He was selected as the Faculty of Arts Excellent Teacher of the Year and completely shocked when they called out his name for the overall prestigious NMMU Excellent Teacher of the Year award for 2015.
Mukhtar Raban’s holistic approach to teaching and learning is founded in the fundamental disciplinary stance of knowledge as a social construct. His teaching is influenced by the notion of ‘trading in’ old paradigms for the adoption of new thought for knowledge acquisition. As an applied linguistics and communication lecturer, he explores language acquisition theory to inform his communicative language teaching practices. His teaching is student-centered, and he favours Krashen’s comprehension hypothesis of subconscious acquisition.
His love for continual evaluation of curriculum instructional design, coupled with advanced technological proficiencies, has led to him being a fore-runner in blended learning and educational technologies in his department and faculty. His modules combine carefully designed online learning components mapped to include incidental, implicit learning; with rich, critical and meaningful face-to-face teaching and learning experiences shaped by a humanising pedagogy.
From flipped to virtual classrooms, synchronous to asynchronous learning, his overall teaching builds on Chomsky’s foundation of linguistic characterisation, to produce students with communicative competence who have the ability to use language in a variety of contexts and embrace the increased multimodal communication opportunities worldwide.
He is a highly passionate teacher and admired by most of his students. Many of his students supported his nomination by writing favourable testimonials.
In addition to his lecturing of the communication modules for engineering students, he also chairs the Blended Learning and Teaching Technologies (BLaTT) portfolio in the department and coordinates the Arabic short learning programmes.
He also coordinates the university-wide online learning programme, English for Academic Studies (EAS) on behalf of the Higher Education Access, Development and Support (HEADS) department.
On behalf of DALS and the Faculty of Arts, we are proud of his achievements. Well done, Mukhtar Raban!
At the NMMU 2015 Awards, Mukhtar Raban (centre) received the Faculty of Arts
Excellent Teacher of the Year and overall NMMU Excellent Teacher of the Year
awards. He is photographed here with Abubakr Raban (left) and
Nazeefah Raban (right).