Submission of proposals to present at TLC 2024

Dear colleagues and students

Members of the University of Cape Town (UCT) community are invited to submit a proposal to present at the 2024 UCT Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC2024), which will be held in-person at the Neville Alexander Building, Lower Campus, on 20 and 21 November 2024.

This year, the teaching and learning community is invited to turn its attention to curriculum – what it is; what it could or should be; and how it influences a wide spectrum of teaching and learning activities. The conference title is inspired by bell hooks (sic), who in her book, Teaching to Transgress, states:

“The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”

Every academic, student and leader of the academic project must confront anew what meaningful and appropriate curricula might look like.

Given UCT’s location in the Global South, emerging from and still reckoning with histories of colonialism and apartheid, presenters are invited to consider contemporary responses to curriculum design and development, including theories of social justice, feminist, decolonial, and indigenous knowledge systems, to ask questions about curricula in our context. That is, it is key to explore the challenge of creating and co-creating curricula that respond to local and global needs and challenges. The threads of focus are as follows: 

• What might a responsive and innovative curriculum look like in our context? What might inform and find expression through these curricula?
• How might curricula promote epistemic and social justice?
• How might curriculum transformation look like in our context?
• What are the roles of languages in shaping curricula for the whole human as student, lecturer and citizen?
• How do digital technologies, educational and otherwise, enable or constrain curriculum development and curriculum expression?
• What happens to curriculum imagination and design in an era of pervasive Artificial Intelligence technologies?

Staff and students are invited to join this ongoing conversation about curriculum – inside and outside the classroom – at TLC2024. 

Important dates are as follows:

• 15 July: Call for proposals opens; registration opens
• 13 September: Submissions close
• 16 September: Proposal review begins
• 2 October: Presenters are notified of outcome
• 31 October: Programme and abstract booklet are released and registration closes
• 20 and 21 November: Conference days

Please register to attend the conference, regardless of whether you are submitting a proposal or not. 

For any queries, please email the Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching team.

• Read the full DVC Desk: UCT TLC2024 – All about curriculum: new visions and future directions.

Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching

Read previous communications:

• From the UCT Executive
• Campus Announcements