Mellony Graven was appointed Full Professor and the South African Numeracy Chair at Rhodes University in 2011. Her work focuses on research and development with teachers, parents and learners in primary schools. She is a past President of the Southern African Association for Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education; has served as member of several international conference committees and serves as editor for books, leading journals and special journal issues. Active citizenship and community engagement are key drivers of her work while simultaneously building her post-graduate research team. As Chair she has provided bursaries and supervision to multiple students. All students are supported and encouraged to present their work at research conferences and publish their findings.
Prof Graven prioritises capacity building of her post-graduate research team and many graduate with distinction. She currently supervises and co-supervises 14 MEd and PhD students and has supervised 8 post-doctoral students and graduated over 35 PHD and Masters students. All are supported to give conference presentations and publish as part of their studies. Prof Graven’s approach to research is grounded in the realities of classrooms, teachers and teacher educators across Southern Africa and other contexts of majority marginalization of mathematics learners. Her former DVC Dr Clayton captured her approach as straddling “in-class intervention and scholarly research and blends them in a seemingly effortless flow of strategic and positive initiatives. This is a researcher that you will find running a family Maths Fun Day in a community hall one day and engaging with the world’s top intellectuals on the topic the next.”
Her passion for equity necessitates keeping research grounded while speaking to national and regional policy and international platforms. The Mental Starters Project (that emerged from 10 years of collaborative research of the two NRF numeracy Chairs) is now part of DBE policy for implementation across all South African schools and is being rolled out too by the Nigerian ministry of education. The parallel primary pre-service teacher education programme (that has met twice annually for the past 5 years) has 16 researchers/teacher educators from 10 South African higher education institutions and multiple institutions in Nigeria, Malawi and Zambia. All use the mental starters as a key component of their pre-service primary teacher education courses. Other researched interventions rolled out nationally by NGOs or districts include after school mathematics clubs and family math story-time programmes.
Her research interests and publications are primarily in the areas of:
- Mathematical Literacy and Numeracy Education
- Learner mathematical dispositions
- Teacher education
- Learning within a community of practice perspective
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TS__mHkAAAAJ&hl=en
LikedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mellony-graven-583b6189/
Email: m.graven@ru.ac.za