|
Soweto school principals - and ultimately its schoolchildren - are to benefit from a partnership between UJ and Harvard.
HARVARD University will collaborate with the University of Johannesburg's Soweto campus to establish a leadership institute geared at school principals in the most remote and destitute areas of the township.
The primary aim is to give school principals in Soweto the tools, skills, knowledge and resources to run better schools and thoroughly transform education in the area.
Higher Education and Training minister Blade Nzimande
Drew Faust, the 28th and first female president of Harvard University, and Ihron Rensburg, the vice-chancellor and principal of UJ, announced the plan for the two institutions to collaborate. It has subsequently been endorsed by Blade Nzimande, the minister of higher education and training.
The partnership was announced on 26 November at the Soweto Campus. In her speech, "The capacity to make history", Faust said the partnership would accentuate Harvard's commitment to engage with students, scholars and institutions of higher learning around Africa. Her visit to Soweto was part of a six-day trip to Africa to highlight Harvard's eagerness to build ties with other institutions of higher learning around the continent.
Experience
The collaboration plan will be spearheaded by UJ's Faculty of Education Management and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, which has about 30 years of experience in leadership training. The initiative is a first by a sitting Harvard president.
Faust said her university was pursuing the venture because she viewed school principals in the township as "heroic men and women". "Many like them are the reason [both universities] are working on an initiative for training school principals that could help transform lives and South African education," she explained.
Through the leadership institute, the universities hoped to turn UJ's Soweto Campus into a hub of innovative education for Africa and the rest of the world, Faust noted. "We must ask what we can do now as two institutions with unique and powerful identities to further the pursuit of knowledge and fulfil the promise of a better society [and] to rethink education. Reinvent yourself as it says across UJ's web pages."
The collaboration plan is designed to improve the quality of leadership in Soweto schools and establish a network of principals at Soweto schools. Other plans in the pipeline include a collaboration of faculties to boost business education and to help provide health care in rural areas.
First female president of Harvard University Drew Faust
The Soweto Campus is on Chris Hani Road, near Orlando Dam and the Orlando Cooling Towers, and is a stone's throw from the biggest hospital in the southern hemisphere, Chris Hani Baragwanath. UJ was recently voted the second top university brand in the Sunday Times annual Next Generation brand survey.
Upgrades
Some R400-million is being spent on upgrading the campus, to increase educational facilities and social amenities, and undo the legacies of apartheid.
Welcoming Faust as a partner of the university, Rensburg said the collaboration programme would officially start in 2010. The partnership was a renewal of UJ's social contract with the people of Soweto.
Throwing his weight behind the collaboration as the acting minister of basic education, Nzimande noted that the partnership would go a long way in dealing with the countless challenges faced by South Africa's education system, particularly in Soweto.
He said the novel collaboration would have many positive spinoffs for locals. "This partnership uses the expertise of a world-renowned institution like Harvard University with three decades of teaching and practice in educational leadership in a comprehensive programme targeting a core challenge in our education system with long-term spinoffs."
Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the oldest university in the United States; it was founded in 1636. It is world renowned and has schooled many leaders and politicians. It has several faculties, including graduate schools of business, education, government, dentistry, architecture and landscape design, and public health.
Related stories:
|
