Keynote Speakers

Dr Brenda LH Marina-Lewis

Dr Brenda LH Marina-Lewis is the founder and CEO of Myntrmi International, a personal and professional development mentoring and consulting service for women. She served as the President of the International Mentoring Association (IMA) from 2020 – 2022 and now serves as Past President in an advisory capacity. Dr. Marina-Lewis has also served as a Mentor Consultant and speaker for the Transformation of the Professoriate Mentoring Program within the University of the Free State in South Africa. She has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and a MeD in Higher Education Administration from the University of Akron in Ohio, USA. As a retired higher education leadership educator, Dr. Marina-Lewis served as an associate dean for the academic affairs division at Baltimore City Community College, USA, and has served as an associate professor, teaching graduate courses in Educational Leadership and Higher Education Administration at Georgia Southern University. She also served as an assistant dean at the University of Akron, Ohio, USA. 

She has published book chapters related to identity development for female students of color, religiosity, and spirituality in leadership programs, managing diversity in workplaces and society, and journal articles on cultural competence and the glass ceiling. Most recently, she has published a book entitled Successful Pathways for the Well-Being of Black Students, which includes studies from rural South Africa, Lesotho, and international students in South Africa. She has also published books Beyond Retention: Cultivating Spaces of Equity, Justice, and Fairness for Women of Color in U.S. Higher Education and Mentoring Away the Glass Ceiling in Academe: A Cultured Critique. 

Her scholarship continues to explore women in leadership, mentoring for leadership, mentoring for well-being, multicultural competence in higher education, and global education issues from a womanist perspective.

Prof. Wayne Hugo

Prof. Wayne Hugo’s research has focused on understanding how education works and impacts society and individuals. His first book, “Ladders of Beauty: Hierarchical Pedagogy from Plato to Dante,” takes readers on a historical journey through key Western thinkers, showing how they used pedagogic mechanisms to lead people from basic understanding to the highest levels of thought and experience.

His next book, “Cracking the Code to Educational Analysis,” or dummies guide to Bernstein, showed how to develop tools to analyse variations in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and variations in education systems.  In “Conceptual Integration,” written with colleagues from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Hugo explored how integration logic offered a complimentary set of analytical tools for hierarchical analysis.  His fourth book, “Journeys of the Pedagogic Imagination,” introduces a way to think about education using a four-part framework. It looks at the mind and brain of a person, the cultural aspects of learning, and the impact of society’s bigger forces, like economics, combining both hierarchical and integrative logic. His fifth book, “Theorising Education: A Primer,” pulls all these ideas into one place and provides the bare logical bones of five essential tools to think about education.  The book ended with a promise to develop a comprehensive theory of educational processes encompassing the evolutionary logic of the past and new dynamics of AI in learning.

Prof. Agreement Jotia

Prof. Agreement Jotia is currently the Acting Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and a professor of Education at the University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in Education with a focus on Democracy and Education, an M.A. in International Affairs with a focus on African Studies/Politics, a B.Sc. in Education from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA, and a Diploma in Secondary Education from Tonota College of Education, Tonota, Botswana. Before his professional activities at the University of Botswana, He served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Central Florida and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Ohio University. He is passionate about Education and internationalization between the Global North and South Institutions of Higher Education. For this reason, he helped establish a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the University of Central Florida and the University of Botswana from 2010-2023. It has served numerous Study Abroad activities for Faculty and Students between the two institutions. He has ably served as In-Country Director for two U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad to Botswana and as Co-Investigator and In-Country Project Director of a U.S. Department of State grant focusing on Equitable Educational Opportunities for the Marginalized from 2012-2015 in Botswana. He is a 2022-2023 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence alumni based at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA where he taught and supervised research at both Masters and PhD Levels. He has been appointed a Board Member for Botswana National Productivity Center by the Hon. Minister of Labour and Home Affairs and is the current Strategy Committee Chairperson. His Honour has also appointed him, the Vice President of the Republic of Botswana, Mr. Slumber Tsogwane, to the National Task Force on Rural Development. He is a vibrant international scholar and researcher whose research interests are Education and Multiculturalism, Deep Democratic Theory, Transformative Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Globalization and Education, and Politics of Developing Areas. He has served as an honorary professor at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.

Prof. Jonathan Jansen

Prof. Jonathan Jansen is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University and the immediate past Academy of Science of South Africa President. He started his career as a high school Biology teacher in the Cape and holds a PhD from Stanford and honorary doctorates from four universities, including the University of Edinburgh. 

He is the author of the award-winning book Knowledge in the Blood (Stanford University Press), and his recent books include Corrupted: a Study of Chronic Dysfunction in South African Universities (2023, Wits University Press) and The Decolonisation of Knowledge (2022, Cambridge University Press).

He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and will be the Chin Yidan Global Fellow at Harvard University in 2024.