Diversity intervention for health educators : a detailed description of diversity workshops with health educators at UCT

Abstract

This report is of value to scholars of organisational transformation in post-apartheid South African organisations. Also, diversity practitioners who work in the context of higher education will find this report to be of interest. The diversity workshops were held with academic staff who supervise fourth year medical students' research and health promotion projects in the Public and Primary Health Care Department at the University of Cape Town. These include staff who are site facilitators, lecturers and registrars in the Health Science Faculty. Many of them, except for the site facilitators, who mainly supervise the health promotion projects, have had no training in teaching methodology or educational theory. Therefore, the emphasis of the training was on the supervision of the research (Epidemiology) projects. The supervisors were facing complex challenges in establishing new ways of teaching to support the changing learning environment - small group learning in institutional and community settings, and the increasing diversity of the student body. To enable staff to respond to these challenges an Adult Educator from the Centre of Higher Education and Development was asked to run workshops with staff in which diversity is made an explicit presence in the learning process. This report documents the process of the workshop implementation.