Culture is a critical component of any learning environment, and the era of teaching and learning as a one-way process is certainly fading away as the Central University of Technology, Free State (CUT) is navigating towards building an effective and conducive collaborative learning approach for its students. On 02 October 2019, the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology hosted a teaching culture seminar to create a platform for academics to come up with effective ways of creating a teaching culture within the faculty.

Keynote speaker, Prof. Yusuf Waghid, a distinguished Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Stellenbosch University shared his presentation titled “Cultivating a scholarship of teaching; Moving towards encounters: on caring, iterations and hospitality.”

When unpacking his philosophy on teaching culture, Prof. Waghid mentioned the three interconnected notions namely; caring, iterations and hospitality. In his argument, he stated that if any culture of teaching were to occur plausibly in institutions of higher education, it cannot be a lack of attention to the duty of pursuing ideas such as a caring teacher; iterative teaching and teaching as hospitality.

His elaboration on the three notions was that teachers should encourage the capabilities of students in order to stimulate them to act, investigate, explore, develop new ideas and engage autonomously. “To be a caring teacher, one must be willing to create opportunities for students to exercise their equal intelligence and thus come to speech. Teachers’ should present justifications for their truth claims and in turn, students listen and then begin to debate publicly what they have learnt. In this sense, their learning does not happen without engagement. When teachers remain open to the unexpected, the good things come out of it.”

Among the presenters was Prof. Isaac Ntshoe who presented on disciplinary styles and the scholarship for teaching and learning in the south narratives. Dr Rosaline Sebolao presented on influencing teaching culture for enhanced student success through academic employees development and Prof. James Swart on fostering a teaching culture through the scholarship of teaching and learning. He stated that a teaching culture can be influenced by the scholarship of teaching and learning and one way of achieving it is by investigating one’s teaching practice, making it public and seeing where you can improve.

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From left: Prof. Isaac Ntshoe, Head of Scholarship for Teaching and Learning  unit; Prof. James Swart, Associate Professor in Electric, Electronic and Computer Engineering; Dr Rosaline Sebolao, Manager of Special Projects at the Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning; Prof. Yusuf Waghid, guest speaker and professor of Education Philosophy at Stellenbosch University; and Prof. Dillip Das, Professor in Civil Engineering.