Education and Heritage Colloquium

Education and Heritage Colloquium
“Heritage institutions provide a stage on which values are asserted and contested, discovered, central or peripheral, essential or marginal to identity, they have become sites of contestation.” -- Prof. Kader Asmal MP, Minister of Education, in his opening address at the Education and Heritage Colloquium (January 22-25, 2002, University of the Witwatersrand). The Education and Heritage Colloquium gathered 65 professional cultural heritage workers from South Africa and the United States for discussions and field experiences on the relationship between education and heritage in the new South Africa. It aimed to train and capacitate a cadre of South Africa’s new generation of heritage professionals through an intensive program of specialized sessions, field experiences, and the provision of instructional resources for continuing application and education on-site in South Africa.
Shahid Vawda and Rooksana Omar at the Education and Heritage Colloquium	Sessions at the colloquium were diverse and ranged from a discussion of national policy frameworks from the perspective of the South African History Project, SAHRA, and the national curriculum proposals from DACST, to a presentation on the Reed Dance by Chris Dlamuka of the University of Durban-Westville. Issues surrounding national heritage training programs operating at the tertiary level were examined with panelists from Wits, University of Durban–Westville, and the Robben Island Museum, while panelists from the MSU Museum and the Multimedia Education Group at UCT discussed alternative training media, systems and audiences. Other panels facilitated discussions on model projects and local heritage training, festivals as educational forums, and the relationship between heritage and economic development. The participants concluded that heritage education is at the center of a matrix of sectors: communities, government institutions, cultural organizations, and higher education.
As part of the field experience portion of the colloquium, participants toured the Mpumlanga Mobile Craft Clinic truck and discussed Freedom Park and the Mandela Museum’s educational missions with Luli Callinicos and Khwezi Ka Mpumlwana. The group also toured MuseumAfrica and learned of its genesis and transformation from Sandra deWet, Manager of Documentation. An illustrated tour of selected heritage sites in Johannesburg was led by Sue Krige of Mindwalks, Inc., and culminated in a reception and vigorous discussion at the National Museum of Military History. Presentations, outlines, video, and audio of the conference are being mounted at the Project website. This Colloquium was the third in a series of projects in the three-year program of binational, multi-institutional collaborations in heritage training and technology funded by the Andrew W. Mellon and Ford foundations and Michigan State University.