Faculty of Education
Prof JD Jansen, Dean
Telephone number: 012 420 3513
Fax number: 012 420 4215
E-mail address: jonathan.jansen@up.ac.za
Preface by the Dean
The Faculty of Education has been able to achieve and sustain an upward trajectory in terms of research productivity, research output and the overall quality of research and scholarship in education. The scale and scope of funded research projects continue to increase annually. The NRF honoured the Faculty of Education with six major grant awards for conducting research in education - totalling close to R1 million. As a result of an intensive capacity building programme record numbers of students are graduating with research masters and doctoral degrees that now require international moderation.
Several strategic initiatives supported this trend. The Faculty has instituted a development programme called ‘Preparing for the Professoriate’ in which new PhDs are systematically prepared to become members of a group of world-class professors. Another initiative has been a series of training programmes aimed at capacitating young scholars for purposes of ‘Writing Your First Scholarly Book’. As a consequence of these initiatives at least two new PhDs have been able to turn their dissertations into high quality scholarly books published through RoutledgeFalmer Press and the Human Sciences Research Council.
The celebrated Annual Post-Graduate Research Indaba of the Faculty of Education was opened this year by the Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor. The Indaba is attended by young researchers from across the world and these masters and doctoral students are granted their first platform for sharing emerging research ideas as well as completed postgraduate research.
Once again the Faculty of Education hosted numerous international conferences on the Groenkloof campus - amongst them the International Leadership in Education Research Network (ILern) Conference, the Brown/ South Africa Conference on Equity in Schools, and the Annual Conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (the ASCD). These conferences attracted top scholars such as Richard Elmore and David Wylie (Harvard), Andy Hargreaves (Boston College), KC Wong (University of Hong Kong), and Juan Moreno (World Bank).
Several scholarly books were published in the Faculty of Education, including Reflections on School Integration (edited by Professors Mokubung Nkomo, Carolyn McKinney and Linda Chisholm), Augmentative and Alternative Communication and Severe disabilities - Beyond Poverty (edited by Professors Erna Alant and Lyle Lloyd) and Keys to Educational Psychology (edited by Prof Irma Eloff and Dr Liesel Ebersöhn).
In 2004 the Faculty of Education recruited onto its permanent establishment some of the leading and most promising young scholars in education from around the world, including Dr Christina Amsterdam (PhD University of South Carolina) and Dr Jabulani Sithole (PhD University of Oklahoma). Finally, our 2004 doctoral class was carefully selected to bring into our research activities those students with outstanding Masters degrees from leading universities around the world; it is from this elite group that the Faculty will select and nurture the next generation of education scholars.
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