Dr Gretha Steenkamp, one of the top lecturers of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, was recently awarded a Teaching Fellowship from Stellenbosch University (SU).
The Fellowship will allow her to implement the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants' (SAICA) new CA2025 competency framework (CA2025 CF) to the School of Accountancy's SAICA-accredited BAcc, BAccHons and postgraduate diploma programmes.
The CA2025 competency framework places greater emphasis on the professional values and attitudes that chartered accountants should have as well as enabling competencies or acumens such as critical and integrated thinking and digital acumen that they require.
The new competency framework will apply to undergraduate students from 2021 and to postgraduate students from 2023/24.
According to Steenkamp, implementing the changes required by the CA2025 CF to the SAICA-accredited programmes, is a strategic priority for the School of Accountancy.
“The new CA2025 CF requires large-scale changes to teaching and learning within the SAICA-accredited programmes at the School. The Teaching Fellowship will help me to spend substantial time on the project and to be scholarly, instead of merely practical about it," she said.
During her Fellowship she aims to:
- Draft a plan for the School of Accountancy (by October 2021) to implement the changes necessitated by the CA2025 CF. This plan will be presented to SAICA and include innovative redesign of teaching and learning materials and assessments which will embed the desired 'graduate attributes' into the programmes;
- Encourage colleagues to initiate some preliminary changes to teaching and learning materials and approaches in 2021 and to document its effectiveness. Then arrange colloquia where colleagues share their innovative ideas and practices (and how they embed the CA2025 requirements) – to facilitate a bottom-up approach to innovation and to create a safe place of knowledge sharing;
- Upskill lecturers to enable them to understand the changes needed and equip them with the tools required to be innovative in this regard;
- Identify champions within the School for each of the values and acumens in the CA2025 CF. These champions should have an natural interest in ensuring that the specific value or acumen be embedded within the curriculum and teaching practices;
- Create a checklist for each of the values and acumens. This checklist should be employed by lecturers seeking to integrate the values and acumens when teaching technical subjects; and
- Create a repository for the values and acumens for all students of the School of Accountancy.
Steenkamp, foresees two major research contributions emanating from the Teaching Fellowship.“The one will focus on the process of embedding the CA2025 CF into the curriculum and teaching practices of the School of Accountancy, and the other on critical thinking skills, specifically in Financial Accounting," she said.
Steenkamp, who was named as one of the Faculty's top online lecturers of 2020, was lauded by Prof Ronel du Preez, Vice-Dean (Learning and Teaching), who echoed the sentiments expressed by SU's Centre for Teaching and Learning.
“The long-term impact of the project on the School of Accountancy and the larger SU community is evident and includes the creation of a new Financial Accounting body of knowledge that would be to the benefit of all role-players.
“In Dr Steenkamp's proposal she showed how the leadership roles she has already occupied in the School of Accountancy will feed into the fellowship project. She clearly has the required leadership experience with curriculum renewal, teaching and assistance to colleagues to successfully complete this project," Prof Du Preez said.
