Two CPUT professors have made the institution proud by having their ratings improved by the National Research Foundation (NRF).
Prof Maureen Robinson, Dean of the Education and Social Sciences Faculty, has improved from a C3 to a C2 rating while Prof Chris Winberg of Applied Linguistics’ rating has improved from an L to a C2.
According to NRF criteria, the C rating is for scholars who are considered to have produced a body of quality work which has coherence and attests to ongoing engagement with the field, and who have demonstrated the ability to conceptualise problems and apply research methods to investigating them.
“A C3 rating is awarded when most reviewers feel the candidate meets these criteria, whereas a C2 rating indicates that all reviewers agree on this,” said Prof Robinson.
She said the reviewers were impressed with the way in which her “research outputs demonstrate a critically reflective engagement with the practices of teacher education and action research.
This conclusion was based on items published over the last seven years in national and international publications”.
Prof Robinson said reviewers suggested ways to broaden this work theoretically and comparatively, so that people in South Africa, as one reviewer reportedly put it, “could see their work and its significance in a wider context and continue to speak to ethically infused social research that can build scholarly networks across multiple countries.”
Prof Winberg on the other hand has been the leader of the Work-Integrated Learning Research Unit (WILRU) since 2002. WILRU is an NRF-funded unit that studies the relationship between higher education and workplaces.
“I have initiated several research projects that study the effect of different kinds of curricular, teaching, learning and assessment practices on students’ work readiness, professionalism, and so on. I’ve published around 30 articles in accredited journals, and graduated several Masters and Doctoral candidates since the founding of WILRU,” said Prof Winberg.
Prof Winberg feels that she is researching an area that is important for the development and identity of universities of technology.
“As an institution we have traditionally had very close ties with the industries that we prepare students for. As the world of work is changing very rapidly, it is important for us to know about these changes and to implement research-based interventions to address the changing contexts of work,” she said.
She mentioned that there are not many rated researchers in applied linguistics, so she is happy to contribute knowledge to the field. She recently convened the joint South African Applied Linguistics Association (SAALA) and Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (LSSA) conference, and was elected chairperson of SAALA for a two year term of office.
Prof Winberg said she was “particularly interested in relationships between language and discourse practices in higher education and in workplaces – as well as how they can be more productively aligned.
Prof Robinson is currently finalising four articles. These are on teacher development in South Africa and Namibia, professional learning communities as an approach to teacher development, teacher education practices in three Southern and East African countries, and the impact of the changing qualifications structure on teachers’ sense of themselves.
She said she enjoys working collaboratively, as this increases opportunities to share expertise and insights. Some of these articles are therefore co-authored by two colleagues in the Faculty, Melanie Sadeck and Chiwimbiso Kwenda, as well as a recent Fulbright visitor, Prof Peter Hewson.
Prof Robinson’s own long-term agenda is to establish a Chair in Teacher Education in the Faculty, so that the excellent work of her colleagues can be better supported and profiled.
Photograph: Prof Maureen Robinson, Prof Chris Winberg
Written by CPUT News
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