Professor Kathija Yassim
Nominee's Province:
Gauteng
Project Name/Description:
Associate Professor, Department of Education Leadership and Management at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Education
For more than two decades, Professor Yassim has traversed the higher education fraternity and continues to achieve more to this day. Hers is a national and international career, seeing her being a highly published researcher with a research niche that encompasses leading education for sustainable futures. Yassim, a believer in the utilisation of innovative approaches, has for years been passionate about the development of future-fit leaders capable of leading sustainable South African schools for the 21st century.
Throughout her career, she has developed and coordinated several postgraduate programmes that employ 5IR technologies and more recently AI-empowered technologies for leadership development.
Her teaching is largely focused on the exploration of future trends in education leadership and stimulating school leaders, especially in low quintile schools to develop learning pathways that offer “life success” not just “school success” to learners. She has been awarded substantial funding for projects involving the usage of school food gardens as a third space for learning. The third learning space offers a bridge between the formal curriculum and the development of 21st-century enabling skills that offer enterprising learners an opportunity to grow their food. Yassim has projects across three provinces, in Hoedspruit, the Natal Midlands, and most recently in Tshwane, which have all yielded leadership development in schools beyond the scope of her job description.
She is currently engaged in Digital Academies in Africa, in partnership with the University of Helsinki, where the work entails developing school leaders using “AI-supported learning that personalises and customises learning resulting in ongoing and lifelong leadership learning”.
Yassim has won several local and international awards for her innovative teaching and research, like the Golden Key International Honour Societies Lecturer of the Year, The Vice Chancellor Award for Teaching and Research Excellence, and more recently the UJ Woman in Leadership Development Award (2022).
“Future fit leaders are those who embrace lifelong learning, self-leadership and who are capable of developing appropriate pathways to ensure learner life success,” she says.
