Theophilus van Rensburg Lindzter

From leading innovative projects such as the M-UBUNTU project, to championing initiatives aimed at improving quality education in his native country-South Africa, Theophilus van Rensburg Lindzter is a passionate agent of change focused on impacting and transforming the education industry in South Africa and globally.

Theophilus van Rensburg Lindzter, currently on assignment with the Swedish Foreign Service, is also the director for Communications Management Support, a mostly web-based for-profit company operating in South Africa that provides advice on strategies for deploying maximum impact broadband infrastructure for learning organizations. His clients are mostly governments, businesses and learning organizations in South Africa deploying learning solutions in the education sector.  

Change leadership

Born in Cape Town South Africa, Theophilus’ cultural background and his later experiences of the culture and education system in Sweden, would play a big role in helping him develop a strong passion to improve the quality of education in his native South Africa and other parts of the world.

Theophilus believes that an education that will be worth its value would be “one that honors the existing diversity in the world and embraces/engages different approaches to solving problems with empathy for the varying experiences of the individuals involved in the process”.

With a strong background and experience in educational technology, education and leadership, he has used this ethos to champion various projects and started organizations aimed at helping educators and leaders in South Africa and other parts of the world develop their leadership capacity and expertise for their practice.

Learning Academy Worldwide and Wisehub

  He founded Learning Academy Worldwide, a Swedish-based Non-profit learning organization that oversees various literacy improvements in South Africa, and Wisehub, a leadership development incubator which provides both remote and onsite leadership coaching services for young people (especially teachers), in South Africa and other parts of the world.

Over the 18-year period of its operation, the academy has deeply impacted many leaders in South Africa and has supported over 50 different schools in South Africa to help improve the pedagogical practices and introduction of educational technology tools and practices in their learning environments. Wisehub also organizes annual summits that brings global change leaders to network and share ideas on various projects.

M-UBUNTU

“’M’ is for mobile devices and ‘UBUNTU’, is a South African concept that encourages learning together, much like an all for one and one for all concept’, said Theophilus.  The project’s focus is an action research style approach to experimenting with mobile phone devices for learning in some schools on a pilot basis in South Africa. He believes that rather than ban mobile phones from classrooms as is the practice in most schools, the devices can be used in a collaborative learning environment to help the learning process. The M-UBUNTU project seeks to find out how students’ use of mobile devices would impact their learning, classroom discipline etc. The project is also aimed at fostering a collaborative learning climate that encourages creativity and technology use for learning in schools.  

Collaborate More-UBUNTU

Theophilus encourages collaboration and networking to share ideas and solve global problems together. He proposes that a global transformation in education to meet the constantly evolving needs of the 21st century learner, would only happen with more collaborative thinking and readiness to embrace diversity and leverage it for more impactful learning. A continuous dialogue aimed at understanding and working together to develop shared knowledge and experiences for solving global problems, should be the educator’s priority.

Written by: Maxwell K. Dziku April, 2017