Media statement by Nomonde Mbadi, Executive Director of Corporate Affairs
The Durban University of Technology, in collaboration with SAQA, INSETA and RWL, will host Dr Jenny Horsman on Wednesday, 11 February 2009, starting at 10h00. The presentation will take place at the ICC Durban, Room MR 21.
Dr Horsman will talk on “Women, Work and Learning: The Impact of Violence”. She will address crucial issues and broker solutions to a growing problem in South Africa and around the globe.
How can women be supported so that they learn successfully? What interventions can make a difference to effectively support women’s learning? How are women affected by violence?
Dr Jenny Horsman is presenting these seminars across the country as a guest of the SA Qualifications Authority, SAQA. She will highlight issues, crucial to women in the critical area of work and learning. What are women’s experiences in the workplace? What training interventions would support women’s empowerment and increase women’s ability to successfully occupy positions in management?
Dr Jenny Horsman is a community-based literacy theorist, educator and researcher with more than three decades of experience in the adult literacy field in England, Sierra Leone and Canada. Her doctoral research on women and literacy in rural Nova Scotia, and her work tutoring, led Jenny to investigate connections between women’s experience of violence and their success at learning. Since that research she has carried out two further major research studies and led numerous practitioner research projects investigating and implementing new learning practices. She lectures internationally on violence and learning, and is conducting on-going research into women’s apprenticeship training and practical classroom strategies for learning that take the impacts of violence into account.
South African women are also victims of violence. It is estimated that one out of six women are in abusive relationships. One woman is killed by her partner every six days. A shocking 80% of rural women are victims of domestic violence. A woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa and one in four men have raped a woman (www.iss.co.za). These realities will impact on family and work life and will have a detrimental effect on the youth. This translates into adverse effects on learning, skills development and the economy.
Dr Jenny Horsman has taught at the University of New Brunswick and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Canada, and designed curriculum for a wide variety of organizations, including industry training councils. Her first book, Something in My Mind Beside the Everyday: Women, Violence and Education had edited and contributed to several other texts and practitioner-oriented manuals drawn from practitioner research. These books have grown out of her years as a literacy practitioner and researcher on women and literacy. She is currently developing a multi-media interactive educational and networking resource on violence and learning www.learningandviolence.net.
For more information, please contact Bhekani Dlamini on 031 373 2845 to facilitate