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Conversations about a model of personhood and intelligence

Presenter

Dr Shahieda Jansen is a registered clinical psychologist and a certified group therapist. She is Deputy Director: Academic Support and ICT at UNISA, Western Cape. Previously she was the Manager of Student Counselling at the University of the Western Cape where she coordinated the psychological and broader developmental needs of the students and supervised and trained Masters-level psychology interns. 

Shahieda presents annually on two areas of specialization:

• • Culturally embedded approaches to personal transformation

• Gender conscious psychotherapy for men

Shahieda is a provider of culturally embedded approaches to personal transformation. Introduction to local ideas of social personhood has become her signature therapeutic alliance with clients. The crucial tone-setting conversation about “who they are”, precedes questions about the more limiting “what is the presenting problem?”.

Her other niche area is masculinized growth opportunities for male clients. Her PhD thesis is titled “Emotional experiences of participants of all-male psychotherapy groups”. Inside all men’s psychotherapy groups, Shahieda facilitates the development of an explicit male culture in which men risk ‘fishing inwards’ interrogating constructions of their own manhood and positively transforming their attitudes and behaviour. In a recent editorial published in the South African Journal of Psychology, Shahieda confirmed that men are emotionally competent. Males are her preferred psychotherapy candidates for group based emotion-focused personal transformation.

Abstract

In a pragmatic multidimensional approach to African personhood the socio-spiritual core integrates all the properties of a spiritual, embodied, relational, reasoning and moral personhood (Jansen, 2012). African Personhood is organised by the fundamental principles of relationship and morality (Klaasen, 2017). A person is thus an embodied socio-moral being, with reasoning powers, self-understanding (identity) and agentic capabilites.

We will be presenting an exploratory and experiential engagement with a situated, embodied African personhood in Teaching and Learning. This kind of holistic integrated person is an attachment seeking being-missile destined for connections with animate / inanimate others. This emergent perpetually unfolding self is in a constant process of construction and self-reflexivity, with capabilities of self- and other understanding in a historical, socio-cultural context (Archer, Bhaskar, & Norrie, 1998).

The practice of Teaching and Learning could potentially be radically transformed with an approach of assumed innate learner resilience located in biophysical and socio-cultural contexts. Learners who can visualise what they are but also what they ought to become. Learner human nature will then be implicitly understood as agentic and change orientated. If learners are approached as fundamentally understanding, dynamic, transformative, growth orientated, adapting, reflexive human beings (Martin & Sugarman, 2001); the landscape of Teaching and Learning could be profoundly modified. 

In the current context of Higher Education, we often confine considerations of academic performance to cognitive intelligence, missing the relational, agentic aspects of intelligence in biophysical and socio-cultural contexts. In this plenary we aim to elicit conversations of student resilience about the following:

a. Contextual and culture-situated intelligence

b. Intelligence beyond cognition

I conclude with a quote about the inescapable link between personhood and performance. “When we can answer the question of who I am, then development takes place” (Klaasen, 2017). Higher Education could turn its search for effective academic development approaches inward, by looking inside the student, to a source of untapped resilience beyond the conventional understanding of intelligence.

Presentation & Resources