitterest moments I have ever endured. I would rather see my daughter carried away as a corpse than see her raped like this.”

This is one of 32 testimonies that were locked away quietly in 1902. These documents, part of the NC Havenga collection, contain the testimonies of Afrikaner women describing their experiences of sexual assault and rape at the hands of British soldiers during the South African War.

This cluster of affidavits formed the foundation of a public lecture that Prof Antjie Krog delivered at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein Campus on Tuesday 23 June 2015. The lecture, entitled ‘They Couldn’t Achieve their Goal with Me: Narrating Rape during the South African War’, was the third instalment in the Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series on Trauma, Memory, and Representations of the Past. The series is hosted by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor in Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Studies at the UFS, as part of a five-year research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Verbalising revulsion

The testimonies were taken down during the last two months of the war, and “some of the women still had marks and bruises on their bodies as evidence,” Prof Krog said. The victims’ words, on the other hand, struggled to express the story their bodies told.

What are the nouns for that which one sees? What words are permissible in front of men? How does one process revulsion verbally? These are the barriers the victims – raised with Victorian reserve – faced while trying to express their trauma, Prof Krog explained.

The collusion of men

When the war ended, there was a massive drive to reconcile the Boers and the British. “Within this process of letting bygones be bygones,” Prof Krog said, “affidavits of severe violations by white men had no place. Through the collusion of men, prioritising reconciliation between two white male hierarchies, these affidavits were shelved, and, finally, had to suffer an embargo.”

“It is only when South Africa accepted a constitution based on equality and safety from violence,” Prof Krog said, “that the various levels of deeply-rooted brutality, violence, and devastation of men against the vulnerable in society seemed to burst like an evil boil into the open, leaving South African aghast in its toxic suppurations. As if, for many decades, we did not know it was there and multiplied.”

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