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04 October 2021 | Story Dr Nitha Ramnath

The University of the Free State, in partnership with the Charlotte Mannya-Maxeke Institute, will be hosting its annual Charlotte Maxeke Memorial Lecture titled, Quality education, gender and the economy. This year, the event will take place virtually.

Date: Wednesday, 27 October 2021
Time: 17:30-19:00
RSVP: Alicia Pienaar, Pienaaran1@ufs.ac.za, by 25 October 2021 after which a link will be shared

Gender equality is a global priority and a South African concern. Among other interventions, it requires an approach that ensures people of all genders have access to and are empowered through education.  Globally, large gender gaps exist in accessing, completing, and continuing with schooling and with higher education studies. These global disparities are evident in South Africa. Gender injustices in education hinder a global majority (including women and members of the LGBTQIA+ communities) from fully participating in and benefiting from education. Indeed, gender injustices still mean that women and girls continue to be plagued by lower levels of success in mathematics, science, and technology compared to males. The gender injustices that hinder success in the education of women and girls relate to a myriad of factors, such as gender-based violence, unjust practices related to pregnancy, and gender roles that often burden women with unpaid care-giving roles. These obstacles also exist within universities that face unique challenges in advancing the gender agenda.

This year marks 150 years since the birth of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke, whose heroic life as South Africa’s first black female university graduate is a beacon for gender equality.  Celebrating this 150-year milestone is an opportune moment to recognise that strong interventions are needed to remove systemic and cultural barriers that violently perpetuate inequality in every sphere of the economy, particularly those that marginalise women and girls. 

Biographies of Programme Director and speakers:

Prof Joy Owen (Programme Director)

Prof Joy Owen is an academic, mother, and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Free State. Formerly head of department and deputy dean (the Humanities) at Rhodes University, Prof Owen spent some time as a visiting lecturer at the University of Münster (Germany) in 2016, and as a TORCH Global South visiting professor at the University of Oxford (UK) in 2019.

Prof Owen’s primary research love is African transnational migration. Her monograph, titled ‘Congolese social networks: Living on the margins in Muizenberg, Cape Town’ detailed the lives of transnational Congolese migrants residing in Muizenberg in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Her work homes in on the complex ways in which African transnational migrants create and maintain belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Focusing particularly on social networks, Prof Owen demonstrates how contingency, strategy, love, and habitus support onward migration (or not). 

A second research flirtation is embodied in critical pedagogy that recognises students as knowledge holders and producers through their experiences prior to and during higher education. Students are critical teaching and learning collaborators in classroom spaces, however defined. As an invisible pioneer, ‘Just Joy’ – as described by one of the students she supervises – merges both head and heart in her teaching, as she encourages students to become critically conscious of the world they have inherited and are creating, and the ways in which all forms of oppression can and need to be collectively addressed.

Prof Owen’s work, including her research, teaching, and administrative work, unobtrusively pulls apart academic and social binaries, making the world safer for the appreciation and celebration of difference – the primary marker of humanity.
Ms Zubeida Jaffer (Keynote speaker)

Zubeida Jaffer is a multiple award-winning South African journalist, and the first woman in Africa to have won the coveted foreign journalist award from the National Association of Black Journalists in the USA. An author and activist, Ms Jaffer’s work has earned numerous local and international awards. These include the Muslim Views Achiever Award as well as the Honor Medal for Distinguished Service to Journalism from the University of Missouri in the USA.

In her memoir titled, Our Generation, Ms Jaffer eloquently tells the story of her emotional journey through the years of South Africa’s turbulence into a new democracy. Her second book, Love in the Time of Treason, has been described as a ‘tour de force’ and has been republished internationally under the title On Trial with Mandela. In her third book, Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke, Ms Jaffer tells the story of South Africa’s first black female graduate who was a feisty leader at the turn of the century, stretching from 1871 to 1939. The celebration of 150 years of her birthday took place in April 2021.

A graduate of both UCT and Rhodes University, Ms Jaffer holds a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York, where she earned the award for best foreign student. Until recently, she was Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of the Free State. She continues to hold the position of Research Fellow at the UFS. She is the publisher of two websites – her own at www.zubeidajaffer.co.za and a second site called The Journalist at www.thejournalist.org.za. The Journalist serves as a knowledge bank providing context and history to students, academics, and other thoughtful South Africans.

Madiepetsane Charlotte Lobe is the Acting Chief Operations Officer in the Department of International Relations and Cooperation.  Ms Lobe represents South Africa in various capacities in the international arena. She is the focal person for Women, Peace and Security in South Africa and serves in the Global Network on Women, Peace and Security working group. She also serves on the Global Steering Committee of the Generation Equality Forum on behalf of South Africa. The Generation Equality Forum is a global multigenerational initiative aimed at dismantling gender inequalities and achieving a gender-equal world by 2030. 

Ms Lobe has served as a councillor (1996-1999), a member of parliament (1999-2004), and a member of the Free State Provincial Legislature (2004-2008).  She is the author of the book, My Father: My Hero, My Zero, published in March 2021. She holds a master’s degree in Politics, majoring in Governance and Political Transformation from the University of the Free State. She also holds a Diploma in Public Relations and Communication. 

Prof Pearl Sithole

Prof Pearl Sithole is the Campus Vice-Principal: Academic and Research on the University of the Free State Qwaqwa Campus in Phuthaditjhaba, South Africa. She is a trained social anthropologist with an interest in governance, gender and development, politics of knowledge production, and social inequality.  An alumna of the University of Durban-Westville, Prof Sithole holds a master's degree and a doctorate in Philosophy, specialising in Social Anthropology, from the University of Cambridge.
She has worked on rural development and policy management at the Human Sciences Research Council, and lectured Anthropology at the University of Durban-Westville and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. 

Prof Sithole has served as a member of the Ministerial Transformation Oversight Committee for Higher Education. She currently serves as a panel member on the Council of Higher Education’s National Review of Doctoral Degrees and was recently appointed by Pope Francis as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a Vatican-based institution created to promote the study and progress of social sciences. 

In recognition of her sterling work as a social scientist, Prof Sithole received the Distinguished Young Woman in Science Award from the South African Department of Science and Technology in 2011.

Prof Sithole has published more than 20 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, and several books. Her most recent publications are, ‘Land in South Africa: A Permanent Question; thanks to History, Law and Economics’ published in 2020 as a book chapter; and the journal article, ‘Is Decoloniality Possible: A Noble Mission, A Frustrated Strategy’ also published in 2020.

News Archive

Service learning teaching strategy essential for the infusion of graduate attributes
2017-01-02

Description: Dr Pulane Pitso Tags: Dr Pulane Pitso 

Dr Pulane Pitso, Director: Institutional Performance
Monitoring within Performance Monitoring and Evaluation
Branch in the Department of the Premier, Free State
Provincial Government (FSPG).
Photo: Rulanzen Martin

“Public service delivery is not only about ‘government’s sector end products’, but is also fundamentally related to the ways in which the citizens can be best served at the point of client interface, as the primary beneficiaries.”

It is against this backdrop that Dr Pulane Pitso’s study explored the role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in infusing the curriculum with graduate attributes for improved service delivery. The study is entitled: Community service learning as a transformative tool for infusing the university curriculum with graduate attributes for improved service delivery.
 
Citizens the central focus in public-service delivery
Although with the advent of democracy, the South African public service introduced the Batho Pele “people first” initiative which is one of the key transformation-oriented initiatives to ensure that citizens are the central focus in public service  delivery. An extant literature indicates that more work by the government still needs to be done in terms of the institutionalisation and implementation thereof.

Notwithstanding that public service is primarily responsible for addressing challenges related to poor service delivery, Dr Pitso moved from a premise that a multifaceted and collaborative approach, underpinned by a concerted effort by all relevant sectors, is more likely to contribute significantly towards improving service delivery. Specific focus was given to sectors primarily mandated to lay foundations through training and development such as HEIs, since the nature and quality of public service largely depends on the nature, quality and relevance of the system of education.

CSL a transformative teaching strategy
The basis for her thesis, emanated from the contention that public service delivery is a dynamic process which cultivates into a citizen-government relationship.

“It is this relationship that makes the implementation of the Batho Pele initiative crucial in ensuring that the social fabric and moral character of government is not compromised, thus the sustainability and facilitation of the emerged relationship,” Dr Pitso says.

The study focuses on the notion of community service learning (CSL) as an increasingly recognised transformative teaching strategy. It transcends lecture halls and utilises communities as educational spaces to provide practical exposure to real-life experiences to students on both learning and serving the communities.

Instilling graduate attributes in students
Dr Pitso’s thesis, which was predominately qualitative in nature, comprised two main stages. The first stage of the study focused on determining the current state of the public service in terms of the implementation of the Batho Pele principles. Whereas with the second stage, the focus was on determining the extent to which the graduate attributes are instilled in students by means of an exit-level CSL module at the UFS.

Dr Pitso’s thesis, which was awarded to her on 30 June 2016, is the product of five years of hard work, commitment and perseverance. She said it would not have been realised if it had not been for the leadership and mentorship of her promoter, Prof Mabel Erasmus, and co-promoter, Prof Victor Teise.

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