Power, democracy and technology: the potential dangers of care for teachers in higher education

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.Dept of Higher Education and Trainin

What is critical in EdTech research?

There are a number of editors on the CriSTaL editorial board, whose interest is in educational technologies, emerging technologies, ICTs in education, digital education and digital pedagogies, which are some of the many terms that are used in our field. These are usually the editors I, Daniela, as managing editor, draw on, when we get submissions from authors on issues around the use of technology in learning and teaching. We receive many submissions, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, but the rejection rate is also increasing due to the majority of the papers failing to meet CriSTaL’s aim and scope. I invited some of my editorial board colleagues into a conversation to chat about what we would like to see in a paper tackling technologies in learning and teaching and which papers we feel do not suit CriSTaL’s aims and scope. The colleagues who joined me in this conversation were Dr Najma Agherdien, who is in Curriculum and Teaching at the University of Witwatersrand and Dr Nicola Pallitt, an educational technology specialist and senior lecturer at Rhodes University. We shared our reflections with other members of the board, such as Paul Prinsloo, Research Professor in Open and Distance Learning (ODL) in the College of Economic and Management Sciences at the University of South Africa, and Tutaleni Asino, Associate Professor in the Learning, Design and Technology Program at Oklahoma State University, and invited our critical friend Laura Czerniewicz, emeritus professor at the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town, to get an outside perspective as well

Sentimentality and digital storytelling: towards a post-conflict pedagogy in pre-service teacher education in South Africa

Includes bibliographical referencesThis study is set against the background of a continued lack of social engagement across difference in South African classrooms. It set out to explore the potential of a specific pedagogical intervention - digital storytelling - as a post-conflict pedagogy in a diverse pre-service teacher education classroom. Personal storytelling has long been used to unearth lived experiences of differently positioned students in the classroom. More recently, the use of digital technologies has made it easier to transform these personal stories into publishable, screenable and sharable digital resources. In general, digital storytelling is lauded in the literature for its potential to facilitate an understanding across difference, allowing empathy and compassion for the 'Other'. In this study, I question this potentially naive take on digital storytelling in the context of post-conflict pedagogies. I was interested in the emotions emerging - particularly in what I termed a potential sentimentality - in both the digital storytelling process and product. I looked at sentimentality in a specific way: as the tension between the centrality of emotions to establish an affective engagement between a storyteller and the audience, and digital stories' exaggerated pull on these emotions. This is seen, for example, in the difficulty that we have when telling stories in stepping out of normative, sentimental discourses to trouble the way we perform gender, race, class and sexuality, all of which are found in the actual stories we tell and the images we use. It is also found in the audience response to digital storytelling. Adopting a performative narrative inquiry research methodology, framed by theorists such as Butler, Ahmed, and Young, all three feminist authors interested in the politics of difference, working at the intersection of queer, cultural, critical race and political theory, I adopted three different analytical approaches to a narrative inquiry of emotions. I used these approaches to analyse stories told in a five-day digital storytelling train-the-trainer workshop with nine pre-service teacher-education students. Major findings of this study are: In everyday life stories, students positioned themselves along racial identities, constructing narratives of group belonging based primarily on their racialized identities. However, in some students' stories - particularly those that offer a more complex view of privilege, acknowledging the intersectionality of class, gender, age, sexuality and race - these conversations are broken up in interesting ways, creating connections between students beyond a racial divide. Looking at the digital story as a multimodal text with its complex orchestration of meaning-making through its different modes, it became clear to me that conveying authorial intent is difficult and that the message of a digital story can be compromised in various ways. The two storytellers I looked at in more detail drew from different semiotic histories and had access to different semiotic resources, such as different levels of critical media literacy, with this compromising their authorial intent to tell counterstories. Finally, the genre storytellers chose, the context into which their stories were told, along with their positioning within this context in terms of their privilege, affected the extent to which they could make themselves vulnerable. This consequently shaped the audience response, which was characterised by passive empathy, a sentimental attempt to connect to what makes us the 'same', rather than recognising systemic and structural injustices that characterise our engagements across difference

Converging institutional expertise to model teaching and learning with emerging technologies

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.Department of HE and Training approved lis

No Size Fits All: Design Considerations for Networked Professional Development in Higher Education

This paper develops a framework for design considerations that can be used to analyse or design networked professional development (NPD) in higher education (HE) contexts. The model was developed after reflecting on three professional development (PD) courses, each with facilitators who are academic developers across the African continent. Using a collaborative autoethnographic methodology (Bali, Crawford, Jessen, Signorelli, Zamora, 2015), the three authors reflect on design considerations for different forms of blended and online PD courses, based on their experiences of designing and/or facilitating these interventions and with PD more broadly. We argue that design considerations, such as context, have become more complex and that understanding the dynamics between them are important. We suggest that course designs can be positioned along a range of dimensions, namely: open/closed, structured/unstructured, facilitated/unfacilitated, certified/uncertified, with/without date commitments, homogenous versus autonomous learning path, content vs process centric, serious vs playful and individual vs collaborative. Our design considerations framework is not meant to judge courses or provide a formula for how best to design them, but rather to highlight how courses can be understood on each of the dimensions we identify, and how design decisions place a course in particular positions along the spectrum, depending on context. We noted some relationships among dimensions and links to learning theories. We also identified various tensions that arise in the design of NPD, such as between academic developers' pedagogical advocacy vs. usefulness, the need to maintain volunteerism without exploitation of affective labour, and the struggle to create spaces for agency within institutional rules

Transforming teaching with emerging technologies: Implications for higher education institutions

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.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Nurturing creative confidence and learner empathy: Designing for academic staff development

As a contemporary and boundary spanning approach, design thinking is gaining traction in higher education, but it has not yet been established in academic staff development. The aim of this study is to reflect on a recent staff development intervention on blended learning course design, aimed at promoting a ‘design thinking mindset’ among university lecturers. By analysing empirical data gathered through participant interactions, we discuss the implications and potential of design thinking for academic staff development. Data analysis shows an increased awareness of the complex and diverse student body, a recognition for interdisciplinary collaboration, mentoring and reflective thinking. Additionally, it is highlighted that adopting design thinking is not without challenges, which include the need for continued practice, securing departmental buy-in and upscaling initiatives. The findings emphasise the importance of creating a ‘safe’ space to experiment, modelling a designing-on-the-go approach, focusing on the iterative processes of (re)design, providing scaffolding for learning, making design thinking processes explicit, building a community of practice, regular feedback and maintaining the balance between playfulness and reflection. Success of such an intervention will rely on balancing the development of design thinking skills, a design thinking mindset and creative confidence

Diffracting socially just pedagogies through stained glass

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.DHE