PHD

Published Thesis


Gachago, D. (2015). Sentimentality and Digital Storytelling: Towards a Post-Conflict Pedagogy in Pre-Services Teacher Education in South Africa. PhD  Thesis. University of Cape Town. Retrieved from https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/16537/thesis_hum_2015_gachago_daniela.pdf?sequence=1

Publications from PHD study

Gachago, D. & Sykes, P., 2017. Navigating Ethical Boundaries When Adopting Digital Storytelling in Higher Education. In G. Jamisson et al., eds. Digital Storytelling in Higher Education. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 91–106.

Gachago, D., 2016. The Performativity of Digital Stories in Contexts of Systemic Inequality. South African Journal for Higher Education (SAJHE), 30(3), pp.296–308.

Gachago, D., 2016. Addressing Some of the Elephants in South African Research Education: Race and reflexivity in postgraduate study. In L. Frick, P. Mosthoane, & C. Murphy, eds. Postgraduate Study in South Africa- Surviving and Succeeding. Stellenbosch: SUN Press, pp. 13–22. Available at: http://www.africansunmedia.co.za/portals/0/books/9781928357247/9781928357247-01.pdf.

Presentations


Transforming transformation in research and teaching in universities in South Africa Workshop at Stellenbosch University, 3rd of December 2014:  Pre-service teacher education students’ stories of difference within a digital storytelling workshop (presentation of findings)


Posthumanism and the Affective Turn NRF Project Meeting, 27th of November 2014: Storytelling, emotions and empathy (presentation of findings)





UWC Critical Literacies Colloquium, 24th November 2014: The limits of digital storytelling as a post-conflict pedagogy (presentation of findings)



UCT research stories, 4th of Feb 2013: Sense and sentimentality in digital stories – a case of pre-service teacher education in South Africa (literature review)





Towards a critical digital storytelling model for engaging with difference based on the pedagogy of discomfort – a case of pre-service education students in South Africa: Proposal presentation at UCT, 7th of November 2012





Digital story on starting a conversation around race with pre-service teacher education students, prepared for CSID CHEC course in 2011





Popular posts from this blog

The power of (online) communities of practice

Image
I have just come across this blog post W hat’s next for faculty development?   by Alexandra Mihai and it has strongly resonated with the journey we have gone through over the last few months: from offering webinars and training sessions on using Blackboard and other tools for remote teaching and learning, curating resources and finally creating guidelines / rubrics for lecturers to benchmark their online courses and organising good practice sharing sessions.  Image by Tim Marshall from www.unsplash.com  What caught my attention though is her suggestion around the importance of informal communities of practice to support academics in times of crisis. One of my roles as academic staff developer has been to create networks across the institution of colleagues with a passion for eLearning. We call these our eLearning champions and we have written before about their shared characteristics, what we called an eLearning mindset , very closely related to the design thinking minds...
Read more

Teaching in times of disruption and the ethics of care

Image
I follow with huge interest how universities worldwide are moving their teaching and learning online. I am fascinated by how fast they move, how well prepared they seem (at least from afar) and mostly, how uncritical they are about issues of access and social justice when it comes to online learning. Here at in South Africa, and in particular at CPUT, any attempt to introduce online or even blended learning has to be mindful of our learners, often not able to access digital resources from home, or not necessarily digitally literate enough to follow this kind of learning. I see very little critical engagement at the moment from around the world, with the exception of articles such as shared a few days ago on Facebook: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online , by Rebecca Barett-Fox. So far she is the one of the few who considers how students might be differently positioned, as she writes: "They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They...
Read more

Why it is so important to move out of your comfort zone once in a while...

Image
Rickett Glenn Waterfalls with my Women's Adventure Club of Centre County, PA hiking buddies      My colleague Alexandra Mihai, an academic staff developer at Maastricht University, who is also doing a Fulbright in the US at the moment, and is also based at the Porvoo Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale, r ecently reflected on her stay . When reading her words, it resonated so much. She listed the following five points as the most important learnings from her stay in the US so far: the power of keeping an open mind the power of connections the power of  changing perspectives the power of a bird's eye view the power of kindness and gratitude I so agree. My stay at PennState was my first sabbatical since becoming an academic, my first break from the South African higher education context in more than 10 years. It reminded me about the importance of moving out of your comfort zone, how refreshing it is to start somewhere new, to discover a new place, new people, new...
Read more