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You are invited to attend the third quarterly TLA (Teaching-Learning, and Assessment) seminar of 2024, offered by the Division for Learning and Teaching Enhancement:

Speaker:  Prof. Nicola Plastow (Division of Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences) (SU Teaching Fellow)

Topic:  Opportunity, meaning, and choice: Proposing a pedagogy of occupational justice

Date:  15 August 2024

Time:  13:00-14:00

Place:  MS Teams: Click here to join the meeting

 
Summary of seminar

Occupational justice is a form of social justice in which people experience equity and fairness in relation to resources and opportunities for participation, in a wide range of healthy and meaningful occupations. Experiencing occupational justice means having the opportunities and resources for doing, being, belonging and becoming (Mthembu, 2021).

At Stellenbosch University, our vision for a transformative learning experience means that “doing and being" a student enables students to “become" graduates, and members of a profession. Louw (2023) argues that we can co-create opportunities for transformative learning that promote occupational justice in health sciences education. However, in her article “Advancing a social justice agenda in health professions education", Jacobs (2020) argues that in health professions education, we need to develop students who are clinically competent and critically conscious of the contexts in which they work, so that they can become agents of change.

In this seminar, I will propose a pedagogy of occupational justice that aims to enable occupational justice for students and healthcare service users. Using an example of one service-learning site in Bishop Lavis, I will illustrate how we can enable students to do, be, become and belong; while simultaneously enabling access to resources and opportunities for meaningful participation for people who may be experiencing various forms of occupational injustice.

Biography of the speaker

Nicola Plastow is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator in the Division of Occupational Therapy in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University. She is an SU Distinguished Teacher, a fellow of the Stellenbosch University Research and Innovation Strategic Excellence (SUNRISE) program, and the only academic at SU to be awarded two teaching fellowships. Her current teaching fellowship focuses on the use of service learning to promote social participation and occupational justice for older people in Bishop Lavis, Cape Town.

More information about the seminar is available from Dr Karin Cattell-Holden at kcattell@sun.ac.za .

References

1. Jacobs, C. (2020). Advancing a social justice agenda in health professions education. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 8(2).
2. Louw, H. (2023). A Co-constructed Strategic Framework for Transformative Learning that Promotes Occupational Justice in Health Science Education at a Higher Education Institution in Namibia: A Participatory Action Research. Stellenbosch University PhD Protocol. Supervisors: Lana van Niekerk, Quenton Wessels, Nicola Plastow.
3. Mthembu, Thuli G. (2021). A Commentary of Occupational Justice and Occupation-based Community Development Frameworks for Social Transformation: The Marikana Event. South African Journal of Occupational Therapy, 51(1), 72-75. https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2310-3833/2021a10

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