Browsing by Author "Verster, B"

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    Flipped out in the blended classroom, the good, the bad and the ugly: When academics become students
    (Sabinet, 2018) van den Berg, Carolien; Verster, B; Collett, Karen S.
    This article explores the well-being of three academics from different higher education institutions and disciplines, as they engage in professional academic development (PAD) courses using technology. A collaborative autoethnographic approach is applied to reflect on our professional development experience. The higher education landscape is shifting to a cloud-based ICT infrastructure, opening up multiple educational opportunities in teaching and learning. Lecturers in higher education institutions (HEIs) are required to use a range of new technological tools and applications and engage in new learning methodologies. This is modelled in professional academic development courses, which integrate technology and digital tools into the teaching and learning process. Participant perspectives on PAD within a blended learning environment are examined through the lenses of an ethic of care and authentic learning to uncover social justice pedagogy. Using a diffractive approach in a collaborative autoethnographic study, the possibilities, tensions and contradictions of using technology to enhance pedagogy are explored. Findings point to the importance of an Ethic of Care and authentic learning, in order to enhance a social justice pedagogy in PAD.
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    Incubating a slow pedagogy in professional academic development: An ethics of care perspective
    (South African Journal of Higher Education, 2018) Collett, Karen; van den Berg, Carolien; Verster, B; Bozalek, Vivienne
    The current neoliberal impetus in higher education has effects on all aspects of academic life, including professional academic development. These effects include increasing workloads and more casualisation of academic work, particularly teaching and a greater emphasis on quantification of scholarly outputs. The Slow movement provides an alternative way for valuing academic life (Berg and Seeber 2016; Bozalek 2017; Hartman and Darab 2012; Martell 2014; Ulmer 2017), as does the ethics of care, which has been used as a normative framework to evaluate and re-imagine academic development from a different perspective than that of neoliberalism (Bozalek et al. 2014; Tronto 2010). To date, however, there has been little engagement with how Slow pedagogy (Berg and Seeber 2016) might be put into conversation with an ethics of care to re/configure professional academic development. Our paper addresses this gap by diffractively reading the political ethics of care (Tronto 1993; 2013) through the concept of a Slow pedagogy in order to reimagine creative provocations for academic development. Experiences of a group of participants, who attended inter-institutional academic development courses in Cape Town, are drawn upon to illustrate the superpositions of these diffractive readings. The intra-actions in face-to-face and online meetings and artefacts are analysed to see what was helpful for the development and flourishing of the small group of participants using the new insights gained through the diffractive readings. Findings show how a professional development course, informed by elements of care ethics and Slow pedagogy, enhance the sustainability of professional learning communities.