Liza Hamman*
University of the Western Cape
Received Sylff fellowship in 2012-13.
Academic supervisor: Prof. Zelda Groener
Current affiliation: Boland College
Dr Liza Hamman is an experienced teacher and facilitator with a special interest in mindfulness as an educational approach. She has developed courses and course materials for a variety of audiences and is currently working as a department head at a vocational education college in South Africa. In 2019 she received her PhD degree, with a focus on mindfulness and transformative learning, from the University of the Western Cape. One of the findings of her PhD study was that mindfulness should be included in training programmes for educators in South Africa.
The above mentioned findings, and the challenges that educators and learners experience, particularly related to high stress levels, anxiety, burnout and emotional exhaustion, motivates her to find ways to offer mindfulness training to educators. In 2020 she initiated a project, with the funding provided by a Sylff Leadership Initiatives grant, to develop an online mindfulness-based stress reduction programme that will address the social and emotional challenges that both educators and students face in a South African learning environment. The main purpose of the project is to promote the development of socially and emotionally competent educators with the capacity to create a classroom environment conductive to learning, through mindfulness training.
