Containing HIV and AIDS: Creating a readers’ theatre script for professional learning in higher education

We worked together to create a readers’ theatre script as a vehicle for learning about using everyday objects to open up conversations in a workshop on HIV and AIDS curriculum integration research in higher education. Through creating the script and a series of interconnected dialogue pieces we uncovered experiences and understandings of productive containment and connections in professional learning in higher education, especially in relation to sensitive areas such as HIV and AIDS. We demonstrate how we composed the readers’ theatre script as a creative analytical practice to gain insights into our learning, while also discovering more about how this arts-based research practice can enhance individual and collaborative meaning making. Through arts-based collaborative self-study research we were able to deepen and extend our learning in a supportive and inventive manner, which fuelled hopefulness and a renewed sense of purpose

Scrapbooking as a tool for transdisciplinary professional learning about HIV and AIDS curriculum integration in higher education

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‘Sink or swim?’: Learning from stories of becoming academics within a transforming university terrain

The meanings connected with becoming or being an academic are constantly shifting, on account of diverse forces that act on universities. The authors of this article portray their learning as a research team of four academics (including one early-career academic) and a doctoral student who took a narrative inquiry approach to listening and responding to their early-career colleagues’ stories of becoming and being academics within a transforming university landscape. Imaginative engagement with these stories through the evocative and reflexive medium of poetry awakened possibilities for navigating the uncertain terrain of academia. The article draws attention to collegial relationships as critical to the growth of self-belief and self-resourcefulness in becoming and being academics. It demonstrates how, through collective participation, novice and experienced academics can become valuable sources of learning and support for each other

Learning from the first year of the Transformative Education/al Studies (TES) project

The Transformative Education/al Studies project (TES) is a three-year, funded project led by researchers from three universities: a University of Technology, a Research-Intensive university, and a rural Comprehensive University. The project participants are academic staff members who are pursuing Masters and Doctoral studies and their supervisors. These participants, all engaged in self-study of their practice in Higher Education, form an inter-institutional, trans-disciplinary learning community. TES aims to enhance and study the development of self-reflexive pedagogic, research and supervision capacity among these participants. In this article, we make public our learning thus far about supporting an emerging postgraduate research learning community involving academic staff working and studying in three very different university contexts. The data sources comprise digital logbooks kept by participants, workshop evaluations, and the researchers' personal reflections and communications. Our analysis contributes to a body of academic work that explores how collaborative and social approaches to scholarship can enhance research capacity, productivity and quality in Higher Education. The conceptual underpinning of the article is that of reflexive ubuntu, which demands a consciousness of our developing "selves" as researchers and supervisors and of our interrelationships with other people.

Assessing the impact of the 'skills revolution' among women in South Africa

Commissioned by the PWMSAThis study sought to examine the extent to which there is/has been a skills revolution in South Africa, the extent to which such a revolution targets/has targeted women and the extent to, and ways in which such skills revolution benefits/has benefitted women, particularly those who have been historically disadvantaged. In essence, the study examined the nature of opportunities available to South African women as a result of the skills revolution and the factors that impede their use of these opportunities

Breathing under water: a transcontinental conversation about the "why" of co-facilitating transdiscilinary self-study learning communities

The preceding chapters in this book exemplify polyvocal professional learning through self-study research as phenomenon (what) and method (how). Overall, these transdisciplinary exemplars comprise a complex conversation about supporting and enacting professional learning, with self-study methodology at the centre.

'Walking our talk': exploring supervision of postgraduate self-study research through metaphor drawing

The authors of this article portray their learning as a group of eight academics who met to examine the roles and relationships of supervisors of postgraduate self-study research. In the article, they represent how through a metaphor-drawing activity they were able collectively to rethink their experiences and understandings of becoming and being supervisors of postgraduate self-study students. They used a metaphor-drawing activity to gain further understanding of self-study supervision, while also learning more about how visual methods can assist in self-study research. Significantly, in their drawings the supervisor was portrayed as a partner working with the student during the supervision process, rather than as a provider of expert knowledge. Through collaborative interactions and sharing of their personal images of supervision of postgraduate self-study research with critical friends, they were able to reconsider their practices in a reflexive manner that provided insight into possibilities for enhancing their supervisory roles and relationships.

Learning about co-flexivity in a transdisciplinary self-study research supervision community

In South Africa, every postgraduate (master's or doctoral) student is usually assigned one academic advisor, known as a supervisor. The traditional model is the apprenticeship model of individual mentoring. This model is usually supplemented by informal and ad hoc support programmes