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Professional Readiness and socially aware Responsiveness

Presenter

Dr Kasturi Behari-Leak is a senior lecturer and interim Director of Academic and Professional Staff Development in the Centre for Higher Education Development at UCT. She convenes a variety of professional and academic staff development programmes for emerging and established academics. Her work focuses on developing academics’ critical agency in the context of change. She is President of the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA); President-elect of the International Consortium of Educational Development (ICED) and will serve as President of ICED (2021-2023). She is part of several national and international research consortia, focused on HE. She is also project leader of a national academic staff development collaborative project (NATHEP) and serves on the advisory committee for GHEAR of the World Universities Network.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our sense of ‘normal’ and has forced us to think creatively, innovatively, sustainably and collaboratively by applying ourselves to teaching, learning, assessing, evaluating, facilitating and engaging differently. While we are working hard ensure that the 2020 academic project is not compromised, we have had to also embrace a socially aware and socially just approach to teaching and learning. Despite our intense engagement to date with pedagogical theories, concepts, frameworks, taxonomies, approaches and philosophies, we may argue that none of these has prepared us adequately for the complexity and challenges of the pandemic. But the crisis offers us a unique opportunity - to think anew and afresh about our traditional practices in light of current contextual demands. Reflecting on the UCT experience, as well as engagements in HELTASA and ICED during the lockdown, this presentation will report on how critical awareness was used as a catalyst to infuse the online space with a pedagogy of care, empathy, solidarity and community that takes into account, students and academics who fear that they are/ will be left behind.