Presentation

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Hello everyone,
Well, today is my last official day in Johannesburg at the Centre for Social Development in Africa. Yesterday was a great day because i was able to give a 2 hour seminar on my work in Ghana and also with the Documents. Some of you may not know exactly why I am here so I will tell you.

My PhD work was in Ghana in 2003 and with Ghanaians we looked at ways to improve social work curriculum in Ghana. Something that was more African in content. Africa has a history of social work coming from the western world and this includes curriculum content. From that research another project arose which was to find conference proceedings from the Association for Social Work Education in Africa conferences from 1970-1990. These were lost documents and few people knew of them in Africa. Their significance is that there is a huge missing gap of information concerning the evolution of social work in Africa and these documents filled in some of that gap. The past three years i have been able to find most of the documents in the States. We have made copies of the documents, over 3,500 pages, and printed them into a 6 volume set, plus CD's and now they are available on-line. Part of my time in Africa is to distribute these documents to different schools of social work in different countries in Africa with the hope that over time African academics, researchers and practitioners will know about them and use them and read them. Part of the seminar yesterday and my speaking in 2 classes over the past 3 weeks is to inform people of the documents and encourage them to read them and integrate them into the classroom, research, and practice. While here I have been able to read some of the documents and also do writing about them. But the most important thing is to build relationships with my social work colleagues here and to get the word out about the documents.

So yesterday I presented my PhD work and the document project. We had around 20 people and we had a good discussion about what is culturally relevant curriculum, particularly in a diverse place such as South Africa with Afrikaans, English, coloured and black South Africans. What was encouraging is that one of the Universities up North has already begun the process of changing their curriculum to be more culturally relevant to their part of the world and this was exciting to hear about. We were all pleased with the discussion and the turnout of interested people.

I am off to Durban tomorrow to meet with colleagues there and continue the work needed to get the documents to all of Africa and will presenting there as well.
Enjoy the pictures.
Linda

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Photos

Seminar
Speaking at the seminar