University of Pretoria
"Revitalising learning facilitation in Mathematics to promote learners’ achievement and understanding and help them find sustainable, decent work"
The changing social arrangement of work presents a challenge not only to workers, but also to Mathematics and career counselling theorists, researchers, scholars, and practitioners. Changes in the occupational world (brought about by technological advances and the need to disseminate information across the globe faster and more efficiently) are alienating workers and leaving them insecure and uncertain. Many workers are traumatised by this struggle, and struggle to adapt to the extent that they feel that work and life have little meaning and purpose. Given the value of Mathematics as the most important ‘gateway subject’, re-planning and re-designing learning facilitation in this subject is essential to bolster learner attainment in Mathematics and promote learners’ chance to adapt, to find sustainable, decent work, and to design successful lives.
The professions of Mathematics and career counselling are obliged to come up with an innovative response to current challenges. A shift in emphasis is needed from trying to identify ways to ‘improve’ the teaching of and achievement in Mathematics to rethinking existing theories and practice, and disrupting obsolete theories and practices. An innovative, visionary approach, needed to enable the field of teaching and learning in Mathematics to re-invent itself and remain relevant in today’s world of work, will be explicated.
The time to awaken Sleeping Beauty has come.
Jacobus G. (Kobus) Maree
Prof. Maree is a Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Pretoria. His main research interests are career counseling, career construction (counseling), life design (counseling), emotional-social intelligence and social responsibility, and learning facilitation in mathematics. He links research results to appropriate career choices and to life designing. Past editor of the South African Journal of Psychology, managing editor of Gifted Education International, executive editor of the SA Journal of Science and Technology and a member of several national and international bodies, he has recived multiple awards for his research endeavours. He was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal for Teaching and Learning from the University of Pretoria in 2010 and has been nominated successfully as an Exceptional Academic Achiever on four consecutive occasions (2003-2016). He has a B1 rating from the NRF.
Prof. Maree has authored or coauthored 90 peerreviewed articles and 61 books/ book chapters on career counselling and related topics since 2008. In the same period, he supervised 30 doctoral theses and Master’s dissertations and read keynote papers at 20+ international and at 20+ national conferences. Over the past five years, he has spent a lot of time abroad. For instance, he accepted invitations to spend time as a visiting professor at various universities where he presented workshops on, e.g., contemporary developments in career counselling, article writing, and research methodology. Prof. Maree was awarded a fellowship of the IAAP at the ICAP Conference in Paris in July, 2014.