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11 January 2021 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Supplied
Dr Ria de Villiers is passionate about education as a vehicle to ensure that people are fully engaged in work and life.

The world is rapidly changing, and the Department of Education (DBE) is responding with a plan that aims to prepare learners to adapt to a new world. Ecubed (E3), a DBE programme using playful project-based learning as a learning methodology, unlocks an entrepreneurial mindset in school learners. The E3 programme focuses on entrepreneurship, employability, and education, emphasising learning as a lifelong process. Dr Ria de Villiers is the Curriculum and Schools’ Implementation Manager for E3.

Dr De Villiers, an alumna of the University of the Free State (UFS), is passionate about education as a vehicle to unlock competencies and agency, ensuring that people are fully engaged in work and life. Dr De Villiers therefore invests great effort in contributing to a more relevant education system. “I feel compelled to do something about the challenges we see in education, especially since it is such a vital part of our human (and societal) development,” she says. 

Loving the buzz at schools, the smell of dust and chalk, Dr De Villiers really has a heart for teachers. “Teachers are often unacknowledged, and the work they do is critical,” she believes. She realised that as a teacher, her reach was too small to solve the problems in the South African education system. Therefore, she works as a teacher trainer, where she feels she can have a broader impact.

Her work as implementation manager for E3 allows her to make a positive impact on the education sector, while managing the creation of new learning materials online and face to face, as well as working in teacher development.

The difference in a changed world

Talking about E3, she says the programme prepares learners to acquire skills, knowledge, attitude, and mindset to be business owners or employers while being lifelong learners. The traditional way of teaching is changing, and with skills acquired through the E3 programme, school leavers will be ready to attend a tertiary institution, be prepared for the job market, and/or be able to start a business.

This is not the first time that Dr De Villiers has found herself in the education arena. She received her doctorate in Applied Linguistics from the UFS Faculty of the Humanities under the supervision of Prof Willfred Greyling in the Department of English. Her dissertation was titled, The impact of a discourse-based teacher counselling model in training language teachers for outcomes-based education. Assisting government and teacher unions with the training of teachers helped her to obtain the data for her PhD, in which she proposed a teacher-counselling model to promote teacher efficacy and agency. 

Teaching across borders

A big part of her career was spent in the education environment, although she worked as a businesswoman and freelance consultant for more than 30 years – first as teacher and university lecturer, and later as co-founder of Future Entrepreneurs, a publishing and teacher-support business. 

But it was when she started a language school that her communication business, Jika Communication and Training, came into being; it was not long before this enterprise developed into a leading training organisation for entrepreneurship education programmes endorsed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Together with the ILO, she worked on a series of 30 business simulation games and role-plays to promote progressive teaching methodologies, learner-centredness, and activity-based experiential learning. 

Teaching others about learning also allowed Dr De Villiers to cross South African borders when she facilitated the reworking of the vocational curriculum for the Indonesian government. She has done training at all teacher-training colleges in Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar for the Ministry of Education in Tanzania. 

A more humane, learner-centred approach

In our changing world, and as it pertains to the education system, Dr De Villiers truly believes that training and teaching needs a more humane, learner-centred approach, with mutual respect between trainer and learner. 

She remains inspired to continue making a difference in the sector. “I want schooling to improve and gear itself for a rapidly changing world. I want young people who are out of work to find their voice and place in the economy. I want every school learner to develop the agency and confidence to stand up in class and ask a question without any fear of losing face. And I want teachers to develop that agency too as they become more and more autonomous, self-reliant, and confident enough to teach using progressive methodologies.”

News Archive

International human development practitioners gather at first HDCA conference in Africa
2017-09-18

Description: HDCA read more Tags: Human Development and Capability Association, University of Cape Town, HDCA conference, Prof Melanie Walker 

The first HDCA annual conference on African soil was held at
UCT from 6 to 8 September 2017.


The Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) is a global community of academics and practitioners that seeks to build an intellectual community around the ideas of human development and the capability approach, and to relate these ideas to the policy arena and justice in the world. The association promotes research within many disciplines, ranging from economics to philosophy, development studies, health, education, law, government, sociology, and more. Members live in over 70 countries worldwide.

The HDCA’s conference is held annually; in 2017, the 17th international conference was held in Africa for the first time. Hosted by the Universities of Cape Town, the Free State (UFS), and the Western Cape, and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the meeting was held in Cape Town from 6 to 8 September 2017. The conference attracted outstanding global scholars, such as Profs Ravi Kanbur (Cornell), Martha Nussbaum (Chicago), Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht), and Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University), among many others.

The conference theme was Challenging Inequalities: Human Development and Social Change, a particularly apt topic in the wake of Stats SA’s latest Poverty Report, which shows growing poverty and inequality in South Africa. Prof Melanie Walker, Director: Centre for Research on Higher Education and Development (CRHED) at the UFS, outgoing vice-president of the HDCA, and a member of the conference committee, led a group of researchers from CRHED, ten of whom were involved in presenting papers, while two former PhD students also presented their research. Overall, the quality of papers was very high, with Prof Nussbaum remarking that this was ‘the best HDCA conference’ she had attended.

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