Dr Lee-Ann Jacobs-Nzuzi Khuabi

Dr Lee-Ann Jacobs-Nzuzi Khuabi is a senior lecturer in Occupational Therapy, in the School of Health Sciences. She has over twenty years of experience as an occupational therapist in general physical rehabilitation and thirteen years of teaching experience in higher education. She joins the University of Newcastle after previously holding the roles of senior lecturer, program convener for the Bachelors in Occupational Therapy – Honours (2018-2023) and PhD coordinator (2023-2024) at Stellenbosch University (SU), South Africa.

In service to her profession, Dr Jacobs-Nzuzi Khuabi serves on the Editorial Board of the South African Journal of Occupational Therapy and the Editorial Team of the Journal of Rehabilitation Advances in Developing Health Systems. She continues to serve as a reviewer for international journals and has served as an external moderator for exit level programs in Occupational Therapy at universities across Africa.

She is an expert in occupational therapy practice in the domain of adult neurology and in 2022 was selected by the World Health Organization to serve on a panel of international experts to review the Package of Interventions for Rehabilitation for Stroke. She also served as a Session Chair lead in neurological conditions at the World Federation of Occupational Therapy (WFOT) Conference, Cape Town, South Africa. In recognition for her scholarship in Teaching and Learning, Dr Jacobs-Nzuzi Khuabi was nominated as the senior person in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS), SU to engage in the Scholarship of Educational Leadership Course (SoEL) in 2021. Subsequent to this she was one of the first members of a community of practice in FMHS, SU (SoEL-FMHS) whose mission includes awareness raising and stimulating interest in leadership in and scholarship of Teaching and Learning as well as engaging academic leaders in scholarly approaches to educational leadership practices. She has expertise in blended learning and curriculum renewal that is underpinned by pedagogy, stakeholder perspectives and evidence-based practice.

Research expertise

In my research I have employed qualitative, quantitative and theory generation methodologies.

As the primary investigator I have secured over a million rand in funding, including 2 separate grants from the South African National Research Foundation and a grant from the South African Medical Research Council.

My primary research foci include:

• Scholarship in Teaching and Learning
• Curriculum renewal using collaborative approaches
• Transformative learning and other pedagogies to foster critical consciousness
• Graduate Attributes to cultivate graduates who are socially responsive and engaged in their communities
• Interprofessional education in Health Professions Education
• Support mechanisms to optimize the student learning experience
• Innovative teaching practices to engage students in active learning and cultivate the knowledge, skills and attitudes to prepare them for practice


• Rehabilitation
• Optimizing participatory outcomes, specifically persons with acquired and progressive neurological conditions
• Mapping the access to care and the identification of the enablers and barriers to service provision
• Modes of service delivery that increases access to client centred evidence-based interventions
• Consumer perspectives to facilitate the contextual relevancy and responsiveness of service delivery

Given the lack of guidelines to facilitate the school re-entry and participation of learners following newly acquired disabilities such as traumatic brain injury (TBI) within the South African context, my PhD focused on the development of an occupational therapy practice model (the model of occupational resilience). The practice model is underpinned by the shared lived experience of adolescents with TBI, and other key stakeholders involved in the school transition process. It provides occupational therapists with guidance on the support interventions that includes a series of resilience-promoting tasks that aim to capacitate learners to adapt to occupational challenges to facilitate their meaningfully participation in school post TBI. Given that teachers play a critical role in the school transition process, I was invited to present the results of this study at the South African Symposium on Teacher Education for Inclusion.

To date I have disseminated my work in peer reviewed journals, book chapters and co-edited a book: Transformation of learning and teaching in rehabilitation sciences: A case study from South Africa. I have also presented at local and international conferences. I have collaborations with interprofessional research partners with foci on stroke rehabilitation, improving the referral pathways to care and health professions education. I supervised 9 masters’ students to completion of their research projects. I remain actively involved in research supervision and currently have 1 master’s student and 2 PhD students.

Leaderly Scholarship in Teaching and Learning

I teach assessment and interventions aimed at improving the motor and processing skills of persons with neurological impairments. Additionally, I have teaching experience in kinesiology and conceptual frameworks. My experience includes teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and across disciplines. I value my role in building capacity in research as means for student researchers to develop their critical thinking skills and develop a research aptitude as a means to facilitate evidence-based practice. I have supervised 13 honours research groups and am proud that we have co-published most of this research.

In my capacity as program convener, I served as the chair of the Division of Occupational Therapy Undergraduate Program Committee, coordinating the four years of the undergraduate program. I was the Division’s representative at the Faculty’s Committee for Undergraduate Teaching. In this role, I sought to create an enabling environment for students, through supporting student leaders to strengthen their collaboration in their initiatives to support their peers.

In recognition for my experience in curriculum development, I was part of a team who received the best overall presentation at the Stellenbosch University, Scholarship for Teaching and Learning Conference for embedding graduate attributes into curriculum development for an occupation-focused evidence-based Occupational Therapy course. I employed a collaborative approach to developing a contextually relevant and responsive occupational therapy undergraduate neurological curriculum. This included key stakeholder perspectives, combined with a review of evidence-based practice and a review of policy and guideline documents informing the training of occupational therapists. This approach to curriculum development was disseminated in two publications and a local and international conference.

Given the importance of teaching practice that is underpinned by pedagogy, I explored Transformative Learning (TL) as a pedagogical construct informing the curricular activities of an undergraduate occupational therapy program. Using a stakeholder perspective, I sought to illuminate stakeholders’ current conceptualization and operationalization of TL as well as the support students need in preparation for, during, and after their exposure to TL opportunities. Findings of this study were disseminated to the Program committee to inform pending curriculum renewal activities and shared in the form of a CPD activity for clinical educators. This work is in the process of being disseminated in peer-reviewed journals and at an international conference.

Innovation in Teaching and Learning initiatives includes the design and implementation of an e-assessment method (i.e. E-OSPE) to assess the clinical competency levels of undergraduate students, which was disseminated in a peer reviewed journal. A further example includes the development of instructional methods such as the development of scorm packages to enable a blended learning experience in terms of practical skills training in adult neurology.