The third colloquium on ‘Schools as Enabling Spaces’ (SES), took place on the 6th and 7th September at Farm Inn, Pretoria. The event was co-hosted by the Faculty of Education, University of South Africa (UNISA), and Centre for the Study of Resilience (CSR), University of Pretoria (UP), with the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) as funders. 

 

The SES Research Group is a collaboration between local and international researchers with an interest in generating integrated, evidence-based knowledge that demonstrates processes that enable schools in challenging settings to support learning, teaching and wellbeing. The SES research group is cognisant of pathways to impact for research. Consequently, the group favours collaboration with relevant policymakers in education, social development and health; non-governmental organisations in related sectors; learners; families; teachers, principals and school governing bodies; as well as the business sector.

 

From a transformation position, this group recognises that, given high structural disparity and inequality in South Africa, quality and equity in education requires knowledge generated from: coordinated research by multiple researchers, with diverse lenses and variability in regional representation. SES is inclusive of a range of perspectives on the central issue of evidence-based support for teachers, learners and leadership that enable learning, teaching and development in challenged education settings (including, but not exclusive to, social context and schooling; learning, instruction and curriculum; pathways to resilience in schools; and policy, leadership and governance in schools) (Ebersöhn, 2016)

 

The colloquium aimed to answer the core question: ‘How have we been creating knowledge on enabling/supporting positive outcomes [learning, teaching, developmental] in schools in challenging contexts?’ The rationale for the above was to galvanise focused future research on SES. The objectives of the colloquium were to:

i. identity what key constructs/concepts are in published studies, and how they were measured (map constructs and measures in mostly alone-standing studies);

ii. integrate and compare what we know based on (i).

 

Participants were grouped into four groups according to the four thematic trends that have been identified:

 

The outcome of the colloquium can be summarized as follow:

 

The Colloquium was attended by representatives from universities across the country, namely the University of South Africa (UNISA), University of Pretoria (UP), University of Johannesburg (UJ), University of Limpopo (UL), North West University (NWU), and University of the Free State (UFS). A fourth SES colloquium is planned for 2018.