A/Prof Daniela Gachago

Last week we offered our first full learning design workshop to staff members across all Faculties. We had 20 participants - way more than we expected for 2,5 days at our beautiful campus in Granger Bay. The workshop was a result of work we have been doing in collaboration between the Centre for Innovative Educational Technology and the Fundani Curriculum Development Unit. We have been drawing from our experiences of our blended learning design short course , in which we tried to promote a Design Thinking mindset. We characterise a design thinking mindset as a mindset that promotes problem orientation, focus on practice, exploration and play, learner empathy, reflection and resilience, becoming change agents and collaboration and generosity (see more here ). eLearning champion mindset ( Gachago et al 2017 ) Our workshop (see outline and notes here ) last week was a combination of a number of exercises / activities we designed over the last few years. The persona activit...

I have met with colleagues from UWC and UCT for some years now to talk, think and write together (and drink lots of coffee in between). For a long time this has been a space of respite and comfort - away from the tensions and conflicts at work. Started during student protest time, it has moved us into coffeeshop spaces, re-appropriating coffeeshops across the Southern Suburbs as spaces for reflection and engagement. I appreciated the honesty and vulnerability we committed ourselves to, in our sharing and writing. Writing for pleasure. Writing without a deadline, without a purpose. Writing together. But as academics do, eventually deadlines, products, purposes crept in, conference were attended, papers written. This video, created by my amazing colleague Niki Romano, is one product of our writing, which we will share at HECU this morning. Its bittersweet to watch it. Its a beautiful piece of art, affecting and affected, it takes me back to good times, but it also did something to us. C...

It's one week since the Decolonial Transformation Workshop finished at the University of Sussex. It was a beautiful, inspiring, intense, thought provoking, emotional space. First and foremost it was an unapologetically black space. A space for people of colour to share their experiences. As white participants we were welcome but it was clear that in that space we were visitors / observers. And it was absolutely fine. I was grateful to be allowed in, to be given the opportunity to listen and learn. There were two main questions that came up for me from the workshop. The first one is : How do you unlearn something you don't know you have? And the second one is about complicity and culpability. Why is it that the closer racism comes to home the more difficult it is to address? To make it more clear, I need to tell some stories. On one of the workshop days I was introduced to a woman of colour. She had beautiful grey dreadlocks, I thought she looked just like Toni Morri...

I just finished listening to the second webinar of the #unboundeq course. What an amazing line up of women! The topic was equity and I guess in general social activism and what it takes to be part of a social global movement fighting inequalities on a larger scale. My mind is racing and its not easy to put down my thoughts in a structured way. So in no particular order, these are the things that stuck with me: 1. Who has to do the anti-racism / social justice labour in a classroom? Maha was talking about the emotional labour her minority students have to do when she is teaching around equity in her class in Egypt and how increasingly uncomfortable she felt forcing the few minority students to 'do all the work'. She spoke about strategies she employed such as pre-readings, to relieve her students of some of the labour of explaining minority experience to dominant groups. I had a similar conversation recently about this with my colleagues. We ran a p rivilege walk  activity ...

I just listened to the first live studio session of the Equity Unbound online course organised by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin and Mia Zamora. It's so nice to hear peoples' voices - there is so much more you can gather from people's voices than from engaging with them in writing; their backgrounds, their personalities, their sense of passion, engagement and humour. What stayed with me most, beyond the richness of what was shared, is their question around allyship, the roles of allies in the fight for social justice. This is a topic I have recently been forced to engage with. South African higher education has gone through hectic times over the last few years - the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements have opened up spaces for important but difficult conversations around transformation, equality, and the role of academia and academics in today's world. What I am most struggling with is the role of white academics in this space. What does it mean to be an “ally” i...

cc wilkernet I have recently enrolled in the course Equality Unbounded (#unboundeq) organised by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin and Mia Zamora. One of the first tasks in this course is to watch Chimamanda Adichie's 'The danger of a single story' TED talk and reflect on it. Since I watched it yesterday for the like 100th time, there are two thoughts that have come to my mind, that kind of challenge the danger of a single story. But first let me say it out loud: I love the talk , I love Chimamanda's books (I think I have read all of them) - I am huge fan. I have used her talk in many ways in my work here in South Africa, it speaks directly to the digital storytelling work we are doing, aimed at creating spaces for students to share their stories and learn about self and other in the process. One of the most interesting project was one that I did with my American colleague Kristi Stewart , from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. In this project,...

Welcome to my blog! This is a space to store / collect / share what I am busy with in my professional life. There are links to the research projects I am busy with, my publications, but also my teaching activities, workshops I am facilitating or presentations I am giving. If you would like to get in touch, send me an email: gachagod@gmail.com SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES Twitter @dgachago17 Facebook :  https://www.facebook.com/daniela.gachago Researchgate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniela_Gachago Academic.edu http://cput.academia.edu/DGachago Google Scholar profile:  https://scholar.google.co.za/citations?user=FIJhSiEAAAAJ&hl=en