The challenges to teacher educators in sub-Saharan Africa are acute. This paper describes how the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) consortium is working within institutional and national policy systems to support school-based teacher professional development. The TESSA consortium (13 African institutions and 5 international organisations delivering teacher education across 9 countries) designed and produced a bank of open educational resources (OERs) to guide teachers’ classroom practices in school-based teacher education. Drawing on examples from the TESSA consortium and from the University of Fort Hare, South Africa, the authors categorize the forms of TESSA OER integration as highly structured, loosely structured, or guided use. The paper concludes by outlining success factors for the integration of OERs: accessibility, adequate resources, support for teachers, accommodation of local cultural and institutional practices, and sustainable funding.
The public sector, including higher education institutions (HEIs), has a critical role to play in the national post-apartheid transformation agenda in South Africa. With the formalisation of community engagement (CE) as a core function of HEIs, universities are now required to contribute to the socioeconomic development of communities and to promote students' social and civic responsibilities through community engagement. Students are viewed as both agents and beneficiaries of community engagement.We propose that students of HEIs in South Africa have to be educated and prepared for engaging with communities, otherwise the potential to cause harm (albeit unintentional), specifically to previously disadvantaged communities, is real. Based on our proposal, this article presents the findings of exploratory research conducted for developing curricula to prepare students for community engagement practice and scholarship at the University of Fort Hare (UFH), in the Eastern Cape.Students currently involved in various forms of community engagement and areas of scholarship were purposefully selected from both the rural and urban campuses of UFH. The research asked the following question: What should be the nature and form of education/preparation of students, for the different kinds of CE activities and scholarship undertaken at UFH? The notion of ubuntu formed the philosophical base, with holistic education as the theoretical foundation of the study. The research drew from the scholarship of Barnett and Coate (2005) on the three functions of university curricula -knowing, acting and being -which we deem well suited to the functions of community engagement in the South African context.
The Eastern Cape Planning Commission identifies human development as the central concern that the Provincial Development Plan should be premised on (Eastern Cape Planning Commission, 2012). This article proposes to critically examine the emerging (albeit implicit) philosophicalfoundation for sustainable human development, which we read as a combination of consciousness, capability, and rational organisation, and discusses these three interrelating aspects against selected stakeholders of sustainable human development: the State, civic society and the university. We determine that a re-imagination of the Eastern Cape Province would require serious consideration for the reshaping of the State, a rethinking of the roles and relationships with, and between, civic society, and a review of the third mission of the university.
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