Browsing by Author "Conana, Honjiswa"

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    Critical interdisciplinary dialogues: Towards a pedagogy of well-being in stem disciplines and fields
    (South African Journal of Higher Education, 2018) Bozalek, Vivienne; Winberg, Christine; Conana, Honjiswa; Wright, J; Wolff, K; Pallit, N; Adendorff, H
    Students enrolled in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) globally and in South Africa are generally not in a state of well-being. International and South African research studies show that undergraduate STEM programmes pose significant challenges to students and that many STEM programmes are marked by high attrition rates and poor student success. There is growing recognition that STEM educators need to teach the “whole student” instead of focussing only on STEM knowledge and skills. In order to teach in a holistic way, university educators themselves need to understand and achieve their own well-being. The article argues that a pedagogy of well-being and its associated concepts of competence, self-efficacy, community and inter-relatedness are key to academic staff and student well-being in the STEM disciplines. The focus of this article is an inter-institution study on enhancing STEM educators’ capacity towards a pedagogy of well-being through teaching portfolio development in diverse institutional contexts. The research question guiding is the study is: How might academic development practitioners and STEM university educators successfully collaborate for the benefit of student well-being and success? Data for this study was obtained from “critical dialogues” between academic development practitioners and STEM university teachers, as well as an external evaluation of the project. The data comprise video-recordings of the critical dialogues and survey responses. The findings of the study indicate that there are barriers as well as productive spaces for interdisciplinary work towards well-being in STEM teaching and learning. The findings have implications for how STEM academics might engage in professional learning towards pedagogical competence, and offer suggestions for the ways in which academic developers might respectfully “transgress” into STEM disciplinary domains in support of a pedagogy of well-being in the STEM disciplines and fields.
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    Exploring pedagogical possibilities for transformative approaches to academic literacies in undergraduate Physics
    (University of the Western Cape, 2016) Conana, Honjiswa; Marshall, Delia; Case, Jennifer M.
    How can research on academic literacies throw light on the challenge to widen access to undergraduate science studies? This article explores what an academic literacies approach might mean in the context of undergraduate physics. The study examines the pedagogical practices and student learning in two undergraduate Physics courses, a mainstream and an extended course, with a particular focus on the disciplinary practice of problem-solving. Concepts from the sociology of knowledge, specifically Legitimation Code Theory, offer a useful analytical framework for characterising the movement between abstract principles and concrete contexts in problem-solving and understanding how meaning is encapsulated in the dense representations of physics. The study shows that with more time and careful pedagogical attention, the extended course was able to make more explicit the literacy practices and epistemological functioning of the discipline. The study found that the extended course adopted a more explicitly normative approach to academic literacy, i.e., inducting students into the disciplinary knowledge and norms of the discipline, but elements of a transformative approach were also evident, i.e., opening up opportunities for these norms to be critiqued and contested.
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    Learning to teach STEM disciplines in higher education: a critical review of the literature
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018) Winberg, Christine; Adendorff, Hanelie; Bozalek, Vivienne; Conana, Honjiswa; Pallitt, Nicola; Wolff, Karin; Olsson, Thomas; Roxa, Torgny
    Enrolments in STEM disciplines at universities are increasing globally, attributed to the greater life opportunities open to students as a result of a STEM education. But while institutional access to STEM programmes is widening, the retention and success of STEM undergraduate students remains a challenge. Pedagogies that support student success are well known; what we know less about is how university teachers acquire pedagogical competence. This is the focus of this critical review of the literature that offers a theorised critique of educational development in STEM contexts. We studied the research literature with a view to uncovering the principles that inform professional development in STEM disciplines and fields. The key finding of this critical review is how little focus there is on the STEM disciplines. The majority of studies reviewed did not address the key issue of what makes the STEM disciplines difficult to learn and challenging to teach.
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    Multimodality and new materialism in science learning: Exploring insights from an introductory physics lesson
    (Unisa Press, 2021) Marshall, Delia; Conana, Honjiswa
    Science disciplines are inherently multimodal, involving written and spoken language, bodily gestures, symbols, diagrams, sketches, simulation and mathematical formalism. Studies have shown that explicit multimodal teaching approaches foster enhanced access to science disciplines. We examine multimodal classroom practices in a physics extended curriculum programme (ECP) through the lens of new materialism. As De Freitas and Sinclair note in their book,Mathematics and the Body, there is growing research interest in embodiment in mathematics (and science) education—that is, the role played by students’ bodies, in terms of gestures, verbalisation, diagrams and their relation to the physical objects with which they interact. Embodiment can be viewed from a range of theoretical perspectives (for example, cognitive, phenomemological, or social semiotic). However, they argue that their new materialist approach, which they term “inclusive materialism”, has the potential for framing more socially just pedagogies.In this article, we discuss a multimodal and new materialist analysis of a lesson vignette from a first-year extended curriculum physics course.