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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

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Towards a compassionate learning design

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Over the last few years, Maha, Nicola and I have been grappling with the idea of designing for compassion. Our engagement with compassionate learning design started with a thought experiment: frustrated with the concept of empathy in design thinking, i.e., the assumption that we can put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, we experimented with replacing empathy with compassion. Drawing from the work I did in my PHD, where I looked at the potential of digital storytelling, to facilitate an engagement across difference and where I used Boler's concept of witnessing, or compassionate listening, to emphasise the importance of recognising how we are differently positioned when listening and responding to stories of others, and in particular for those in privileged positions, to take accountability and responsibility for our own role in somebody's else's story. ‘[compassion] goes beyond the feeling-for or feeling-with an individual and moves towards understanding the social an...
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Teaching in times of disruption and the ethics of care

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

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