Towards an e-learning ecologies approach to pedagogy in a post-COVID world

This article responds to themes in this special Covid-19 edition of the Journal of Education. It specifically concentrates on online digital technology as one of the core dimensions of education's pandemic-related response. As the default mode of teaching during the pandemic, Online Emergency Remote Teaching evoked contentious responses about the future directions of education in a post-Covid world. The article is an attempt to shed light on the role of digital technology in education. We present an argument that supports an ‘e-learning ecologies’ approach to pedagogy to inform teaching and learning in institutional context.  We argue that a reflexive pedagogy-led response to digital technology holds promise for creating a productive educational platform to promote students’ critical epistemic engagement to secure viable futures.   Keywords:   Post-Covid pandemic, digital technology, e-learning ecologies, reflexive pedagogy, design-based learning &nbsp

The emergence of an education policy dispositif in South Africa: An analysis of educational discourses associated with the fourth industrial revolution

Abstract The notion of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has recently entered the public and policy domain in South Africa. It has rapidly found resonance in policy discourse and the popular media. It has also entered the language of educational policy and institutions. The impact of 4IR on educational thinking and practice has hitherto not featured in academic discussion on education in South Africa except for a keynote plenary session at the annual conference of the South African Education Research Association (SAERA) in Durban (October 2019). The South African Education Deans Forum recently published a call for the submission of chapters for a book on teacher education, 4IR and decolonisation. This article is based on an address that I delivered at the SAERA 2019 conference as part of the plenary panel. The article consists of 4 sections. The first section offers a consideration of the entry of 4IR discourse into the educational imaginary. I suggest in this section that 4IR discourse has installed a socio-technical imaginary in South Africa’s unequal educational dispensation. The second section concentrates on the construction of educational governance. Based on research on 4IR-related policy making, I discuss the policy directions taken by the Department of Higher Education and Training and Department of Basic Education in giving effect to ways of engaging with 4IR in each of their domains. The third section features a discussion of the impact of technological disruption on society, the economy and education. The final section is a discussion of the emerging educational architectures in the 4IR and a critical consideration of the curriculum and pedagogical dimensions of 4IR, which, I argue, are informed by an orientation which prioritises the acquisition of generic skills. Sidelining knowledge and concepts as central to the structuring of the curriculum, a generic skills approach succumbs to a ‘knowledge blindness’ that holds pernicious consequences for epistemic access in South Africa. Keywords: fourth industrial revolution, education in South Africa, policy dispositif, educational governance, genericism &nbsp

A pedagogy of supervision: ‘knowledgeability’ through relational engagement

an initial participant in this debate, having published an article on the topic in 2005. In thisresponse article I offer an exposition of what I term a ‘pedagogy of supervision’ (PoS),which I suggest as a way of addressing the debate’s silence about the link between thepersonal or subjective dynamics of students’ thesis work and their knowledgeabilityacquisition processes during the supervision process. Based on my personal supervisionexperiences, I present three engagement moments – habitus engagement, knowledgeabilityengagement and data-analysis engagement – as a way of substantiating a productive PoSapproach. The article is an argument for understanding supervision work as leveragingstudents’ intellectual knowledgeability through active relational mediation, which I suggestis more likely to secure the student’s ability to produce a thesis that makes a knowledgecontribution to the chosen field of study

Lecturers' accounts of their curriculum practices at a university of technology

This article focuses on lectures’ accounts of their curriculum practices at a University of Technology (UoT). Based on semi-structured interviews with lecturers, it examines their engagement with the curriculum and the practices they adopt to ensure student learning. I draw on Bourdieu’s (1990) concepts of field, reflexivity, illusio and doxa to highlight the lecturers’ ability to negotiate the university’s field and the reflexive stances they adopt to change and adapt their teaching practices. The article highlights the importance of cultivating reflexivity in academic staff development programmes and the need to strengthen lecturers’ reflexivity at UoTs. The article’s findings show the tension lecturers experience between teaching and research and the subordinate role of research in their curriculum practices. The article discusses the lecturers’ commitment to the curriculum’s values and shows that these factors were crucial in developing lecturer agency and reflexivity. The lecturers’ beliefs about their teaching and pedagogical strategies they utilised are discussed as a part of their curriculum practices. These were critical in establishing their agency and in producing innovative curriculum practices. My research shows the significance of utilising information communication technologies (ICTs) by the lecturers as a pedagogical strategy in the enactment of the curriculum.

Students’ emerging pedagogical reflexivities in respect of their "student teacherly becoming" on a PGCE Diversity and Inclusivity module

Situated in the context of teaching in higher education, the article provides a discussion on how student teachers in a Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) module mediate their ‘teacherly becoming’ (Author 2012) as pre-service teachers. The article presents the argument that learning to become a professional teacher involves not only what the students are learning, but also who they are becoming. The data for the article is drawn from student assignments which invited students to draw on the module readings and class discussions to consider their positioning as intentional/unintentional bearers of the past. The assignment required of them to consider how their emerging reflexivities as student teachers are influenced by their personal and educational backgrounds, and how these affected their ‘becoming’ as student teachers in the PGCE programme. The data is presented and discussed on the basis of four themes that emerged from the student essays. The article concludes by suggesting that modules that prepare student teachers for the complexity of the teaching profession and interaction with their students will be more productive if opportunities are provided in the module’s assessment modalities, for the students to reflexively engage with aspects of their ‘being and becoming’ as pre-service teachers

Embodying pedagogical habitus change: A narrative-based account of a teacher’s pedagogical change within a professional learning community

Situated in the context of teaching in South Africa, this article narrates the journey of pedagogical change and adaptation of one teacher who participated in a professional learning community (PLC). It discusses the durability and malleability of this teacher’s pedagogical disposition by arguing for a conceptualisation of teacher change that moves beyond a cognitivist approach, i.e. one that is driven primarily by knowledge acquisition, to one that engages the embodied practices of teachers in the light of the shifts and adaptations that they undergo when trying to establish augmented pedagogical approaches. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, bodily hexis and doxa, this article argues that sustained pedagogical change involves an engagement with the teacher’s embodied pedagogical habitus which has formed over time given the educational spaces they have inhabited. The article is based on data collected over a two-year period from PLC transcripts, observational school visits and multiple in-depth interviews with the teacher. This article describes the constraints or ‘hardness’ of change as the teacher engages with his embodied pedagogical habitus which has developed over time. However, this article further argues that possibilities of embodied pedagogical adaptation and change exist in the reflexive, on-going dialogical space that a professional learning community offers

Foundation Phase teachers’ experiences of teaching the subject, coding, in selected Western Cape schools

Several teachers have recently started introducing coding into their teaching in primary schools. This comes on the back of the emerging prominence of educational technology and the teaching of computational skills at school level, in light of the country’s policy commitment to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Coding has been punted as 1 of 2 essential subjects to be launched in schools countrywide from 2020; the other being robotics. In this article we focus on the implementation of coding as a subject in selected Foundation Phase classes in the Western Cape. We aim to gain an understanding of coding as a subject from the perspective of teachers who are implementing this very new subject in the Foundation Phase. Wespecifically discuss the experiences and challenges of teachers who have been teaching the subject over the last few years, based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 4 Foundation Phase teachers. Overall, we provide a set of considerations for the optimal implementation of coding as a subject in Foundation Phase in South African schools. The participants’ experiences highlight the challenges associated with implementation, teachers’ pedagogical skills and competences, and resource requirements. We raise the following areas that need to be addressed for the successful implementation of coding: professional development addressing teaching methodologies on the development of computational thinking skills in young learners, providing support for teachers, addressing time constraints in the teaching of the subject, and providing resources

Dialogical habitus engagement: The twists and turns of teachers’ pedagogical learning within a professional learning community

The focus of this article is on the pedagogical learning of five teachers in a professional learning community (PLC). The PLC was conceptualised as a means of generating pedagogical learning and change among the participating teachers in consonance with a socially just educational orientation. The two authors of this article participated in the PLC as participants and facilitators. This article discusses the difficulty that the PLC encountered as it engaged with the ‘hardness’ of pedagogical change among the teachers. We suggest that the dialogical approach of the PLC, as a form of ‘habitus engagement’, has the potential to capacitate the form of adaptation and change required by the teachers. The article discusses the twists and turns involved in the PLC’s struggle to deliberate productively about pedagogical change. It describes an absence of a didactic language and pedagogic reflexivity among the teachers that caused the PLC conversations to remain ‘stuck’ in discussions that revolved around issues external to pedagogical knowledge transfer, mainly regarding keeping order and discipline in their classes. We describe how introducing a pedagogical tool into the PLC deliberations enabled the teachers to move towards a more participatory approach in their teaching practices. The exemplifying basis of our article is our deliberations with the five teachers in the PLC and the article describes the ‘methodo-logic’ of the PLC process that incorporated an emphasis on reflexive dialogue and ongoing interaction to establish a generative pedagogical platform for social justice pedagogies