A widely circulated quote by Caroline Leaf goes: “Your purpose is not the thing you do. It is the thing that happens in others when you do what you do”. In sharing this reflection of my journey since earning the VC Award in 2021 for “The Most Promising Young Teacher of the Year”, it feels right and poignant to open with the Leaf quote. I have long loved teaching and learning. Coming from a family of teachers - “umama” (my mother) and “umalume” (my uncle) - were teachers and school principals respectively. My early formative years centred on often watching my mother prepare for her lessons and/or be in some education and schooling setting. As a treat, she would often involve me: asking my little boy self to cut, staple, colour, write and assist in whatever way she felt appropriate to ensure I didn’t feel neglected as she went on with her work and lesson preparations. Along with the women and community in my area of birth, Lady Frere in the rural Eastern Cape, they built the first pre-primary school in the area, which exists to this day and has outlived their time in the formal South African education system. Having read more now in critical pedagogy studies, I have the language to share as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and other critical educators have written that my mother, uncle and my community understood education as a community resource. Like any resource, it had to be tended to, nurtured, and supported in order to ensure its perpetual continuation. Picture: me with my mother at my pre-school graduation. In this tradition of my mother, uncle and community: as a resource to the University of Johannesburg communities, I have felt supported, tended to and nurtured to keep growing. In my growth, I have been able to surrogate many other people’s dreams. In using my personhood in its embodied form, my life has not only soared on its own through my career accolades as more awards and recognitions, but I have further co-created with colleagues, students at UJ and elsewhere an environment that encourages nurturing, thriving and soaring in our students and staff. Although this short reflection is about how my life has progressed since 2021, the true joy and success has come from seeing how our students and colleagues have equally thrived. As such, in the true transformative potential of education - it has been less about my own individual self and everything to do with how we have collectively grown as colleagues, students and wider anthropological and development studies communities. Of the major milestones since the VC award has been my promotion to Associate Professor and entering into university management as the Head of Department for Anthropology and Development Studies at UJ (2025-2027). I have further entered formal student support services at UJ through my 94 A Journey of Innovation
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