Educators From South Africa

"I’m a paleontologist, and a biologist. The particular area that I work in is called paleobiology. I use my understanding of bone structures of modern animals to make extrapolations to the fossil record."

"So we’ve had a youth centre down in Masiphumelele for years. But we realised that we were missing young men aged between 17 and 29. So we have built a health park alongside the youth centre, basically it’s a gym with all the latest equipment."

"So the message now is: ‘get ripped, get prepped.’ You know, if you want to look gorgeous, if you wanna be attractive, build your muscles, but have a healthy penis too."

"When fossils are found, people try to identify and understand the fossil itself. But my research goes beyond that. I want to try and understand something about the animal when it was living — how long did it take to grow, what kind of factors affected its growth, did it have any disease, was it male or female."

"To be honest, I’m 62, so I kind of feel like my career is – with the lens that the glass is half full – that I am at a career summit somehow. I suppose I’ve been quite reflective in thinking what has been achieved and what still needs to be done."

"And in the middle of the health park, we still have the sexual reproductive health clinic"

"The project I was involved in, in northern South Africa, looked at the effectiveness of reactive or targeted IRS (responding only when there was a malaria case) versus proactive IRS (the standard IRS blanket spraying program carried out at the beginning of the season) and how much each cost per annum."

"My second book is called . This book is about is the history of life on earth from a perspective of the African continent. It’s like a big picture story. The book was aimed at the high school level but can also be enjoyed equally by adults.One of my very big interests is to promote science through different platforms."

"Kids have so much information about the prehistoric world, it is unreal. They know the geological time, they know about predators and prey and the names of so many dinosaurs."

"I’m constantly looking for new ways to reach people"

"There is an epidemic of obesity now. So we are trying to say to young women: ‘this BMI [Body Mass Index] is going to get you into trouble. What can we do, sister? How can we help you? What’s your diet? Can we advise around the dietary side?’ You know, gentle engagement around non-communicable diseases"

"We need really curious leaders"

"because then you don’t make assumptions, you don’t take diversity views for granted."

"I moved into teaching – rather than set out to teach, or work in education. When I began my working career as a secondary mathematics teacher, I had no intention of becoming an academic and researcher in education. My first post was in a so-called ‘coloured’ school in Cape Town, a school with a strong political identity tied to the Unity Movement."

"Psychology was my second major – this also wasn’t in my original plan – I had thought I would do Applied Maths, but I enjoyed Psychology in first year and so continued, and then enjoyed work on child development, learning and so on."

"Once you get a big role, that's the starting line, not the finishing line. So it's really, how do you understand what the need is from your organization and in society?"

"I always loved mathematics, and was inspired by particular teachers in both primary and secondary schools, and so I went to University to study mathematics."

"If you don't know as a leader what your license to operate is from society, then you've got tunnel vision. So it's understanding the context, what society expects, what the organization needs, and having to adapt yourself and evolve.” Asked about the way forward"

"I gave “extra mathematics lessons” while I was doing my degree and enjoyed this (as well as earning quite well from it) and so went on from a B Sc to do my professional teaching diploma."

"I am involved in collaborative research projects with Yale University, Edinburgh University and the University of Liverpool among others which variously work on fire-grazer interactions, inter-continental savanna comparisons, the importance of land-atmosphere feedbacks, and pursuing a global theory of fire."

"I work on understanding the dynamics of savanna ecosystems in the context of global change. My work integrates field ecological data, remote sensing, modelling, and biogeochemistry."

"My research helps create the landscapes and environments that support us"

"For me it was worth trying out a few different things until I found what I liked. Even though it might have seemed undirected at the time, I ended up with some really useful skills"

"Being creative is a huge part of being a good scientist. You need to find new ways to look at old problems and you must be able to design experiments that reveal new information"

"Interesting as I think about this, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation had an immense effect on me. I happened to read this while I was working on my PhD, and it provided a different gaze on what it meant to learn and live in a language that was not your mother tongue, or as she called it, the language of her heart and emotions. I have since read much of her work, the most powerful of which was After Such Knowledge: Meditations on the Holocaust. The latter, a philosophical and social commentary rather than an academic text, has contributed significantly to my understanding of the social world, as well as some of my own location in history."

"Most influential at the start of my academic career was Lev Vygotsky’s work: Mind in Society and Thought and Language. As a mathematics education researcher I am always working between educational theory and literature in mathematics education. With my early work on teaching mathematics in multilingual classrooms, David Pimm’s book Speaking Mathematically was pivotal in turning my attention to mathematical language more generally. More recently, with my interest in mathematical knowledge in and for teaching and particularly what is produced as mathematics in teacher education practice, influential resources are Basil Bernstein’s Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, and Anna Sfard’s Thinking as Communicating and then the extensive work done by Deborah Ball in the past decade. I could go on, as I enjoy reading, and spend time relaxing with whodunnit."

"In other words, a scientist needs vision."

"You have to be vulnerable. You have to recognize you don't know the answers. Good ideas can come from anywhere"

"Broadly my time is shared between supporting the professional development work we do in schools, and doing and supporting the research that is linked to this work, with a large proportion of time supporting full time doctoral students in the project. I teach less than I did before. I travel internationally a fair amount, to conferences and for other international work I do."

"I think our whole field of educational research in South Africa is relatively young. There is so much we need to know more about, and from the empirical base of our schools, classrooms and learners. I think the transition years from primary into secondary mathematics what teachers need to know and do to teach across subjects at that level are very poorly understood. This is critical in mathematics where the move to greater abstraction and working with symbolic forms emerges. It is also a critical point where we need to know more about what it means to learn and teach mathematics in a dominant minority but extremely powerful language (English)."

"Young people still care about the problems of the world and are willing to solve them, and they know that having fun is part of life"

"When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over."

"We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable."

"You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work…"

"We all experience longing and magic, but we aren’t always good at knowing when they’re happening to us. Longing and magic don’t go away because we get older or more disappointed with our circumstances and selves."

"We steal; we hoard; we like the sounds of our own voices."

"Novels are the most terrifying of the forms, apart from screenplays (which are basically the haiku of the fiction world, and which is why the good ones are hardly ever written by just one person)."

"Writing is an aptitude. Sometimes you have more time and inclination for it, and sometimes you have children."

"Middle-aged love is so devastating because this time round, you know exactly what’s at stake! Old-aged love is going to knock your thrombosis socks clean off!"

"We all have those roads-in-the-yellow-wood dudes –the unready loves who left us, or we left. Sometimes, in the small, shuddery hours, they come back. I think about them; I’m glad I knew them. Life is long. If you’re lucky."

"It is important for women to be aware of their common lot. It is important for women to stand together and rise together to meet our common enemies—illiteracy, poverty, crime, disease, and stupid, unjust laws that have made women feel so helpless as to be hopeless."

"The archaeology of aging is so interesting – what people think they are allowed to do; what they actually can do."

"Don’t do it. But also: if you want to, you will."

"Let us dig the soil of bitterness, throw in a seed, show love, and see what fruits will grow. Love will not come without forgiving others. Where there was a bloodstain, a beautiful flower must grow."

"Your credibility is built when others speak positively about you. Do the same for them whenever, and wherever, you can."

"Go out of your way to find reasons to amplify the good work women in your organisation and network are doing."

"If you cannot find something positive to say about another woman, say nothing at all."

"Throughout my life, I have had great mentors and sponsors who believed in me, probably more than I believed in myself. They gave me the courage to do what I wanted to do."