Browsing by Author "Mitchell, Veronica"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    The case studies: authentic learning
    (Routledge, 2014) Herrington, Jan; Mitchell, Veronica; Rowe, Michael; Titus, Simone
    Moving from theory to practice in higher education is deeply challenging. While exploring pedagogical models in the literature may lead to tacit understanding of general principles, actually implementing these principles in practice can be an entirely different matter.
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    Developing scholarship of teaching and learning through a community of enquiry
    (UWC, 2017) Bozalek, Vivienne; Dison, Arona; Alperstein, Melanie; Mitchell, Veronica
    A growing interest in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in higher education requires the seeking of opportunities for its development within and across disciplines and institutions. However, rewards for individual competitiveness in research publications, including the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), tend to discourage collaboration, which could be highly conducive to the development of SoTL. This paper proposes the value of working together in a collaborative community of enquiry (CoE) in order to take forward SoTL in higher education. We draw on Cassidy et al.’s (2008) and Christie et al.’s (2007) model of seven elements of a CoE to explore our own experience of forming a CoE emanating from an inter-institutional professional course on teaching and learning, which assisted us to collaboratively contribute to SoTL. The above model was found to be useful, but could be enhanced through an expanded perspective, incorporating the affective turn.
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    Diffracting reflection: a move beyond reflective practice
    (UNISA Press, 2017) Mitchell, Veronica
    Reflective practice has become a core component in higher education studies. In the health sciences, reflective tasks are required throughout the undergraduate programmes, yet many students struggle to find value in these tasks for their present and future professional practice. Benefits that can be derived from the process are undermined by this lack of motivation for reflective engagement. Concern around the static, contained, individualist nature of reflections that often face judgement through assessment can be addressed by opening up the process to generate new potentials. In this paper, I draw on new materialism and the Baradian (2007) philosophy of diffraction to move beyond the reflective practices of representation and sameness by affirmatively working with/through differences. I refer to data collected in an ethics approved research study at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, to explain a context of unjust practices in which students learn. I demonstrate how students’ reflective texts shared online on the Google Drive platform can be productive and transformative material forces that enact new knowledge, valued by students. The apparatus of text-students-events is put to work creating new possibilities to enable a socially just pedagogy in medical education.
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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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    A diffractive exploration of affect: Learning, research and teaching in obstetrics
    (South African Association for Research and Development in Higher Education (SAARDHE), 2016) Mitchell, Veronica
    Instances of abuse, neglect and disrespect to women in labour are not uncommon in South Africa's public health birthing facilities. These social injustices are surrounded by a pervasive silence that confronts undergraduate medical students in their first practical obstetrics rotation. In this article I draw on affect theory to explore how students engage with these unjust practices. Through a diffractive analysis I question how drawings can be used to elicit affect as a pedagogic device towards developing a socially just pedagogy in obstetrics. In this ethics-approved study I address three aspects of student learning. Firstly, the ways in which the medical curriculum appears to obfuscate affect. Secondly, how affect is entangled in student learning, complicating responses to unjust practices. Thirdly, how drawings as data-in-the-making have elicited students' affective responses to confront difficult curriculum encounters. This visual methodology is thus opening in/determinate educational spaces for activism against unjust practices.
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    A diffractive reading of dialogical feedback through the political ethics of care
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Bozalek, Vivienne; Mitchell, Veronica; Dison, Arona; Alperstein, Melanie
    With regard to improving higher education feedback practices, there is an increasing interest in using the efficacy of dialogue rather than the more traditional unidirectional approaches. We build on this impetus by considering how the ethics of care can be used to analyse the dialogical aspects of feedback. By diffractively reading insights of Boud and Molloy [2013a. “What is the Problem with Feedback?” In Feedback in Higher and Professional Education: Understanding it and Doing it Well, edited by D. Boud, and E. Molloy, 1–10. London: Routledge; Boud, D., and E. Molloy. 2013b. “Rethinking Models of Feedback for Learning: The Challenge of Design.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 38 (6): 698–712] on dialogic feedback through the moral elements of care ethics, this paper proposes a novel way of discerning the extent to which the dialogical giving and receiving of feedback contributes to learning. To illustrate this, we draw on experiences from an Emerging Technologies professional development course for higher educators. We examine our own dialogical interactions of giving and receiving feedback using the moral elements of care ethics – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust, to provide a concrete example of how the ethics of care can be used productively for evaluating feedback practices.
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    Obstetric violence within students� rite of passage: The reproduction of the obstetric subject and its racialised (m)other
    (UNISA Press, 2021) van der Waal, Rodante; Mitchell, Veronica; Bozalek, Vivienne
    Building on the work of Mbembe (2019) and Silva (2007), we theorise how the obstetric institution can still be considered fundamentally modern, that is, entangled with colonialism, slavery, bio- and necropolitics and patriarchal subjectivity. We argue that the modern obstetric subject (doctor or midwife) representing the obstetric institution engulfs the (m)other in a typically modern way as othered, racialised, affectable and outerdetermined, in order to constitute itself in terms of self-determination and universal reason. While Davis-Floyd (1987) described obstetric training as a rite of passage into a technocratic model of childbirth, we argue that students� rite of passage is not merely an initiation into a technological model of childbirth. The many instances of obstetric violence and racism in their training make a more fundamental problem visible, namely that students come of age within obstetrics through the violent appropriation of the (m)other. We amplify students� curricular encounters in two colonially related geopolitical spaces, South Africa and the Netherlands, and in two professions, obstetric medicine and midwifery, to highlight global systemic tendencies that push students to cross ethical, social and political boundaries towards the (m)other they are trained to care for. The embedment of obstetric violence in their rite of passage ensures the reproduction of the modern obstetric subject, the racialised (m)other, and institutionalised violence worldwide.