Title of presentation: Implementing multilingualism in South African universities: dilemmas and innovations
Title and name of presenter: Prof Mbulungeni Madiba, Dean: Faculty of Education
Short biography of presenter: Prof Mbulungeni Madiba is Dean of the Faculty of Education at SU since September 2019. He has served as the director of the Multilingual Education Project (MEP) in the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) at UCT. He has been deputy dean and acting dean of the CHED a number of times, chaired UCT's Senate Language Committee and served on the UCT Council. Prof Madiba has 30 years' of teaching experience and a wealth of experience in leadership and management. A full professor of Multilingual Education, Prof Madiba holds a DLitt et Phil (Linguistics) degree from the University of South Africa (Unisa). He has also received research fellowships and study awards from a number of higher education institutions abroad, including the universities of Cologne, London (Oppenheimer fellow), Birmingham and Harvard (Mandela fellow). As an established researcher with a C-rating from the National Research Foundation, his main research interests are language planning and policy, with a special focus on multilingual education.
Blurb: Twenty-six years into democracy, South African universities are still faced with many dilemmas in implementing multilingualism in their teaching and learning programmes (SAHRC Report, 2014). These dilemmas are of theoretical/ideological, methodological and practical nature. Some of these dilemmas have been widely exposed by the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Most universities are just not equipped to provide multilingual learning and teaching support materials to students learning remotely from home. The aim of this
presentation is to discuss these dilemmas and show innovative strategies that
have/ can be used to address them in South African universities. Translanguaging
is proposed as an innovative pedagogic strategy to address language policy
implementation challenges identified in this presentation. It will
be argued that translanguaging enables multilingual students to use their full
linguistic repertoires in learning and also bridges the gap between university
language policies and pedagogical practices.
Date and time: 26 May 2020, 12:45 – 13:45
Venue: MS Teams
For more information and for RSVP contact Juanita Layman
jlayman@sun.ac.za
021 808 3717
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