The Faculty of Education, in collaboration with Belgian universities Ghent, Howest and Odisee recently hosted an international symposium in Stellenbosch to discuss the role of language in teaching.
The theme of the two-day symposium was: Language across the Curriculum: A disciplinary literacy approach to meeting the language and literacy needs of a diverse student population. The event was part of a bigger international collaboration between the Faculty and the Flemish Inter-university Council entitled: Training the Teachers of the Future: Language Policy and Literacy at CPUT.
“This project also supports three Masters’ students and one PHD student,” said Dr Candice Livingston, CPUT lecturer and Project leader for the South African team, about the international collaboration. Livingston, together with the organising committee, put together a programme with a variety of sub-themes that included Disciplinary Literacy; Translanguaging in the Curriculum; Teaching language across the curriculum with the use of technology and Language integration in the curriculum.
Prof Piet van Avermaet, the Flemish project leader, presented the opening talk while Dean of Faculty of Education, Prof Thobeka Mda, opened the proceedings. The keynote speakers, who were both from Stellenbosch University, were professors Mbulungeni Madiba, Dean of the Faculty of Education, and Cecilia Jacobs, a Higher Education Professor at the Centre for Health Professions Education.
The plenary speakers were An De Moor, a Belgian language expert in Higher Education at Odisee University of Applied Sciences and CPUT’s Biotechnology Professor, Muhammad Nakhooda.