Professor Michael Samuel delivers his
inaugural lecture on the Edgewood campus
on doctoral graduate career path studies
as a research enterprise.
‘Attaining full professorship brings with it a responsibility to activate the development of the next generation of scholars. It is a time to reflect on what contribution one would like to make to the world of academia for the future,’ said Professor Michael Samuel. He recently delivered his inaugural lecture on the Edgewood campus to a packed lecture hall that included both his close family and friends.
His lecture, which was based on his paper, explores the interest in doctoral graduate career path studies as a research enterprise. It focuses on five key doctoral education studies across international contexts in the United States of America, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Kingdom and France.
Samuel plans on dedicating his time and effort to providing research leadership amongst the growing doctoral education programmes within the School of Education and the College of Humanities.
He also sees it as an opportunity to look at how members of academia, as leaders of programmes and as an institution position themselves continentally and internationally in terms of knowledge expansion and development.
‘This development is about how we engender amongst our doctoral graduands and in our prospective research agendas the roles and responsibilities of expanding conceptions of freedoms: of intellectual, moral, social, cultural, spiritual, economic and epistemological growth.’
‘We cannot simply be takers of the standards of quality education borrowing from so-called more advanced contexts. We must become also MAKERS of significant and relevant new knowledge,’ said Samuel.
He presently serves on the Advisory Council for the Commonwealth Secretariat on Teacher Mobility, Recruitment and Migration which is the custodian of an international Protocol guiding the movement of teachers across national borders.
He has participated in international studies supported by the Department for International Development (UK) involving researching teacher education reform in Ghana, Malawi, Lesotho, Trinidad & Tobago, and South Africa (1998-2003) culminating in his book “Changing Patterns in Teacher Education: Policy, Practice and Prospects” (2003).
In 2011 he was awarded the Turquoise Harmony Institute’s national Ubuntu Award for Contribution to Education in South Africa. He has published in the following international and national journals: Perspectives in Education (PIE); South African Journal of Higher Education (SAJHE); The South African Journal of Communication Disorders (SAJCD); TESOL Quarterly; Institute of Development Studies Bulletin; International Journal of Educational Development (IJED); and International Journal for Educational Research (IJER).