‘Making a life’: David Holgate and his Roles in Teaching, Researching and Community Involvement

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Oct 012012
 

Professor David Holgate

“I guess my point of departure especially when it comes to the teaching research connection would be that as a mathematician it would be quite hedonistic to be involved in pure research and not have a commitment to teaching, especially in an African context, and at the University of Stellenbosch. I really enjoy teaching, but that aside, I do feel what I suppose you can call a kind of moral obligation; that if I have been entrusted with a certain level of knowledge and skill I should share that.”

In this brief Professor David Holgate of the Department of Mathematical Sciences is interviewed by Dr Catherine Kell, a researcher commissioned by the CTL.  Download the full interview here.

This is the second brief in the Centre for Teaching and Learning, or CTL’s ‘Making a life’ series, where we explore the attitudes and experiences of academics at Stellenbosch University, with regard to their roles in teaching, research and what is generally called ‘community involvement’. The series was approached as a set of interviews with individual academics, which took the form of reflective conversations between a CTL researcher and the individual academic. Academics approached for the interviews were not sampled, but drawn from different departments and different disciplines, and tended to be those who had had some involvement with CTL. At times we have incorporated other texts into the brief, to enrich the sense of the activities academics engage in, in ‘making a life’.