UJ Department of Educational Psychology

UJ Department of Educational Psychology

The Department Educational Psychology is involved in the professional preparation of learning support teachers, school counsellors and educational psychologists. The department is housed on two campuses – Auckland Park Kingsway and Soweto. The department is involved  in all pre-service qualifications in the Foundation, Intermediate, Senior and FET phases and the PGCE.
Our mission is to advance social justice in diverse community educational settings. This we do through caring, transformative, culturally authentic teaching, learning and research practices.

Community Engagement

The Department has projects where training is being done off-campus to extend it to the real world of community psychology. The teaching philosophy behind the projects are to teach Educational Psychology through an experiential learning modality where it is accepted that students, who have an honours degree and experience as counsellors or teachers have an abundance of experience they bring to the course. During these outreach project opportunities are being created to take students beyond the city boundaries to rural areas and other sites to increase exposure, to share experiences, to engage with diversity and to learn from each other while developing an understanding for community psychology in the South African context.

Research project in Westbury – studying community knowledge holding and sharing
A group of researchers from the University of Johannesburg is involved in studying children learn from community knowledge holders. The purpose is to study examples of interactions between community knowledge holders and children outside school, in order to make recommendations to schools on how methods of community knowledge sharing can benefit teaching and learning.
The project involves Knowledge sharing events at the Westbury Youth Centre.
We envisage the participation of elders, the community leaders, grand-parents and great grandparents, and the activist community members who work with a passion on community projects focusing on for example health, reading, literacy, work programmes, history, arts, music, and so on.
Our belief is that knowledge rests in communities, including the knowledge used for making a living, and participating in growing our democracy. Knowledge for livelihoods cannot be limited to what children learn from school textbooks. Knowledge is the way we live, and what we need to survive; it determines our life styles and life chances.  Knowledge, therefore, is much more than what is learned in schools. The problem is – what children learn at home and in the community is not valued in schools in any formal way.
The focus of this project is on children learning from community knowledge holders outside of school.  The purpose is to collect and study examples in order to make recommendations to teachers in schools on the WHAT and the HOW of children’s learning.
The main question of the project is: In situations of education where community knowledge holders interact with children outside of school – what do the children learn, and what methods do adults use to teach?