It is with much sadness that the SRHE community notes the passing of Brenda Leibowitz, a South African scholar in academic development and higher education. Her recent work on academic staff development features twice in the SRHE/Routledge book series; first, a chapter in the edited 2016 book “Researching Higher Education: International perspectives on theory, policy and practice”, and then, with Vivienne Bozalek and Peter Kahn, a 2017 book “Theorising learning to teach in higher education”. She also presented her work at the SRHE annual conference and will be known to many in the community for her engagement across a wide range of higher education conferences in South Africa and abroad.
Brenda’s engaged scholarship over nearly 30 years was strongly rooted in her activist commitment to recognizing a democratic and transformed South Africa through education and higher education. She began teaching in secondary schools designated for ‘coloured’ pupils and this sharpened sense both of the inequities of apartheid and the possibilities in education led to a most formative stint in the Academic Development Centre at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where her practice and emerging scholarship focused on language issues in the university. She followed this with a period of curriculum work as a Director in the national Department of Education, completing a PhD from the University of Sheffield, and moved from here to nearly a decade directing the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Stellenbosch University. Here her work moved from a focus on student development to staff development, bringing with it a critical edge and an exceptionally strong commitment to collaboration and empowerment. In 2014 her scholarship was noted with the appointment to a chair in Teaching and Learning at the University of Johannesburg (and more recently, with the award of an National Research Foundation (NRF) funded South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) position on Post School Education and Training).
Brenda was one of the Principal Investigators on an ESRC Newton/NRF funded project entitled “Southern African Rurality in Higher Education” (SARiHE), which began in 2016 and will complete work in 2019. Brenda’s long-term interest in social justice in higher education especially for students from rural backgrounds in South Africa helped to secure funding for this project. The Southern African University Learning and Teaching (SAULT) forum, which she helped to build, has also been important in this project and has facilitated the involvement of academics and academic developers from across nine Southern African countries.
Brenda was absolutely prolific in her deep scholarship, and pulled many others along in her wake. She published across national and international journals, book chapters and books. A flavour of the evolution of her distinctive scholarship can be seen in the perusal of some of her article titles that drew on direct quotes from her research participants:
* “Why now after all these years you want to listen to me?” Using journals in teaching history at a South African university. The History Teacher, 1996
* “Communities isn’t just about trees and shops”: Students from two South African universities engage in dialogue about ‘community’ and ‘community work’. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 2008
* What’s Inside the Suitcases? An investigation into the powerful resources students and lecturers bring to teaching and learning. Higher Education Research and Development, 2009
* “Ah, but the whiteys love to talk about themselves”: Discomfort as a pedagogy for change. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 2010
* “It’s been a wonderful life”: Accounts of the interplay between structure and agency by “good” university teachers. Higher Education, 2012
The title of her most recent paper, with colleague Vivienne Bozalek, ‘Toward a Slow scholarship of teaching and learning in the South’ is also revealing. ‘Slow scholarship’ foregrounds qualities such as thoughtfulness, attentiveness, the valuing of relationships, creativity, and depth of engagement – qualities that embody so well Brenda’s own scholarship and her way of being in the world.
In her research, Brenda leaves an extraordinary written record of scholarship; however, more importantly, there are the many, many lives that this extraordinary educator and scholar touched and influenced deeply. Brenda had an openness and generosity of spirit that allowed her to traverse boundaries and bring together collaborative teams across all the usual divisions of discipline, social background and institutional type. She had a solid compass that never deviated from its pointing towards the long arc of social justice, but she accomplished all she did with notable humility and serious interest in others and their educational and research journeys.
The period of late apartheid bred a distinctive sort of higher education researcher, many of these working in academic development at UWC in the 1990s. In this group of hugely influential higher education scholars, including Chrissie Boughey and Melanie Walker, Brenda made a distinctive and important contribution, cut much too short by her cancer diagnosis. We will remember her with love and admiration.
Jenni Case, Lisa Lucas and Delia Marshall