Philosophy


Introduction


My teaching and learning philosophy has been shaped my many events and people I have encountered in my life. My schooling and higher education experiences, both in developed and developing worlds, have cemented a range of beliefs in me about what I consider ‘good’ teaching and learning and over the last few years I have found the theoretical underpinning for these beliefs.

Theoretical approaches that I find helpful in making sense of my own experiences with teaching and learning, and which I will briefly outline below, including examples of how this applies to my own teaching and learning, are:

  1. Andragogy  / adult learning theories
  2. A focus on social justice and diverse classrooms framed by an ethics of care
  3. The role of emotions in teaching and learning when engaging across difference
  4. And most recently Design Thinking and its focus on inter-disciplinarity and co-design

1. Andragogy / adult learning theories

As an academic staff developer I engage with and teach mostly adults in once-off workshops, seminars or formal staff development programmes. I am responsible for the CIET Teaching and Learning with Technology seminar series and have designed a range of staff development interventions such as a short course we offer at CPUT on “Designing blended learning” drawing on design thinking principles (see App ID6). I have also been involved in the design and facilitation of the Cape Higher Education Council (CHEC) course on “Blended Learning Design” and  “Multimodal Pedagogies and Postqualitative Research” and the elective module on “Teaching and Learning with Technologies” as part of the PGDIP in Higher Education (Teaching and Learning) (see App TL3). Academic staff at teaching-intensive universities, such as a University of Technology, have limited time for additional staff development. Therefore any kind of training and support I am designing and offering has to take into account the very tight schedules and specific demands of academics./

In one of the assignments I had to write as part of one of my courses I was tasked to reflect on ‘My personal philosophy of Adult Education’. At that moment, and to a certain extent still, I felt at home in the world of Humanistic Adult Education based on the works of Carl Rogers  or Malcolm Knowles (Merriam & Caffarella 1999). This is an extract from my assignment, which explained my philosophical stance at that time:


‘The purpose of Humanistic Adult Education is to provide an opportunity for learning, whose outcome is individual growth and self-fulfilment.... Regarding the role of the learner in Humanistic Adult Education, I strongly believe in learner centeredness. As opposed to an instructor-centred teaching and learning process, I think the learner should be the centre of attention. The instructor only takes a facilitating role, guiding the learner in the right direction and providing resources and a conducive environment for the learning process.


I think this fits very well with the definition of an adult learner, who is not an empty shell, waiting to be filled by his/her teacher, but who brings a wealth of experience to the teaching and learning process.


The responsibility of learning does not rely solely on the teacher. On the contrary - the learner needs to be empowered to take over responsibility for his/her own learning and has the right to choose when, what and how to learn. A high level of participation and interaction is expected from learners. Adult learners join learning situations on a voluntary basis and will not react well to imposed learning objectives and settings. Adult learners will also only learn what they perceive as being important for their current life situation. The individual self-concept also influences the learning process. The perceived difference between the real and the ideal self will motivate adult learners to take on learning. The role of assessment can only be to enable learners to measure their own progress through self-assessment and peer evaluation. Any external evaluation would be meaningless. I think teaching and learning is part of self-actualisation and development and is our possibility to change the world around us and help make it a better place.

As adult educators we have the duty to continuously develop ourselves and our learners. Learning occurs anyway anytime and everywhere – in a structured or unstructured form. I would even go further and say that there should not be a separation of teacher and learner, but at the end we are all learners, learning from each other. ‘

How does this apply in my own teaching and learning?


When I facilitate workshops, I make sure, that my workshop objectives are not set in stone, but that participants have the possibility to shape their own objectives. As I will explain later under the topic ‘Design Thinking’, I believe in co-designing curricula with participants or students, involving all stake holders, such as communities and industry. I believe in carefully planning and preparing interventions but I also make sure that I leave space for individual development and change to the workshop schedule. All of our short courses will be pre-empted by conversations with future participants, either face to face or through online surveys, to understand our target group and establish their needs and expectations, which helps us design curricula that are meaningful to our participants. As an example we interviewed participants of our PGDIP module last year before module start and changed the course outline significantly after we received feedback that participants were not eager to continue their design based research they started in a previous module but wanted to work on new projects.


During workshops I leave enough space for discussions, even if they are not entirely workshop related, because I believe that participants know best what their current developmental needs are. Since at the end learning is geared towards individual and collective self-actualisation, the content of a workshop is only secondary, while the personal development of a learner, the development of lifelong learning skills, be it e.g. his/her discussion skills or a growth in self-confidence is primary.

In my workshops I try to keep my presentations as short as possible, to give room to group activities and individual input from the participants. I also invite experienced colleagues to share their practice, as I strongly believe in modelling / scaffolding and peer learning (see course outline of short course on blended learning design under App TL3). I strongly believe that most knowledge already exists in participants and only needs to be brought to the surface. As an example, I asked students in the postgraduate diploma on ICTs in Education at UCT who I had the pleasure to teach recently, to analyse a case study we designed here at CPUT on flexible learning, evaluate it against a flexible learning framework and suggest improvements. Their input was amazing and it positioned them as experts in the field (see App TL3 for a summary of their suggestions).

I try as much as possible to relate workshop content to academics teaching and learning practice to make learning meaningful and authentic. I am guided by a head/hand/heart approach to teaching, instilling contents, but also skills and most importantly maybe, a specific mindset (see more under design thinking below). I believe that participants need to try workshop contents out, need to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, to really learn (again that’s something I will come back when talking about design thinking). I believe in experiential learning and I try to contextualise my content through the introduction of stories and case studies (as shown in the example mentioned above).

I also believe very strongly in the importance of personal guidance and the personal relationship between instructors and learners. Only if there is trust and a caring environment learning can happen. In my work both at the University of Botswana, where for example technophobia was high, or now at CPUT, where many academic staff members are fairly new to research and find that daunting, we invest a lot of time and energy in building relationships with the lecturers we were supporting and coaching in their use of technologies or in their research journeys. I feel that a personal relationship with and mentorship of early career researchers / academic staff plays a big role in my work and is also personal rewarding (see App TL1 for a list of early career researchers mentored at CPUT and RIS15 for examples of outputs with these colleagues).


My attempt at a learner-centred, supporting, non-threatening, approachable teaching and learning approach, but also my passion for the subject I teach, is valued by staff, as can be seen by the feedback received from participants in workshops (-> see App TL4).

2. A focus on social justice – introducing technologies into diverse classrooms


In addition to staff development, I am also involved in the facilitation of guest lecturers in undergraduate and postgraduate courses both at CPUT and in other Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the Western Cape. Since 2010 I have for example taught the digital storytelling component of the BED 4 Professional studies (PNS41RS) course (also the context of my PHD studies which I completed in 2015 at the University of Cape Town), have been involved in first and second year Journalism teaching, have facilitated workshops for first year ECP in Architectural Technology and Design students and have been regularly invited to teach on the UCT Med (ICT).


Teaching in the highly challenging context, that the current South African classroom represents, I have become increasingly aware of how power and privilege impact on our teaching and our students’ learning. I have experienced classrooms that are made up of highly differently positioned students, where linguistic, cultural and racial backgrounds still very much impact on the kind of opportunities students encounter both during their schooling and in relation to future employment. This has opened my eyes to a more critical view of education and I have moved slightly away from a purely humanistic approach to a more critical one.


My concern for social justice and an ethical view of the use of technologies in teaching and learning has led me to Joan Tronto’s ethics of care framework. Joan Tronto’s work on the ethics of care (Tronto 2013; Tronto 1993) is a courageous attempt to centre care as a political project. She argues that care, an undervalued activity that is mostly carried out by less-powerful members of society, should be at the centre of democratic political agendas (2013). Care is not just a disposition but also an active ethical practice—something we do. Rather than seeing ethical dilemmas as big—and often unsolvable—questions, it is in our everyday practices of caring for ourselves and others that we most need to consider and practice ethical behaviour. Fisher and Tronto define care as: ...a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (see Tronto 1993, 103; Fisher and Tronto 1990, 40).

This definition of care has various implications: It is the practice of caring for self and others that makes us human. Care is defined as a standard, but a standard that is flexible enough to allow us to ‘live as well as possible in the world’, considering the smaller and larger contexts the care relationship is set in. Tronto writes: ‘While perfection is impossible, improvement is not. Through good caring, people are better able to live well in this world’  (2001, 65). She also sees care as a complex ethical relationship, in which all participants or actors need to be involved. There can be no one person solely responsible for decision making in a caring relationship or web of relationships: All the parties involved should contribute to the discussion on caring needs and how they should be met (2001). We note also that one’s position in the web of caring will shift between contexts and over time; we are all care givers in some spaces and times, and care receivers in others.

In her work Tronto initially defines four (1993) and then five (2013) moral elements of care and their respective phases (in brackets):


  1. Attentiveness (caring about): noticing unmet needs, suspending one’s own judgements and being able to see the world from the perspective of the one in need.
  2. Responsibility (caring for): taking on the burden of responding to this need.
  3. Competence (care giving): being competent to care, which is always both a technical and a moral and political issue.
  4. Responsiveness (care receiving): listening to the response of the person/group that was cared for, sometimes resulting in new unmet needs.
  5. Solidarity (caring with): taking collective responsibility, to think of citizens as both receivers and givers of care, and to think seriously about the nature of caring needs in society.


How does this apply in my own teaching and learning?


Negotiating teaching and learning within these highly complex and contested teaching spaces is a challenge that I am posing myself every day in my practice at CPUT. When it comes to using technology for teaching and learning in resource-poor environments, I find the concept of low threshold applications (LTAs) useful. The notion of LTA was introduced by Steve Gilbert, who promoted LTAs by arguing that

‘... the potential user (teacher or learner) perceives an LTA as NOT challenging, not intimidating, not requiring a lot of additional work or new thinking. LTAs… are also 'low‐threshold' in the sense of having low incremental costs for purchase, training, support, and maintenance.’



When supporting lecturers or introducing new technologies, I first of all focus on technologies that are easy to use and ideally freely accessible to both lecturers and students, such as social media and mobile learning technologies (the recent introduction of Blackboard Mobile will be a game changer I believe – see App. TL3 ). Furthermore I try to scaffold the learning process as much as I can, to make it as non-threatening as possible. I also try and be aware of the learner profile, I am going to encounter in a course or workshop, and will be sensitive to the extent a technology is socially inclusive.

Using emerging technologies in teaching and learning may at a first glance benefit and advantage more privileged students who have access to technology and the kind of skills needed to engage with these technologies. However in my experience, projects such as the digital storytelling workshops we conduct with students, when integrating them with for example, with participatory learning and action techniques (PLA), such as the River of Life, which are open-ended, flexible, visual learning methods that allow students with diverse academic literacy to explore how they have been placed ‘in relation to resources and the privilege and harm emerging from their positioning in relation to resources in the light of their own experiences’ (Bozalek 2011, p.475), can give students whose voices and experiences are  usually not heard in the classroom, the opportunity to share their stories. I found that of particular importance is the collaborative interaction PLA techniques provide for differently positioned students to share their perspectives and begin to engage with each other (Bozalek & Biersteker 2010).


Joan Tronto’s ethics of care framework has helped me reflect on my practice in various way, such as looking at the ethics of continuing teaching using technology during times of disruptions or unpack ethical dilemmas encountered in our digital storytelling projects. It has allowed us to see ethics not as some big questions up for discussion but as continuous ethical conversations we have with ourselves, our students, our colleagues, our family members. As we argue in one of our papers on the ethics of care within times of student disruption, Joan Tronto’s work on the ethics of care (1993; 2013) helped us navigate the difficulties, complexities and often contradictory higher education spaces in South Africa today. In particular her view that care is not a disposition but an active, on-going conversation and doing - an ethical practice resonated with me. Her suggestion that it is in our everyday practices of caring for ourselves and others that we most need to consider and practice ethical behaviour throws a new light on our teaching and learning practices. Her view that good care is not something that we can ever achieve, but that we can strive towards, allows us breathing space in our attempts as providing the best care possible to our students and us as she writes: ‘While perfection is impossible, improvement is not. Through good caring, people are better able to live well in this world’ (Tronto 2001, 65). Also her insistence that care should be seen as a complex ethical relationship, in which all participants or actors who need to be involved, allows us to challenge current practices at the institution in terms how and who is in charge of the decision making process in times of disruption. No one person can be solely responsible for decision making in a caring relationship or web of relationships: All the parties involved should contribute to the discussion on caring needs and how they should be met (Tronto 2001).


Similarly my fellow digital storyteller Pam Sykes and myself concluded in another paper on the ethics of digital storytelling in higher education that: “We have strong hopes for the potential of new forms of engagement, such as story work, to help our universities shift into slightly more decolonial spaces. Nevertheless, our work has brought us to the point where we feel we need to step away from, or surrender, the idea that any of the dilemmas we have surfaced in this paper—the conflicts in our classrooms, our own doubt and uncertainty, the failure of our teaching methodologies to accommodate everyone—are fixable. This may mean that there is no hope of perfect consensus; as we come together in this space, each of us bearing a different burden out of the past, we need to face the possibility that we may never reach any kind of stable agreement on how to proceed.”


3. The role of emotions in teaching and learning


While students of different social backgrounds may now learn together in classroom spaces, their friendships and relationships are still often formed based on common social backgrounds based on shared language and culture, fuelled by deeply rooted beliefs and assumptions that impact on their conscious or unconscious choice of social engagements (Jansen 2010; Soudien 2012). These notions frame my understanding of ‘race’ or ‘culture’ as social and political constructions embedded in socio-spatial, political and historical structures, which have real and uneven material consequences linked directly to students’ sense of privilege or oppression.

Boler and Zembylas (2003) suggest that one way to overcome these barriers to engagement across difference, in particular in post-conflict societies such as South Africa, is to acknowledge and work with the emotions governing our classrooms. One such post-conflict pedagogy based on intentional engagement with emotions is the ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (2003), calling for both emotional and cognitive labour. These authors maintain that allowing emotions into the classroom and critically reflecting on their origins may help to challenge dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain social inequities, thus creating possibilities for individual and social transformation.


How does this apply in my own teaching and learning?

In my work here at CPUT, and in particular in the digital storytelling projects, which have become a larger and larger part of my work, I have become more and more convinced of the important role that emotions play in particular when engaging across difference. We started the digital storytelling project in Education for two reasons: first and foremost we were looking for new ways of using technology in the classroom and develop digital literacy skills in students. And second, to find new ways to facilitate students’ reflection on their teacher identity - for their own personal growth. However, what surprised us in the course of running this project, that much more than a personal growth project, it became what Benmayor (2008) calls a social pedagogy, a pedagogy that approaches learning as a collaborative process (p. 198), allowing for collaborative and social learning in diverse classrooms through the sharing and disclosure and initiating a ‘process of bonding and cross cultural alliance’ (p. 198), a process in which ‘vulnerability is transformed into pride’ (p.199).

As we added more activities to support this facet of the project, such and the participatory learning and action technique ‘River of Life’ discussed above, in which students draw and share critical incidents in their lives in randomly selected groups, we started to encounter resistance to this process and students complained how uncomfortable this felt to share their past with students they didn’t know well and would usually not engage with. I found that Boler and Zembylas (2003) ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ helped me understand the normative nature of emotions both as a site of political and social control and resistance. The digital storytelling project has put both students and us lecturers in places of discomfort, but has also helped in opening up to the ‘other’ and shedding some of the beliefs and assumptions that we carry with us.  Instead of teacher identity and digital literacy what the project turned out to be was a project about difference, about the ‘other’, about our own assumptions and beliefs about people we don't usually engage with, about our emotions that come with this process - learning how to stay in our own pain and in and with each other’s pain.


What recently I have been more and more concerned with, is the ethical implications of using digital storytelling in Education. Our students are highly vulnerable and the stories they bring to class with are often difficult. How does one handle these difficult conversations and often traumatic stories ethically? My interest has led to a range of publications but also a specific focus of last year’s Untold conference (https://www.uel.ac.uk/events/2017/07/unconference-digital-storytelling), which I helped organize. In collaboration with Mark Dunford from the University of East London, we organized a specific theme under this conference focusing on the ethics in digital storytelling and were able to develop a guiding framework / guiding questions that could help facilitators of digital storytelling workshops across many contexts (see App ID6) However, we have gone beyond that and applied for funding here at CPUT to explore in detail ethical dilemmas concerning digital storytelling at the institution for teaching learning and community engagement. Our objective is to develop a framework which can assist lecturers to engage with personal stories in ethical ways (see App ID7).

We have also introduced other activities to allow students to engage with power and privilege in a more critical and systematic way. The privilege walk activity is such an intervention, which we trialed both with Journalism and Architectural Design students. Adopting the Privilege Walk we aimed at facilitating an embodied and affective understanding of the socio-historical roots of privilege. Framed by critical pedagogy (Freire 2005; Hooks 1994) and a focus on the intersectionality of privilege, this activity forces students to acknowledge their position in a privilege grid. The Privilege Walk is well known and used in social justice and diversity education. It is based on statements drawn from anti-racism educator and activist Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege Checklist” (1992). McIntosh created this list to help white people acknowledge their privilege, which is often “invisible” (in similar ways that male privilege is unacknowledged in our society). As a white woman, she explains, “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious” (McIntosh 1992, 30). Participants in the Privilege Walk are positioned in a social grid that poignantly represents the current state of our society. The statements in this exercise usually result in white males positioned at the front of the grid, while African females are at the back of the grid. Statements do not only focus on race but are intersectional in that they focus on race, gender, class, sexuality, age, religion, etc. This allows students to see privilege as more than financial advantage and more than just white privilege. It is a powerful activity that creates space for interesting conversations about the legacy of apartheid and how our society still values whiteness, masculinity and heteronormativity. But it can also lead to discomfort and frustration. It sets up the system as it is today without giving students the chance to change this system. This is why we developed it further, asking students to come up with statements that would create a new grid, based on different values. We wrote about this in the Conversation and published an article in the South African Journal of Higher Education (see App RIS5) . This intervention was also mentioned in the 2017 QEP report as an example for initiatives that promote inclusivity of diverse students (see App TL3).


4. Design Thinking

One of the concepts that we have engaged with more recently is Design Thinking, in particular within the context of staff development initiatives around blended learning course design. As we write in our introduction to our newly developed short course “Designing Blended Learning”:


Internationally and locally, there is a trend towards design thinking and learning design. Design thinking as a methodology for developing novel solutions to complex, real-world problems, is gaining popularity in various domains. For many years design thinking provided a useful approach for innovating in business, health, software development and engineering sectors but it is only recently gaining ground in the context of Higher Education innovation (Razzouk & Shute 2012).


Learning design implies that learning innovation starts with ‘wicked’ problems that need holistically designed interventions. Wicked problems are everyday problems which are nevertheless difficult to solve as they are ill-defined, associated with confusing information, many decision makers and stakeholders with competing interests, and involving whole systems  (Buchanan, 1992). These problems include the provision of access to diverse student populations in a context of global economic recession, dwindling resources as well as rigid bureaucratic systems. It focuses on creative problem solving for resource-scarce contexts. It often means working around existing constraints. It is a process-oriented methodology, that views learning innovation as an iterative, collaborative, reflective, and most importantly, contextualised effort. A focus on design allows us to move away from a tool- and technology-driven approach to support and innovation to a process that will take into consideration first and foremost the learner and the learning problem we would like to address, taking into account the specificities of our students, our staff and our institution. It foregrounds innovative local solutions to local problems.

 Design implies change. Design implies creativity. Design implies innovation. It is important to acknowledge that design as we define it, covers the whole process of problem identification (define), finding of solutions (ideate), design of intervention (prototype) and implementation and evaluation of prototype (test). What makes design thinking stand out from other instructional design model, such as ADDIE, is its emphasis on empathy, which means designing from the perspective of the learner. Design thinking is an iterative process, which means that an integral step of the process is repeated/continuous evaluation and re-design.


How does this apply to my own teaching?

After some research we did in 2016 on eLearning champions at CPUT (see App RIS5 ), we discovered that these colleagues shared characteristics that mirror what literature calls a design thinking mindset: collaboration and generosity; learner empathy; problem orientation; exploration and play; reflection and resilience; focus on practice and becoming change agents.


Based on these findings I led the development of a short course in 2017 to promote this mindset. Design thinkers such as Rauth et al. (2010, p.7) suggest that design thinking education (i.e. the process of teaching design thinking) is able to develop a certain mindset as creative competence that 'culminates in the acquisition of creative confidence, which assures the students of their own ability of acting and thinking creative'. Drawing from design thinking principles we thus developed a course that would allow lecturers to develop into ‘eLearning champions’. We introduced design activities such as problem ideation, persona development or learning metaphors to create a space that would be conducive to experimentation, playfulness, risk taking, all characteristics that we deem important when innovating teaching and learning. We also invited colleagues to the course to act as mentors and model some of these characteristics or practices. See paper “Nurturing creative confidence and learner empathy: design principles for innovative academic staff development” submitted for review to BJET under Papers in Progress for a detailed evaluation of the course.

Another element that we drew from design thinking is the idea of co-design. Within the decolonial debate we are asked to design curricula with our students to make them meaningful and disrupt existing power relations. I am part of a research project at the moment in which we plan to design a short course for lecturers and students on critical compassionate citizenship. An integral part of this project is to model and develop a co-design process at the institution.


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