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11 February 2022
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Story Leonie Bolleurs and Rulanzen Martin
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After two years of lockdown, online meetings, and limited contact with colleagues, academy at the University of the Free State (UFS) is gradually returning to normal. This month (February 2022), staff, students, and members of related industries will convene on three different occasions to learn about cutting-edge scholarship, to reconnect with each other, and to discuss issues impacting society in the fields of theology, the humanities, and agriculture.
Seminar on ‘The Limits of Decolonisation’ with Prof RW Johnson
Date: 24 February 2022
Time: 09:00-16:00 SAST
Venue/Platform: Equitas Auditorium, UFS Bloemfontein Campus, and Microsoft Teams
Decolonisation has been a heated point of discussion for some time now, but have you ever wondered if there could be limitations hindering the decolonisation project? The Departments of Political Studies and Governance and Philosophy and Classics at the UFS will host an array of academics and experts for a hybrid seminar on the topic The Limits of Decolonisation.
If decolonisation is an important issue for you or if you are interested in the topic and its relevance and influence in the world and academia, you should join or attend the seminar – either online via Microsoft Teams or in person in the Equitas Auditorium – on 24 February 2022 from 09:00.
The keynote speaker is political scientist
Prof RW Johnson from the University of Oxford. Prof Johnson is an emeritus fellow at Magdalen College and is the author of several acclaimed political books. The other speakers are all from the Departments of Political Studies and Governance, and Philosophy and Classics. Terrence Corrigan from the
South African Institute of Race Relations will speak on The relationship between critical race theory and decolonisation.
RSVP: Alice Stander StanderAFM@ufs.ac.za (please specify dietary requirements, as a light lunch will be served)
Rhodes professor calls for accountability in teacher education
2013-11-14
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Prof Jean Baxen of Rhodes University and Prof Dennis Francis, Dean of the Faculty of Education of the UFS.
Photo: Stephen Collett
15 November 2013 |
Lecture (pdf)
“Our education system needs quality teacher education.”
This was the message from Prof Jean Baxen, Deputy Dean of Research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. She delivered the Education Public Lecture on ‘The lives of children, citizenship and teacher education: challenges and opportunities’ at the University of the Free State’s Bloemfontein Campus.
Growing up in White River, the rural areas of Eastern Transvaal (as it was previously known), Prof Baxen took the audience on a journey of the imagination. She shared stories of how she and fellow learners walked miles to get to school and how her son found himself in a situation of being unsure about his own racial identity, questioning what it meant to be ‘coloured’. She also related stories of how teachers are not sufficiently prepared to mediate information on HIV/Aids.
These stories revealed how little teachers cared, and also how difficult and challenging it is for learners to cope in such teaching and learning environments – thus calling for quality teacher education.
She stressed the fact that quality teacher education is needed in South Africa to assist in curbing the challenges children and fellow citizens come across in our broader society. “It is important that, as teacher educators, we should groom teachers to find and understand their identity, sexuality, and also the world they live in. There is an urgent need for us to hold ourselves and others accountable and to not distance ourselves and make it someone else’s responsibility – it is our joint responsibility as citizens,” she said.
We need a pedagogy that would navigate and start formulating a language that we could use to face these challenges, she proposed.