The Durban University of Technology’s Centre for Excellence, Learning and Teaching (CELT) hosted a Higher Education numeracy symposium on 31 August 2015 at the DUT hotel school in Durban.

The theme of the symposium highlighted that Numeracy in higher education is complex – and is based on multiple practices that are particular to higher education and to specific professions or disciplines. The lack of appropriate numeracy practices can hinder students’ access to the materials of various disciplines and thereby, impact on student success.

The aim of the symposium was to  initiate  conversations  on the complexities  of higher education  numeracy  and how it is differs from other  ways of being numerate, to explore ways of designing and implementing a curricula that foster the development of numeracy practices, to establish the levels of numeracy  competences of students entering the university, to identify the numeracy demands of the curriculum and to embed the development of appropriate numeracy within the  course and programmes.

DUT Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ahmed Bawa, spoke about the importance of mathematics  “Numbers and letters are related to the world we live in, letters and numbers work together to help us understand the internal and external world, produce records of the past, produce pictures of the world and interpret our action,” said Prof Bawa. The Vice-Chancellor also added that all students at DUT must have exposure to mathematics and its beauty, how it relates to the world, its impact on intellectual development as well as its impact on logic learning and language.

DUT CELT, Teaching and Learning Practitioner Shoba Rathilal, said that Numeracy for DUT needs to be unpacked and made available to students through curricula design, access to disciplinary knowledge as well as to examine entrance and placement criteria.

Pictured: Robert Prince from UCT and Prof Thengani Ngwenya, DUT CELT Director, at the event.

-Mxolisi Ntanzi