A journey to being an educator has taken one CPUT graduate right back to where it all started, his own primary and high school.
When Taswell Mabutha was a learner at Jan Kriel School in Kuils River he dreamt of the day he could finally matriculate and leave behind the stigma of being a pupil at a school for children with special educational needs.
Mabutha has severe dyslexia and struggles to understand what he is reading. It was a condition he initially masked well as a child but which later became apparent as he matured.
“Basically I can’t understand words and my spelling is very bad. When I was very young and reading Cathy and Mark I used to manipulate the system and pretend I could read,” he says.
As he moved into high school and became a teenager, Mabutha says he would act out in an effort to show he wasn’t “slow or special needs.”
“A lot of the time I think some of these kids can be part of a conventional school system, it’s just how you deal with them. I am not trying to change the curriculum I want to change mind sets,” he says.
Mabutha also wants more of these children to access university education, like he did at CPUT, and not be restricted to studying trades at vocational colleges.
He ended up studying Professional Cooking for five years at CPUT’s Granger Bay campus and successfully graduated in 2016.
The qualification took longer to complete because Mabutha did not acknowledge his learning disability initially and only sought out the help of the disability unit much later than he should have.
After graduating from CPUT in 2016 he worked as a professional chef working in upmarket resort kitchens but later returned to his alma mater to do a postgraduate teaching qualification.
This month Mabutha joins thousands of CPUT graduates as he attends his second graduation ceremony but he is already hard at work changing lives back at Jan Kriel where he now teaches Travel and Tourism.
