Biographies and Geographies: Who Teaches Matters
Reimagining Knowledge, Belonging and the University
Professor Kasturi Behari-Leak
In her inaugural lecture, Professor Behari-Leak positions academic staff development and professional development as a critical site of institutional and sectoral transformation.
Far from being support work on the margins, she argues it is a scholarly field that advances epistemic justice, pedagogical agency, curriculum change, and decolonial thought. She reflects on the intellectual, professional, relational, and deeply personal journey that has shaped her work in higher education development as an activist–scholar–practitioner and institutional leader.
As future-oriented work, she re-positions academic staff development as central to how universities cultivate the conditions to consciously shape humane, convivial, socially responsive, and intellectually vibrant institutions.
Watch Prof Behari-Leak’s Inaugural Lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzR-m8m5UC8&t=12s
Read the UCT News Article here: https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2026-05-29-rituals-re-membering-and-re-imagining
Critical access to higher education: A multimodal approach to academic literacies
Professor Arlene Archer
It is important to recognize the potentials for inclusion and exclusion carried by language and writing, especially in South Africa where unequal educational systems still prevail. This inaugural lecture looks at ways of enabling student access to writing and dominant forms of assessment in Higher Education.
As the head of the Writing Centre for the past 26 years Professor Archer has focused on the negotiation between students’ lifeworlds and the new ideas and genres they encounter at university.
To this end, her research identifies the ways in which a range of students’ resources can be harnessed to engage with dominant practices. She argues that recognition of students’ resources is key to a transformative agenda in Higher Education where decontextualized models of student support persist and students continue to be constructed as ‘lacking’ in some way.
Theory from the Past, Theory for the Future: Rethinking Health Professions in Context
Professor Francois Cilliers
It is often said that assessment drives learning, but how does this happen? And if assessment drives learning, what drives assessment? Likewise, staff development as a field has expanded significantly, yet do we truly understand when and why academics integrate what they learn into their teaching and assessment practices? How can theory help us uncover the dynamics at play?
This lecture takes us on a journey through the development and application of research and theory in health professions education, showing how conceptual models—such as those developed in the speaker’s own research—can illuminate complex and often overlooked mechanisms in assessment and academic development. The lecture will also examine the dominance of health professions education research from the global North, asking how educators in South Africa can move beyond uncritical adoption of ideas developed elsewhere.
Drawing on insights from implementation science, the lecture proposes a theorised approach to engaging with global research in ways that serve local needs and realities. By reconsidering theory from the past and shaping theory for the future, this lecture offers a vision for health professions education that is both educationally sound and contextually just.
Read the UCT News Article here: https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2025-04-14-why-south-africa-needs-its-own-educational-playbook