In this paper we offer glimpses of the way some teachers may work creatively within the constrain... more In this paper we offer glimpses of the way some teachers may work creatively within the constraints of our South African education system.There are many studies that focus on issues such as teacher attrition, low morale, work load, job security, and teacher migration, all suggesting something of the dire straits in which education is located in the postapartheid era (Hall, Altman, Nkomo, Peltzer and Zuma, 2005; Ramrathan, 2002; Singh, 2001; Manik, 2005; Hayward, 2002). Against these negative impressions, we wish to present counter-narratives of teacher success, resistance and inventiveness, exploring teachersi?½ lives and their narratives through the theme of home. The theme of home [and homelessness] has been an important one in post-colonial experience, and a variety of genre of writings have shown how dislocation and unhomeliness [unheimlich], and the attendant i?½dis-easei?½ that results, are experienced, managed and contested. We begin the paper by providing a brief theoretical...
This paper presents an understanding of what it means to be a teacher in a school defined as 'rur... more This paper presents an understanding of what it means to be a teacher in a school defined as 'rural'. From a sociological perspective, we consider the mechanisms and ways of knowing that are adopted by a teacher for understanding not only the external world but for being a certain kind of teacher for a school in a rural setting. Employing data techniques from life history and collage compositions, data was produced with a teacher we have named Hilton. The data focused on his daily lived experiences and the social realities of working in the context of rural education to offer an expanded social and collective approach to teacher identity. Through his story, as told and experienced by him, we foreground dominant discourses at work in a rural context, and show how specific discourses define Hilton's life and work as a teacher in specific ways. Despite the challenges and adversities he faces, we show how as a teacher he chooses to negotiate-through resistance and complicity-the discourses that dominate rural schooling and its culture, learners, teachers and communities. The article concludes that a teacher's capacity to disrupt and challenge stereotypical meanings of rural schooling involves ongoing dialogue with the self, with teachers, with learners and the wider community.
“New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher ... more “New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher Professional Learning” begins with a prologue that tells a story of how the book editors—Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell—have engaged with their own learning, as well as with what the book can offer to others. The chapter goes on to retrace research connections between memory-work, the arts, and professional learning. Next, the book editors look back at their personal, professional, and scholarly connections as a way to signal their ongoing collaborations across Canada and South Africa. They also draw attention to political and social links between Canada and South Africa. Thereafter, the editors explain how each of the subsequent nine chapters was composed from juxtaposing several “mosaic” pieces written by 21 new and emerging scholars in South Africa and Canada. This is followed by a synopsis of each chapter. To conclude, the editors highlight the scholarly contributions of Memory Mosaics.
Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedag... more Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedagogies begin? As self-study researchers, we understand that it starts with our selves. Through self-study of educational practice, we identify issues that we are concerned, curious and passionate about in relation to our own pedagogies and we research those issues in our own contexts. While the research topics are diverse, our common focus is on what difference we as educators can make. Our exploration is about how we can re-imagine our selves, in the hope that our change will have a positive impact on other people. We have confidence that there is always room for change, no matter how small; there is always something we can see or do differently. Thus, we aim to develop practitioner-led, context-specific ideas for change and to explore ways to make that change happen (Pithouse, Mitchell & Weber, 2009). Importantly though, we recognise that, although educational change begins with 'me', it must also involve 'us'. Because we view teaching, learning and researching as interactive processes, we realise that we need the perspectives of significant others such as students, colleagues, and other self-study researchers or 'critical friends' to "challenge our assumptions and biases, reveal our inconsistencies [and] expand our potential interpretations" (LaBoksey, 2004: 849). We also need to make our self-study research available for public critique in order to contribute to public conversations about educational change.
Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedag... more Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedagogies begin? As self-study researchers, we understand that it starts with our selves. Through self-study of educational practice, we identify issues that we are concerned, curious and passionate about in relation to our own pedagogies and we research those issues in our own contexts. While the research topics are diverse, our common focus is on what difference we as educators can make. Our exploration is about how we can re-imagine our selves, in the hope that our change will have a positive impact on other people. We have confidence that there is always room for change, no matter how small; there is always something we can see or do differently. Thus, we aim to develop practitioner-led, context-specific ideas for change and to explore ways to make that change happen (Pithouse, Mitchell & Weber, 2009). Importantly though, we recognise that, although educational change begins with 'me', it must also involve 'us'. Because we view teaching, learning and researching as interactive processes, we realise that we need the perspectives of significant others such as students, colleagues, and other self-study researchers or 'critical friends' to "challenge our assumptions and biases, reveal our inconsistencies [and] expand our potential interpretations" (LaBoksey, 2004: 849). We also need to make our self-study research available for public critique in order to contribute to public conversations about educational change.
According to Edwards (2009), photographs have intricately connected meanings as images and as obj... more According to Edwards (2009), photographs have intricately connected meanings as images and as objects. As objects, photographs can be pinned up on a surface, framed, or just stuck on a wall (Edwards, 2009).
Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research follows on from a 3-day inter... more Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research follows on from a 3-day international research symposium held in Durban, South Africa in February 2016, organised by Daisy Pillay, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, and Inbanathan Naicker.
supervision is a complex and demanding pedagogic practice, which goes beyond research and discipl... more supervision is a complex and demanding pedagogic practice, which goes beyond research and disciplinary expertise on the part of the supervisor. Considering that a limitation of traditional systems of doctoral research training is the master/apprentice supervisory model, we question whether different genres of research, such as self-study, add to the complexity of a supervision relationship, where the support process between supervisor and student changes the practitioner and her situation. By adopting a reflexive stance in a self-study supervision relationship, we engage in the process of self-scrutiny and tenuous knowing of our positions in this relationship as each of us came to know it, and the shifting nature of these positions as illuminated through particular moments in the self-study doctoral project. Drawing on excerpts from supervisory meeting conversations we write together about our struggles relating to our fixed positionings, dis- positionings, and repositionings necess...
Encountering objects Family objects Cultural objects Memory objects Objects transcend black and w... more Encountering objects Family objects Cultural objects Memory objects Objects transcend black and white Objects work in transversals Objects open becomings Disruptions refocused us To speak back, provoke, dispel. .. Produce questions, entry points Pause, change direction! Relaunch ourselves Make new connections In diverse contexts Walking with students Mapping with students Know our students Inspired to read and write Improve educational practices Social change and equity viii
Nareen Gonsalves, Pieter du Toit, Theresa Chisanga (together with a team of colleagues at her uni... more Nareen Gonsalves, Pieter du Toit, Theresa Chisanga (together with a team of colleagues at her university), and Daisy Pillay are all higher education teachers and researchers (teacher researchers) working in very different university settings in South Africa.
In this article, we – a research team of academic staff and postgraduate students – take a narrat... more In this article, we – a research team of academic staff and postgraduate students – take a narrative inquiry stance to explore what we can learn from one African international postgraduate student‟s stories of experience on a South African university campus. We use the medium of narrative vignettes – brief evocative scenes or accounts – to re-present data generated through unstructured interviews and collage-making. Framed through a multiperspectival theoretical lens, the vignettes reveal how the student‟s everyday life on campus is constrained by fear of xenophobic harassment and violence. We argue that the setting or backdrop for his learning can therefore be understood as pedagogically unsound, even when effective teaching and learning activities might be seen to be taking place in designated spaces. To conclude, we consider possibilities for cultivating pedagogic settings that are beneficial and safe for all those who learn, teach and live within them.
In “Collaging Memories: Reimagining Teacher-Researcher Identities and Perspectives,” Daisy Pillay... more In “Collaging Memories: Reimagining Teacher-Researcher Identities and Perspectives,” Daisy Pillay, Reena Ramkelewan, and Anita Hiralaal explore teacher-researcher identities and perspectives through the piecing together of lived experience and practice using collage. The exemplars are drawn from ongoing doctoral research by two emerging South African scholars, Reena and Anita. Reena’s mosaic piece reveals how collage making assisted her in recognising the multiple and layered selves that constitute her life and work as a teacher-researcher in a public primary school. Anita’s piece shows how creating a collage portrait helped her bring together memories of critical experiences and significant people who influenced her in becoming a certain type of teacher educator. Together, Reena’s and Anita’s accounts of collaging memories show how collage making can reinvigorate critical moments of the past for new perspectives to inform teacher-researchers’ selves and practices.
“‘To Seek Out Something More’: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narra... more “‘To Seek Out Something More’: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs” by Daisy Pillay, Sagie Naicker, and Wendy Rawlinson showcases the power of found photographs for evoking, constructing, and reconstructing memory in written self-narratives. The exemplars are drawn from Sagie Naicker’s and Wendy Rawlinson’s doctoral research in South Africa. Sagie drew on selected photographs to examine how his disability identity influenced his leadership practice, and his journey as an activist seeking social justice for people with disabilities. Wendy’s found photograph evoked a bodily experience of being transported to a more imaginative space that triggered her curiosity for aesthetic pedagogical adventuring in her racially diverse classroom. Taken as a whole, the chapter demonstrates how, drawing multi-methodologically on self-narratives and the visual meaning making perspective of found photographs, the scholarship of self-awareness of teachers’ ways of being, knowing, and doing can make significant contributions to teacher professional learning.
We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry ca... more We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry can facilitate awareness of, and insight into polyvocality in educational research. Using found poetry and haiku poetry, we present a poetic performance in which we engage with diverse voices that manifest in multiple data sources: a student participant's photographic collage and unstructured interview transcript; audio-recorded discussions with research team members and a conference audience, and research team members' written reflections. We aim to contribute to methodological conversations about poetry as research, with a particular focus on understanding more about the potential of collective poetic inquiry for evoking polyvocality in educational research. Drawing on notions of 'un-knowing', 'not-knowing' and 'productive ambiguity', we conceptualise our participatory research process as polyvocal and invite readers to join us in considering how cultivati...
In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between... more In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between and among memory-work, the arts, and professional teacher learning, charting the course of transcontinental methodological variations and considerations over time and space. We chronologically offer this retracing, looking back to some of our earliest work on memory and teaching in Canada in the early to mid-1990s and then following the movement of our memory-work collaborations across Canada and South Africa up to the present time. The memoir positions imagination, creativity, and the arts at the heart of remembering as an educational project. Throughout, we highlight the value of arts-based tools and methods—such as drawing, photography, filmmaking, creating collages, poetic inquiry, storytelling, and working with objects—in the doing of memory-work. Building on the work of Frigga Haug and others, mosaic-ing memory offers a multifaceted visual, material, and cultural lens to view teac...
In this paper we offer glimpses of the way some teachers may work creatively within the constrain... more In this paper we offer glimpses of the way some teachers may work creatively within the constraints of our South African education system.There are many studies that focus on issues such as teacher attrition, low morale, work load, job security, and teacher migration, all suggesting something of the dire straits in which education is located in the postapartheid era (Hall, Altman, Nkomo, Peltzer and Zuma, 2005; Ramrathan, 2002; Singh, 2001; Manik, 2005; Hayward, 2002). Against these negative impressions, we wish to present counter-narratives of teacher success, resistance and inventiveness, exploring teachersi?½ lives and their narratives through the theme of home. The theme of home [and homelessness] has been an important one in post-colonial experience, and a variety of genre of writings have shown how dislocation and unhomeliness [unheimlich], and the attendant i?½dis-easei?½ that results, are experienced, managed and contested. We begin the paper by providing a brief theoretical...
This paper presents an understanding of what it means to be a teacher in a school defined as 'rur... more This paper presents an understanding of what it means to be a teacher in a school defined as 'rural'. From a sociological perspective, we consider the mechanisms and ways of knowing that are adopted by a teacher for understanding not only the external world but for being a certain kind of teacher for a school in a rural setting. Employing data techniques from life history and collage compositions, data was produced with a teacher we have named Hilton. The data focused on his daily lived experiences and the social realities of working in the context of rural education to offer an expanded social and collective approach to teacher identity. Through his story, as told and experienced by him, we foreground dominant discourses at work in a rural context, and show how specific discourses define Hilton's life and work as a teacher in specific ways. Despite the challenges and adversities he faces, we show how as a teacher he chooses to negotiate-through resistance and complicity-the discourses that dominate rural schooling and its culture, learners, teachers and communities. The article concludes that a teacher's capacity to disrupt and challenge stereotypical meanings of rural schooling involves ongoing dialogue with the self, with teachers, with learners and the wider community.
“New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher ... more “New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher Professional Learning” begins with a prologue that tells a story of how the book editors—Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell—have engaged with their own learning, as well as with what the book can offer to others. The chapter goes on to retrace research connections between memory-work, the arts, and professional learning. Next, the book editors look back at their personal, professional, and scholarly connections as a way to signal their ongoing collaborations across Canada and South Africa. They also draw attention to political and social links between Canada and South Africa. Thereafter, the editors explain how each of the subsequent nine chapters was composed from juxtaposing several “mosaic” pieces written by 21 new and emerging scholars in South Africa and Canada. This is followed by a synopsis of each chapter. To conclude, the editors highlight the scholarly contributions of Memory Mosaics.
Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedag... more Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedagogies begin? As self-study researchers, we understand that it starts with our selves. Through self-study of educational practice, we identify issues that we are concerned, curious and passionate about in relation to our own pedagogies and we research those issues in our own contexts. While the research topics are diverse, our common focus is on what difference we as educators can make. Our exploration is about how we can re-imagine our selves, in the hope that our change will have a positive impact on other people. We have confidence that there is always room for change, no matter how small; there is always something we can see or do differently. Thus, we aim to develop practitioner-led, context-specific ideas for change and to explore ways to make that change happen (Pithouse, Mitchell & Weber, 2009). Importantly though, we recognise that, although educational change begins with 'me', it must also involve 'us'. Because we view teaching, learning and researching as interactive processes, we realise that we need the perspectives of significant others such as students, colleagues, and other self-study researchers or 'critical friends' to "challenge our assumptions and biases, reveal our inconsistencies [and] expand our potential interpretations" (LaBoksey, 2004: 849). We also need to make our self-study research available for public critique in order to contribute to public conversations about educational change.
Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedag... more Self-study of educational practice: Re-imagining our pedagogies Where does re-imagining our pedagogies begin? As self-study researchers, we understand that it starts with our selves. Through self-study of educational practice, we identify issues that we are concerned, curious and passionate about in relation to our own pedagogies and we research those issues in our own contexts. While the research topics are diverse, our common focus is on what difference we as educators can make. Our exploration is about how we can re-imagine our selves, in the hope that our change will have a positive impact on other people. We have confidence that there is always room for change, no matter how small; there is always something we can see or do differently. Thus, we aim to develop practitioner-led, context-specific ideas for change and to explore ways to make that change happen (Pithouse, Mitchell & Weber, 2009). Importantly though, we recognise that, although educational change begins with 'me', it must also involve 'us'. Because we view teaching, learning and researching as interactive processes, we realise that we need the perspectives of significant others such as students, colleagues, and other self-study researchers or 'critical friends' to "challenge our assumptions and biases, reveal our inconsistencies [and] expand our potential interpretations" (LaBoksey, 2004: 849). We also need to make our self-study research available for public critique in order to contribute to public conversations about educational change.
According to Edwards (2009), photographs have intricately connected meanings as images and as obj... more According to Edwards (2009), photographs have intricately connected meanings as images and as objects. As objects, photographs can be pinned up on a surface, framed, or just stuck on a wall (Edwards, 2009).
Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research follows on from a 3-day inter... more Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research follows on from a 3-day international research symposium held in Durban, South Africa in February 2016, organised by Daisy Pillay, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, and Inbanathan Naicker.
supervision is a complex and demanding pedagogic practice, which goes beyond research and discipl... more supervision is a complex and demanding pedagogic practice, which goes beyond research and disciplinary expertise on the part of the supervisor. Considering that a limitation of traditional systems of doctoral research training is the master/apprentice supervisory model, we question whether different genres of research, such as self-study, add to the complexity of a supervision relationship, where the support process between supervisor and student changes the practitioner and her situation. By adopting a reflexive stance in a self-study supervision relationship, we engage in the process of self-scrutiny and tenuous knowing of our positions in this relationship as each of us came to know it, and the shifting nature of these positions as illuminated through particular moments in the self-study doctoral project. Drawing on excerpts from supervisory meeting conversations we write together about our struggles relating to our fixed positionings, dis- positionings, and repositionings necess...
Encountering objects Family objects Cultural objects Memory objects Objects transcend black and w... more Encountering objects Family objects Cultural objects Memory objects Objects transcend black and white Objects work in transversals Objects open becomings Disruptions refocused us To speak back, provoke, dispel. .. Produce questions, entry points Pause, change direction! Relaunch ourselves Make new connections In diverse contexts Walking with students Mapping with students Know our students Inspired to read and write Improve educational practices Social change and equity viii
Nareen Gonsalves, Pieter du Toit, Theresa Chisanga (together with a team of colleagues at her uni... more Nareen Gonsalves, Pieter du Toit, Theresa Chisanga (together with a team of colleagues at her university), and Daisy Pillay are all higher education teachers and researchers (teacher researchers) working in very different university settings in South Africa.
In this article, we – a research team of academic staff and postgraduate students – take a narrat... more In this article, we – a research team of academic staff and postgraduate students – take a narrative inquiry stance to explore what we can learn from one African international postgraduate student‟s stories of experience on a South African university campus. We use the medium of narrative vignettes – brief evocative scenes or accounts – to re-present data generated through unstructured interviews and collage-making. Framed through a multiperspectival theoretical lens, the vignettes reveal how the student‟s everyday life on campus is constrained by fear of xenophobic harassment and violence. We argue that the setting or backdrop for his learning can therefore be understood as pedagogically unsound, even when effective teaching and learning activities might be seen to be taking place in designated spaces. To conclude, we consider possibilities for cultivating pedagogic settings that are beneficial and safe for all those who learn, teach and live within them.
In “Collaging Memories: Reimagining Teacher-Researcher Identities and Perspectives,” Daisy Pillay... more In “Collaging Memories: Reimagining Teacher-Researcher Identities and Perspectives,” Daisy Pillay, Reena Ramkelewan, and Anita Hiralaal explore teacher-researcher identities and perspectives through the piecing together of lived experience and practice using collage. The exemplars are drawn from ongoing doctoral research by two emerging South African scholars, Reena and Anita. Reena’s mosaic piece reveals how collage making assisted her in recognising the multiple and layered selves that constitute her life and work as a teacher-researcher in a public primary school. Anita’s piece shows how creating a collage portrait helped her bring together memories of critical experiences and significant people who influenced her in becoming a certain type of teacher educator. Together, Reena’s and Anita’s accounts of collaging memories show how collage making can reinvigorate critical moments of the past for new perspectives to inform teacher-researchers’ selves and practices.
“‘To Seek Out Something More’: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narra... more “‘To Seek Out Something More’: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs” by Daisy Pillay, Sagie Naicker, and Wendy Rawlinson showcases the power of found photographs for evoking, constructing, and reconstructing memory in written self-narratives. The exemplars are drawn from Sagie Naicker’s and Wendy Rawlinson’s doctoral research in South Africa. Sagie drew on selected photographs to examine how his disability identity influenced his leadership practice, and his journey as an activist seeking social justice for people with disabilities. Wendy’s found photograph evoked a bodily experience of being transported to a more imaginative space that triggered her curiosity for aesthetic pedagogical adventuring in her racially diverse classroom. Taken as a whole, the chapter demonstrates how, drawing multi-methodologically on self-narratives and the visual meaning making perspective of found photographs, the scholarship of self-awareness of teachers’ ways of being, knowing, and doing can make significant contributions to teacher professional learning.
We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry ca... more We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry can facilitate awareness of, and insight into polyvocality in educational research. Using found poetry and haiku poetry, we present a poetic performance in which we engage with diverse voices that manifest in multiple data sources: a student participant's photographic collage and unstructured interview transcript; audio-recorded discussions with research team members and a conference audience, and research team members' written reflections. We aim to contribute to methodological conversations about poetry as research, with a particular focus on understanding more about the potential of collective poetic inquiry for evoking polyvocality in educational research. Drawing on notions of 'un-knowing', 'not-knowing' and 'productive ambiguity', we conceptualise our participatory research process as polyvocal and invite readers to join us in considering how cultivati...
In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between... more In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between and among memory-work, the arts, and professional teacher learning, charting the course of transcontinental methodological variations and considerations over time and space. We chronologically offer this retracing, looking back to some of our earliest work on memory and teaching in Canada in the early to mid-1990s and then following the movement of our memory-work collaborations across Canada and South Africa up to the present time. The memoir positions imagination, creativity, and the arts at the heart of remembering as an educational project. Throughout, we highlight the value of arts-based tools and methods—such as drawing, photography, filmmaking, creating collages, poetic inquiry, storytelling, and working with objects—in the doing of memory-work. Building on the work of Frigga Haug and others, mosaic-ing memory offers a multifaceted visual, material, and cultural lens to view teac...
Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience aut... more Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience autoethnography as a challenging, complex and creative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The peer-reviewed chapters offer innovative and perspicacious explorations of interrelationships between personal autobiographies, lived educational experiences and wider social and cultural concerns, across diverse disciplines and university contexts. This edited book is distinctive within the existing body of autoethnographic scholarship in that the original research that is presented has been done in relation to predominantly South African university settings. This research is complemented by contributions from Canadian and Swedish authors. The sociocultural, educational and methodological insights communicated in this book will be valuable for specialists in the field of higher education and to those in other academic domains who are interested in self-reflexive, transformative and creative research methodologies and methods.
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