Engagement in Action

Digital storytelling is a growing movement across the world. Using simple digital tools, it helps people from all walks of life tell their own stories - to heal, to share, to be listened to. Rhodes Community Engagement is part of Common Good First, a global digital network of universities that showcases and connects social innovation projects around the world, and digital storytelling is at the heart of it. In this latest edition of Engagement in Action, hear how RUCE is helping the community make its voices heard.

“If you were to ask in the modern university how much engaged research there is, it would be very, very small. We are living in an era when society is pushing back at universities and saying, ‘for us to see that you are valuable we want to see you take the risk of getting into the messy spaces’.”

Professor Tally Palmer, Director of the Institute of Water Research, won the 2018 VC’s Distinguished Community Engagement Award for her championing of ‘engaged research’ – research that partners with communities and shares knowledge and information, rather than imposes knowledge or extracts information. Instead of giving a lecture, Tally decided to engage and invited the community to a workshop – Makana: Water Works For Everyone. Hear what happened that night in the City Hall and find out more about a new kind of research for the 21st Century.

"If you walk across the stage at graduation and all you have is knowledge, then we have failed you as a university."

Professor Chrissie Boughey retired as Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic and Student Affairs in June 2019. Central to her work at Rhodes was a focus on the integration of community engagement into all aspects of university life, driven by her deep conviction that Rhodes is uniquely placed to create graduates who have acquired much more than just information and skills. In this edition of Engagement in Action, she tells Jayne Morgan about the realisation of her vision of community engagement as a key pillar of what the university has to offer.

"It is better to light a candle than to curse darkness.” Public schooling in Grahamstown is broken. Just kilometers away from some of the most expensive and well-resourced schools in the country, are schools that are crumbling, teachers who are not coping and a system that is failing an entire generation of learners. In his inaugural speech in 2015, Rhodes Vice Chancellor, Dr Sizwe Mabizela, vowed to do something about it. Three years on, and no one could have predicted how much difference his remarkable education initiative would make.

“For many people, technology is not empowering, it's disempowering.“ Clement Simuja arrived at Rhodes from Malawi to do a PhD in Information Systems about “something to do with agriculture“. Then a desperate head teacher from Alexandria arrived in the department asking for help. His school had plenty of computers but no one who knew how to use them. Clement went to see what he could do. It changed his research, it changed his life and the lives of many others. This is a story of technology, inspiration and insight into increasing Africa's chances of a genuine digital revolution.

“Every single human being on this planet lives in a catchment. You are upstream of somebody or downstream of somebody. Water is the great integrating factor.“ Professor Tally Palmer is Director for the Institute for Water Research and founder of the Unilever Centre for Environmental Water Quality. What does she believe we can we do to meet the challenges of quantity, quality and access to water in this country?

Nosiphiwe “Nosi” Ngqwala arrived at Rhodes to do a masters in biochemistry. She became a student volunteer but realised there was no organisation focusing on what she felt was the most important job of all - teaching the next generation of South Africans how to look after their environment. So she founded Children of the Soil to do just that. She now has a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and is a senior lecturer in the Pharmacy Department, but her passion for community building, for youth upliftment and for environmental education is as strong as ever.

Professor Jacqui Akhurst started her career as a teacher, became a school psychologist and then a full-time academic. Starting in KZN, moving to the UK in 2004 (York and York St John Universities) and then to Rhodes in 2015, her research focus has long been community psychology. Through her inspiration and guidance, Rhodes Psychology Department is one of the university's most active - and effective - when it comes to community engagement. In the second edition of the podcast, hear how she has helped create powerful interventions for students and community organisations alike.

People need fresh, healthy food. But growing fresh food needs a reliable source of water in a water scarce country. The Amanzi for Food project – funded by the Water Research Commission (WRC) and led and implemented by the Environmental Learning Research Centre at Rhodes – brings together farmers, extension services, local economic development, agricultural training institutions and agricultural NGOs. They share knowledge and skills around harvesting, storing, and using rainwater to improve food production and to make farming as sustainable as possible. Find out how it works in this first edition of ‘Engagement in Action’ and how it benefits every single person involved – from subsistence farmers to academics.