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SECTION
1
Origins of The University of Fort Hare/The Open University partnership
Alice
In 2004 the new South Africa is celebrating its tenth birthday. The little
town of Alice and the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape, neighbours
to rural communities such as Dongwe, as much as anywhere, signify the
extraordinary history of that rebirth. It was here in the rolling landscape
of the Eastern Cape that the British built their largest South African
stronghold as they battled for land and power against the Xhosa people.
It was here in 1916 that Scottish missionaries established a teacher training
institution which soon became the University of Fort Hare, the first University
for black Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars and future leaders
came from all over the continent, and the University provided the intellectual
foundation for South Africa’s Freedom Movement. Here Professor Z
K Matthews proposed the 1956 Congress of the People leading to the adoption
of the Freedom Charter of the African National Congress (ANC). Nelson
Mandela took his first degree here, as did Robert Sobukwe, founder of
the Pan African Congress. The first black Zimbabwean medical doctor, Ticofa
Samuel Parirenyatwa and the historian, novelist and politician Stanlake
Samkange were among the many non-south Africans who spent formative years
at Fort Hare. Today the University of Fort Hare is expanding with major
new centres in the nearby city of East London.
Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes, a new city in the UK as far from London (60 kms) as Fort
Hare is from East London, is the base for the UK’s Open University.
Set up by Royal Charter in 1969, The Open University had a very different
kind of struggle to gain legitimacy. First called The University of the
Air, it aimed to provide a second chance of higher education to the millions
of people excluded from, what was then, a highly elitist University system.
And how the ‘establishment’ huffed and puffed against the
idea. The Times in 1969 opined that it was `Better to support those university
adult education departments which have shown themselves competent.’
The first Vice-Chancellor of The Open University, Walter Perry, was resolute
in his intentions however:
“Amongst those whom the educational institutions have failed, there
are many who are highly intelligent and who would undoubtedly benefit
from the experience of Higher Education if given the chance…We should
extend the opportunity to all classes of the population as a positive
step towards replacing the elitist system that has been prevalent in Britiain
for many years.”
First early days of partnership
This first phase of university to university co-operation was strongly
focussed on creating an innovative approach to training teachers. The
Open University had pioneered an award winning teacher education programme
in the 1990s and the model, with a strong emphasis on improving classroom
practice, seemed highly appropriate for versioning to Fort Hare needs.
The challenge, in the Eastern Cape region, was acute. Over 130,000 unqualified
or underqualified teachers worked in the schools and any attempt to promote
educational opportunity required a better skilled teaching force.
Over the period 1995–2000 Fort Hare and The Open University worked
together to establish a wholly new approach to upgrading teachers’
qualifications, the features of which included:
• the scheme was school based, teachers carried on teaching their
classes and the course materials provided them with class based activities
that focussed on raising achievement and improving practice;
• the materials design, borrowing from some of the OU experience
and applying it to the Easter Cape Province, were imaginative and presented
to a quality standard new to South Africa;
• the programme provided local support and incorporated a partnership
between the University of Fort Hare and the Provincial governments Department
of Education;
• the curriculum was school and community focussed; the role of
teachers as leaders in rural communities was recognised and developed.
Over thirty staff from Fort Hare and The Open University have worked collaboratively
through study visits, joint evaluations and workshops in building and
revising the programme aimed at primary and secondary teachers. A range
of sources of finance supported the exchanges including:
• The Open Society Foundation
• The British Council Higher Education links programme
• The Kellogg Foundation.
The benefits to the teachers of the Eastern Cape are clear, but the partnership
also created the basis for new thinking within Fort Hare and within The
Open University. Fort Hare, for example, began to embrace the idea of
using new technologies and the distributed learning model of the Open
University as a key component of its plans to become a major regional
focus for higher education in the Eastern Cape. The Open University brought
back some of the community focussed ideas to the development of its UK
based programme. This important first phase of co-operation laid the foundation
for a new phase of co-operation around the Digital Education Enhancement
Project (DEEP).
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