SEAmester – South Africa’s first class afloat

Abstract

The Department of Science and Technology’s (DST’s) 10-year Global Change Grand Challenge programme requires platforms to ‘attract young researchers to the region and retain them by exciting their interest in aspects of global change; while developing their capacity and professional skills in the relevant fields of investigation’1 . In addition, in July 2014, President Zuma officially launched Operation Phakisa and announced that a key target of this Oceans Economy initiative would be ‘for the Department of Higher Education and Training to drive alignment between theoretical and workplace learning’2 . SEAmester – South Africa’s recently established Class Afloat – achieves just that. SEAmester introduces marine science as an applied and cross-disciplinary field to students who have shown an affinity for core science disciplines. It identifies with government’s National Development Plan3 on education, training and innovation – critical to South Africa’s long-term development and investment in this sector. SEAmester has a long-term vision aimed at building capacity within the marine sciences by coordinating and fostering cross-disciplinary research projects and achieving this goal through a highly innovative programme. The strength of SEAmester is that postgraduate students combine theoretical classroom learning with the application of this knowledge through ship-based, and more importantly, hands-on research. The state-of-the-art research vessel, SA Agulhas II, provides an ideal teaching and research platform for this programme; its size, comfort and shipboard facilities allow large groups of students and lecturers to productively interact over a period of 10 days.