On November 11th, 2021, the Coordinator of the BAQONDE Project, Pedro Alvarez-Mosquera, participated in CoPAL’s (Community of Practice for the Teaching & Learning of African Languages) most recent meeting, organized by USAf (Universities South Africa), the representative body of the 26 public universities in the country.
On November 11th, 2021, the Coordinator of the BAQONDE Project, Pedro Alvarez-Mosquera, participated in CoPAL’s (Community of Practice for the Teaching & Learning of African Languages) most recent meeting, organized by USAf (Universities South Africa), the representative body of the 26 public universities in the country.
Under the title “Moving beyond Rhetoric: African Languages at the center of transformation in Higher Education” Dr. Alvarez-Mosquera highlighted BAQONDEas an example to prompt the audience to think about their Higher Education Institutions’ (HEI) role in promoting Indigenous African Languages. In line with the new Policy Framework for HEI, he insisted that this could be a pivotal time for the Community of Practice to collaborate for real transformation in this area. More specifically, as part of their leading role in the nation, he questioned if HEIs were acting as a gatekeeper of knowledge or as platform to disseminate this knowledge. In his own words, it is time “to set in motion an unprecedented coordinated strategy toward unlocking language resources by means of inter-institutional collaboration.” In his talk, he also explained how BAQONDE will establish a Community of Practice as part of the project’s national sustainability strategy to help position African languages to be at the center of Higher Education.
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