Professor Ruksana Osman
Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic
Professor Ruksana Osman is the Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic at the University of the Witwatersrand. In this position she is responsible for the broad coordination of the academic project across all divisions of the University. The five faculty deans report to her, and she oversees the University’s online and blended-learning academic strategy.
Prior to this appointment, she served as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Advancement, Human Resources and Transformation, as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, and as the Head of the School of Education. Her experience in higher education, and her 40-year association with Wits University therefore spans the full range of roles at all levels of institutional management, governance, and leadership. These have included internally- and externally facing foci on enabling staff capacitation, directing the academic project, intellectual leadership, fundraising, contributing to policy development and implementation, and being centrally involved in institutional strategy development.
A Professor of Education, Prof. Osman has extensive teaching and research experience in the field of teacher education and higher education. She has an established reputation for impactful scholarly work in the broad fields of higher education policy, pedagogy and students’ lived experiences of equity and access to higher education. She is known for the connections she has made between research centred and research led approaches to learning and teaching and the transformative practices of learning contexts like schools and universities.
Prof. Osman holds the UNESCO Chair in Teacher Education for Diversity and Development and has established a global network to support the research and development work of the Chair. She is widely published in the academic and popular press, and is the author or co-author of multiple papers, journal articles and books. She is the co-editor of Research-led teacher education: Case studies of possibilities (2012); Large Class Pedagogy: Interdisciplinary perspectives for quality higher education (2013); Service Learning in South Africa (2013); Transforming Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Towards a Socially Just Pedagogy in a global context (2017); Teacher Education for Diversity: Conversations from the Global South (2018) and pedagogical responsiveness in complex contexts (2022).
Outside of South Africa, Professor Osman has been at the forefront of building several transnational partnerships particularly with UK, European and African universities. She has spearheaded Wits’ partnership in several strategic academic initiatives including the Diversifying the Academy programmes, the Wits Edinburg Sustainable African Futures (WESAF) doctoral program, the AFRETEC (African Engineering and Technology) network that aims to drive digital transformation on the African continent, The Future Materials Project which involves collaborating with a number of global universities and a new generation of scholars working on future materials and the way such materials can advance society more inclusively.
An elected member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa, Professor Osman is recognised for the quality and relevance of her work in higher education as a teacher and researcher in pursuit of socially-just education.