The preparation for a career in education and training cuts into all three categories of knowledge: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor, and all four dimensions of competence. The implication is that effective teaching requires not only theoretical knowledge, but also practical abilities that include a range of instructional skills and techniques. The workbook therefore contains a number of activities intended to promote professional competence. The types of activities vary: they are used to stimulate thinking (promoting reflective practice), and provide guidance in the application of knowledge, as well as developing certain instructional skills. Note that the amount of activities included here is only scratching the surface; different teaching matters should receive priority in the continuous professional development (CPD) of academic staff.

Readers may perceive some of the activities as challenging, or find it difficult to relate to that, owing to being novices in higher education teaching and learning. In view of this, the reading includes comments on each activity (Activity solutions), as well as comments on the reflection activities, as a further attempt at supporting and enhancing the professional development of novice teachers.

The workbook includes reading on aspects of resource design for learning enhancement. Since this particular topic involves many technical aspects, it is presented separately from the content in the textbook, and is regarded as an enrichment opportunity.

Aslam Fataar, one of South Africa’s few educational sociologists working with ethnographic methods, captures the complex interactions and dynamics between social life, school processes and youth subjectivity in townships in the Western Cape. His work with concepts of mobilities and space is enormously generative, providing a way for teachers, principals, communities and policy makers to engage with the ?complex ecologies? of young people’s learning in urban schools.

As an astute policy analyst, he also well knows the systemic barriers in the way of achieving this. The last chapter, on possibilities for pedagogical justice at the site of the school, considers how disengaged students might re-engage through leveraging explicit pedagogic connections between their lifeworlds and school practices. Acknowledging that pedagogy cannot be the only means for revitalising schooling, the author nevertheless insists that marginalised young people’s consent needs to be won by schools that make use of, rather than ignore, their strengths, knowledges and aspirations. The approach to the troubled question of youth and subjectivity is enlightening, and vital to understanding the post-apartheid city and school. The book fills a much-needed gap in educational sociology in South Africa.

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Its November 2001. A university in dire straits, financially bankrupt burdening a debt in excess of R100-million, a disillusioned and demoralised staff complement still reeling from the trauma of retrenchments, coupled with an academic project facing collapse as student numbers dwindle by a third to less than 10 000. Is there a future for such an institution, described by some as a Obasket caseO with very bleak prospects of survival? This was the landscape that confronted the newly-appointed Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the University of the Western Cape.

Fast forward to December 2014. The CEO retires from office, bestowing upon his successor a financially sound institution with a flourishing academic project, recording unprecedented achievements, enriching the lives of more than 20 000 students, and widely acknowledged as a research-led university.E

This book narrates how visionary leadership with the steadfast belief that your past does not determine your future, galvanised an entire organisation into believing that a better outcome was indeed achievable, and the will to move forward as a collective with a redefined purpose and commitment to achieve that which was once deemed impossible.

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