Executive Dean of CEDU, Prof KP Dzvimbo
As 2012 draws to a close, I would like to wish you a festive season filled with love, goodwill and peace. May you and your family experience a well deserved rest and travel safely. Looking back on 2012, the College of Education (CEDU) has achieved a great deal. The first highlight was the birth and consolidation of the new College. The second was the restructuring and allocation of staff to ten new departments. A discipline based approach was followed to structure the way the College operates. The efforts at reforming the curriculum, otherwise called the Professional Qualifications Mix (PQM), are progressing well. This change is necessary so that we can meet the needs of South African schools through the education of a professional teacher who has been exposed to their subject content, pedagogical content and has knowledge of our classroom contexts in South Africa.
Excellent efforts have been made by everyone in the College to improve the research output and productivity so that we can make the curriculum reform and teaching relevant. Another highlight was the establishment of the Office of Research and Graduate Studies which has succeeded in streamlining the way in which we manage the education and supervision of our M&D students. Our community engagement project, with a focus on five hundred schools in five provinces, is a response to the clarion call from our government to assist with underperforming schools. Our academic citizenship activities are many, with involvement not only at Unisa, but also geared to assist our sister institutions in the region and in eastern and western parts of Africa.
An increased number of academics have attended local and international conferences where they have presented various papers based on applied and basic research in line with the multi-, intra- and trans-disciplinary approaches to the study of Education. Finally, we are progressing well with the realisation of our vision to re-imagine the teaching, learning, study and research of education as a discipline so that we can continue to contribute to the education of a professional teacher, policy maker and educational practitioner in general in South Africa, on the continent and beyond.
Lastly, I wish to thank all staff members of the College of Education and our colleagues in the greater Unisa, who each, in their own way, have worked hard towards achieving the highlights of 2012. May God bless all of you.
The Executive Dean of CEDU, Prof KP Dzvimbo
