Professor Heila Lotz-Sisitka started her professional life as a Grade 1 teacher. She now holds a Tier 1 South African National Research Foundation/Department of Science and Technology Chair in Global Change and Social Learning Systems, and is a Distinguished Research Professor at Rhodes University.
Her Chair is based in the Environmental Learning Research Centre at Rhodes University, South Africa which she directed for 15 years (2000-2015). The current focus of the Chair’s research is transformative social learning and green skills learning pathways in areas of biodiversity, the water food nexus, climate change, social and environmental justice, and just sustainability transitions.
She has served on over 20 national and international research and policy programmes and scientific committees focusing on education, transformative learning and sustainability and is regularly invited to present keynote contributions in this area, to date having done over 90 keynotes in more than 45 countries around the world, with some of the most recent being at the European Conference on Education Research (the second largest education conference in the world), the Belmont Forum 10th Anniversary (a major international research funding policy group), the International Association of Cultural and Activity Theory Research (International post-Vygotskian psychology and learning sciences research group) and the International Transformations to Sustainability Conference (leading international research group in the Sustainability Sciences). Prof Lotz-Sisitka contributed to the various iterations of South Africa’s national curriculum process, and to various national committees and forums developing some of the first ever environmental health, management and education qualifications in South Africa, and she led development of the first ever Environmental Sector Skills Plan for South Africa.
She has led various national and international research programmes, and has supervised 65 Masters, 47 PhD and 12 post-doctoral scholars, and has examined 22 PhDs internationally. Her publications number over 170 and she has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the WESSA Gold Award and Life Time Award for contributions to environment and sustainability in South Africa, the Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Award, the Vice Chancellor’s Community Engagement Award (twice), and the Vice Chancellor’s Senior Researcher Award, being one of two academics in the university to have obtained the honour of receiving all three awards.
She served as Editor-in-Chief of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education for 13 years (2003-2016) and served one term as co-editor of the Learning, Culture and Social Interaction Journal (2021). Recent book publications include a Routledge book on ‘Critical realism, environmental learning and social-ecological change’, (Price and Lotz-Sisitka, 2016), a Springer book on ‘Schooling and sustainable development in Africa’ (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2017), and a Routledge book on ‘Green Skills Research in South Africa: Models, Cases and Methods’ (Rosenberg, Ramsarup and Lotz-Sisitka, 2020).
Three recent international research leadership roles include leading the South African hub of the international GCRF Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures research programme operating across the UK, Netherlands, South Africa, India, Rwanda and Somalia (2020-2024); Axis 1 lead of the global Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Education, and an international Transformative Knowledge Network (2016-2019) working across nine countries on four continents, funded by the International Science Council entitled the Transgressive Social Learning for Social-Ecological Sustainability in times of Climate Change (T-Learning), for which Dr. Lotz-Sisitka served as the PI and network lead. Current professional leadership roles include leading a programme on sustainability in teacher and TVET education with the UNESCO ROSA working with over 100 teacher education institutions across the SADC region, amongst others. She was also founding host of the national Fundisa for Change teacher education consortium leading integration of environment and sustainability education in South Africa’s teacher education system. Nationally she is also leading an NRF Community of Practice involving 11 South African research Chairs focussing on education and sustainability.
She holds a B2 National Research Foundation Rating, which is defined as “A researcher who enjoys considerable international recognition by their peers for the high quality and impact of their recent research outputs”. Her research interests include critical research methodologies, transformative social learning, and education system transformation. Her passion is sustainability and social justice education, emancipatory agency, and people’s participation in transformative education and learning processes.
Her publications can be accessed at http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5193-9881
Last Modified: Mon, 15 May 2023 15:58:30 SAST