Browsing by Author "Gachago, Daniela"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Converging institutional expertise to model teaching and learning with emerging technologies
    (UNISA Press, 2013) Bozalek, Vivienne; Ng'ambi, Dick; Gachago, Daniela
    There is an increasing disjuncture between the use of technologies and the impact that this has on teaching and learning practice. This challenge is compounded by the lack of institutional preparedness to support emerging practices that harness transformative potential in higher education (HE). Most staff development initiatives have tended to focus on skills acquisition, which have often not translated into pedagogical change. In the previous two years (2011 and 2012), four higher education institutions (HEIs) in Cape Town, South Africa, convened a collaborative short course on ‘Emerging Technologies for Improving Teaching and Learning’, which was targeted at 43 educators at the four HEIs over the two years it was offered. The objective of the course was to empower educators from the four HEIs with pedagogical knowledge for teaching with emerging technologies by modelling authentic practices. The course provided a unique opportunity for academics to come together in a relaxed and supportive atmosphere to learn, discuss and benefit from valuable experiences of peers and expert facilitators from the four HEIs in our region regarding the use of technologies for improved teaching and learning. This article draws on the theory- based design framework for technology enhanced learning (TEL) to reflect on the two-year inter-institutional facilitation of a course aimed at empowering educators to teach with emerging technologies through modelling practice.
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    Diffracting socially just pedagogies through stained glass
    (South African Association for Research and Development in Higher Education (SAARDHE), 2016) Bozalek, Vivienne; Bayat, Abdullah; Motala, Siddique; Mitchell, Veronica; Gachago, Daniela
    This article emerges from our relationship with Theo Combrinck, a colleague, a passionate social and academic activist, a recovering addict and a PhD student, who left our living space during 2014 - a death that was unexpected yet a consequence of an iterative desire to end a troubled/ing life. The intensity of Theo's physical absence retains a vibrant presence and continues to intra-act with us as we consider socially just pedagogies. Theo's work lives on through memories, audio recordings and different forms of texts written by him, all representing his views of socially just pedagogy. Our entanglements with Braidotti's posthuman and Barad's diffractive methodologies shape our understandings of the past and present intra-actions with Theo in time and space. The generative process of our individual and collective becomings through Theo illustrate how the collaborative energy of co-constituted relationships contribute an affective response towards developing socially just pedagogies.
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    'Family comes in all forms, blood or not': disrupting dominant narratives around the patriarchal nuclear family
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Gachago, Daniela; Clowes, Lindsay; Condy, Janet
    After nearly 25 years of democracy, lives of young South Africans are still profoundly shaped by the legacies of apartheid. This paper considers how these differences are produced, maintained and disrupted through an exploration of changing narratives developed by a small group of South African pre-service teachers, with a particular focus on the narratives developed around discourses of fatherhood generally and absent fathers in particular. We draw on interviews conducted with three students in which we discussed their digital stories and literature reviews. In this paper, we draw attention to the limitations of digital storytelling and the risks such autobiographical storytelling presents of perpetuating dominant narratives that maintain and reproduce historical inequalities. At the same time, in highlighting ways in which this risk might be confronted, the paper also aims to show the possibilities in which these dominant narratives may be challenged.
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    Power, democracy and technology: the potential dangers of care for teachers in higher education
    (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2015) Bozalek, Vivienne; Watters, Kathy; Gachago, Daniela
    Internationally, there is a growing interest in the potential of care ethics as a useful normative framework to evaluate teaching and learning in higher education. However, to date there has been little engagement with the inherent dangers of care such as those of paternalism and parochialism. This is particularly pertinent in the South African context where there are on-going struggles to find ways of dealing with continuing inequality experienced by students, who may be at the receiving end of paternalism and parochialism. This article focuses on interviews conducted with teaching and learning practitioners collected during a larger national project on the potential of emerging technologies to achieve qualitative learning outcomes in differently placed South African higher education institutions. An analysis of the interviews indicated that while these lecturers were portrayed as innovative educators, using emerging technologies to enhance their pedagogy, issues of paternalism and parochialism inevitably affected teaching as a practice of care. The findings showed that without self-reflexivity and critical engagement with issues of power and control, including choice of technology, there exists danger that teaching could be paternalistic, leading to disempowerment of students and a narrow parochial focusing on the studentteacher dyad. What also emerged from the findings was that interdisciplinary teaching and student-led cross-disciplinary learnng has the potential to mitigate parochialism in the curriculum.
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    Technology enhanced teaching and learning in South African higher education – A rearview of a 20 year journey
    (Wiley, 2016) Ng’ambi, Dick; Brown, Cheryl; Bozalek, Vivienne; Gachago, Daniela; Wood, Denise
    In the last 20 years, the South African higher education has changed significantly, influenced by global trends national development goals and pressure from local educational imperatives, in the context of a digitally networked world. Shifts in technology enhanced pedagogical practices and in discourses around information and communication technologies (ICTs) have had varying degrees of influence in higher education. This paper takes a rearview of a 20-year journey of technology enhanced learning in South African higher education. An analysis of literature view is presented chronologically in four phases: phase 1 (1996–2000), phase 2 (2001–05), phase 3 (2006–10) and phase 4 (2011–16). In phase 1 technology was used predominantly for drill and practice, computer-aided instruction, with growing consciousness of the digital divide. In phase 2 institutions primarily focused on building ICT infrastructure, democratizing information, policy development and research; they sought to compare the effectiveness of teaching with or without technology. During phase 3 institutions began to include ICTs in their strategic directions, digital divide debates focused on epistemological access, and they also began to conduct research with a pedagogical agenda. In phase 4 mobile learning and social media came to the fore. The research agenda shifted from whether students would use technology to how to exploit what students already use to transform teaching and learning practices. The paper concludes that South Africa’s higher education institutions have moved from being solely responsible for both their own relatively poor ICT infrastructure and education provision to cloud-based ICT infrastructure with “unlimited” educational resources that are freely, openly and easily available within and beyond the institution. Although mobile and social media are more evident now than ever before, teaching and learning practice in South African higher education remains largely unchanged.
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    Towards a shared understanding of emerging technologies: Experiences in a collaborative research project in South Africa
    (The African Journal of Information Systems (AJIS), 2013) Gachago, Daniela; Ivala, Eunice; Backhouse, Judy; Bosman, Jan Petrus; Bozalek, Vivienne
    While the practice of using educational technologies in Higher Education is increasingly common among educators, there is a paucity of research on innovative uses of emerging technologies to transform teaching and learning. This paper draws on data collected as part of a larger study aimed at investigating emerging technologies and their use in South African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to improve teaching and learning. The research employed a mixed method research design, using both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods—quantitative data from a survey of 262 respondents from 22 public HEIs in South Africa and qualitative data gathered from 16 experts/practitioners on their self-reflective definition of the term “emerging technologies.” The paper concludes that levels of institutional development, access to resources, discipline, group belonging and individual motivation of respondents influenced the way they defined emerging technologies including what constituted an innovative use of technology, foregrounding the contextuality of emerging technologies.
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    Transforming teaching with emerging technologies: Implications for higher education institutions
    (SUN, 2013) Bozalek, Vivienne; Ng’ambi, Dick; Gachago, Daniela
    A gulf is widening between the technologies used by students, those used by educators and those provided by institutions. However, knowledge about the impact of so-called emerging technologies on learning or the readiness of higher education institutions (HEIs) to engage with such technologies in the South African context is relatively thin. This article uses Rogers’ (2003) diffusion of innovations model as a conceptual framework to examine the diffusion, adoption and appropriation of emerging technologies in South African HEIs. We report on a survey which examined how emerging technologies are used in innovative pedagogical practices to transform teaching and learning across South African HEIs. The article concludes that, in order to foster a greater uptake or more institution-wide diffusion of use of emerging technologies, institutional opinion leaders need to purposefully create an enabling environment by giving recognition to and communicating with change agents, and developing policies that will encourage institutional-wide engagement with emerging technologies.
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    Travelling into the other’s world: South African pre-service teacher education students’ construction of difference, belonging and identity
    (Education Faculty, Stellenbosch Library, 2018) Gachago, Daniela; Bozalek, Vivienne; Ng’ambi, Dick
    Against the backdrop of continuing racism ‒ both overt and subtle – in South Africa’s classrooms, this article describes one lecturer’s attempt at facilitating conversations around race relations in South Africa with nine pre-service student educators. Using Bamberg’s (2012) positioning analysis to analyse how students constructed stories of difference, belonging and identity it transpired that students tended to position themselves first and foremost along racial lines, revealing their experiences of continuing academic and social segregation. Although students expressed a desire to overcome these divides, they struggled to visualise a world where black and white students could engage beyond their comfort zones, moving beyond the narratives with which they grow up. Lugones’ (1987) concept of world-travelling and her suggestion that world travelling might be more difficult for those who are at most ease in their lives, was useful to unpack and understand the different roles students performed. Students’ stories also showed the importance of destabilising dominant understandings of subjectivity, by allowing the emergence of fragmented narratives in difficult conversations. Recommendations of how to use narratives to facilitate students’ world travelling include the emphasis on intersectionality, fluidity and complexity in students’ stories but also discuss the challenges when facilitating such a process and the importance of self-reflexivity on the part of the facilitator.
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    The use of emerging technologies for authentic learning: A South African study in higher education
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) Bozalek, Vivienne; Gachago, Daniela; Alexander, Lucy; Watters, Kathy; Wood, Denise; Ivala, Eunice; Herrington, Jan
    It is now widely accepted that the transmission of disciplinary knowledge is insufficient to prepare students leaving higher education for the workplace. Authentic learning has been suggested as a way to bring the necessary complexity into learning to deal with challenges in professional practice after graduation. This study investigates how South African higher educators have used emerging technologies to achieve the characteristics of authentic learning. A survey was administered to a population of 265 higher educators in South Africa who self-identified as engaging with emerging technologies. From this survey, a sample of 21 respondentswere selected to further investigate their practice through in-depth interviewing using Herrington, Reeves and Oliver’s nine characteristics of authentic learning as a framework. Interrater analysis undertaken by five members of the research team revealed both consistencies and differences among the twenty one cases across the nine elements of authentic learning. The highest levels of authenticity were found for the elements authentic context and task, and the lowest for articulation. Furthermore, there was a moderate correlation identified between levels of authenticity and the role played by emerging technologies in achieving the authenticity, showing a potentially symbiotic relationship between them.