Browsing by Author "Bozalek, Vivienne"

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    Sentimentality and digital storytelling: towards a post-conflict pedagogy in pre-service teacher education in South Africa
    (2015) Gachago, Daniela; Ng'ambi, Dick; Bozalek, Vivienne
    This study is set against the background of a continued lack of social engagement across difference in South African classrooms. It set out to explore the potential of a specific pedagogical intervention - digital storytelling - as a post-conflict pedagogy in a diverse pre-service teacher education classroom. Personal storytelling has long been used to unearth lived experiences of differently positioned students in the classroom. More recently, the use of digital technologies has made it easier to transform these personal stories into publishable, screenable and sharable digital resources. In general, digital storytelling is lauded in the literature for its potential to facilitate an understanding across difference, allowing empathy and compassion for the 'Other'. In this study, I question this potentially naive take on digital storytelling in the context of post-conflict pedagogies. I was interested in the emotions emerging - particularly in what I termed a potential sentimentality - in both the digital storytelling process and product. I looked at sentimentality in a specific way: as the tension between the centrality of emotions to establish an affective engagement between a storyteller and the audience, and digital stories' exaggerated pull on these emotions. This is seen, for example, in the difficulty that we have when telling stories in stepping out of normative, sentimental discourses to trouble the way we perform gender, race, class and sexuality, all of which are found in the actual stories we tell and the images we use. It is also found in the audience response to digital storytelling. Adopting a performative narrative inquiry research methodology, framed by theorists such as Butler, Ahmed, and Young, all three feminist authors interested in the politics of difference, working at the intersection of queer, cultural, critical race and political theory, I adopted three different analytical approaches to a narrative inquiry of emotions. I used these approaches to analyse stories told in a five-day digital storytelling train-the-trainer workshop with nine pre-service teacher-education students. Major findings of this study are: In everyday life stories, students positioned themselves along racial identities, constructing narratives of group belonging based primarily on their racialized identities. However, in some students' stories - particularly those that offer a more complex view of privilege, acknowledging the intersectionality of class, gender, age, sexuality and race - these conversations are broken up in interesting ways, creating connections between students beyond a racial divide. Looking at the digital story as a multimodal text with its complex orchestration of meaning-making through its different modes, it became clear to me that conveying authorial intent is difficult and that the message of a digital story can be compromised in various ways. The two storytellers I looked at in more detail drew from different semiotic histories and had access to different semiotic resources, such as different levels of critical media literacy, with this compromising their authorial intent to tell counterstories. Finally, the genre storytellers chose, the context into which their stories were told, along with their positioning within this context in terms of their privilege, affected the extent to which they could make themselves vulnerable. This consequently shaped the audience response, which was characterised by passive empathy, a sentimental attempt to connect to what makes us the 'same', rather than recognising systemic and structural injustices that characterise our engagements across difference.
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    Technology enhanced teaching and learning in South African higher education – A rearview of a 20 year journey
    (British Journal of Educational Technology, 2016-07-18) Ng'ambi, Dick; Brown, Cheryl; Bozalek, Vivienne; Gachago, Daniela; Wood, Denise
    In the last 20 years, the South African higher education has changed significantly, influenced by global trends national development goals and pressure from local educational imperatives, in the context of a digitally networked world. Shifts in technology enhanced pedagogical practices and in discourses around information and communication technologies (ICTs) have had varying degrees of influence in higher education. This paper takes a rearview of a 20-year journey of technology enhanced learning in South African higher education. An analysis of literature view is presented chronologically in four phases: phase 1 (1996–2000), phase 2 (2001–05), phase 3 (2006–10) and phase 4 (2011–16). In phase 1 technology was used predominantly for drill and practice, computer-aided instruction, with growing consciousness of the digital divide. In phase 2 institutions primarily focused on building ICT infrastructure, democratizing information, policy development and research; they sought to compare the effectiveness of teaching with or without technology. During phase 3 institutions began to include ICTs in their strategic directions, digital divide debates focused on epistemological access, and they also began to conduct research with a pedagogical agenda. In phase 4 mobile learning and social media came to the fore. The research agenda shifted from whether students would use technology to how to exploit what students already use to transform teaching and learning practices. The paper concludes that South Africa's higher education institutions have moved from being solely responsible for both their own relatively poor ICT infrastructure and education provision to cloud-based ICT infrastructure with “unlimited” educational resources that are freely, openly and easily available within and beyond the institution. Although mobile and social media are more evident now than ever before, teaching and learning practice in South African higher education remains largely unchanged.
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    Towards a Shared Understanding of emerging technologies: experiences in a collaborative research project in South Africa
    (Kennesaw State University, 2013) Ng'ambi, Dick; Gachago, Daniela; Backhouse, Judy; Bozalek, Vivienne; Ivala, Eunice; Bosman, Jan Petrus
    While the practice of using educational technologies in Higher Education is increasingly common among educators, there is a paucity of research on innovative uses of emerging technologies to transform teaching and learning. This paper draws on data collected as part of a larger study aimed at investigating emerging technologies and their use in South African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to improve teaching and learning. The research employed a mixed method research design, using both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods—quantitative data from a survey of 262 respondents from 22 public HEIs in South Africa and qualitative data gathered from 16 experts/practitioners on their self-reflective definition of the term "emerging technologies". The paper concludes that levels of institutional development, access to resources, discipline, group belonging and individual motivation of respondents influenced the way they defined emerging technologies including what constituted an innovative use of technology, foregrounding the contextuality of emerging technologies.
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    Transforming teaching with emerging technologies: implications for higher education institutions
    (Unisa Press, 2013) Bozalek, Vivienne; Ng'ambi, Dick; Gachago, Daniela
    A gulf is widening between the technologies used by students, those used by educators and those provided by institutions. However, knowledge about the impact of so-called emerging technologies on learning or the readiness of higher education institutions (HEIs) to engage with such technologies in the South African context is relatively thin. This article uses Rogers' (2003) diffusion of innovations model as a conceptual framework to examine the diffusion, adoption and appropriation of emerging technologies in South African HEIs. We report on a survey which examined how emerging technologies are used in innovative pedagogical practices to transform teaching and learning across South African HEIs. The article concludes that, in order to foster a greater uptake or more institution-wide diffusion of use of emerging technologies, institutional opinion leaders need to purposefully create an enabling environment by giving recognition to and communicating with change agents, and developing policies that will encourage institutional-wide engagement with emerging technologies.
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    ‘Undergoing' as posthuman literacy research in an in/formal settlement primary school in South Africa
    (2021) Crowther, Judith Lynne; Murris, Karin; Bozalek, Vivienne
    My research began with a critical incident of my teaching performance being monitored in a British primary school classroom. A dis/continuous re-turning to the incident catalyses analysis of concepts in education and the educator's role in teaching literacy. Analysis is predominantly enabled through the critical theories and philosophies of Tim Ingold, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad. Eight years later, having moved back to South Africa, my research continued in an in/formal settlement government school where I was employed as a literacy support teacher. Inspired by Murris and Haynes' Philosophy with Picturebooks approach, I conducted philosophical enquiries with small groups of primary school children (aged 9-12) as a way of doing literacy support. The children were diagnosed by the school as having barriers to learning and were research participants for a period of six months. Created data includes critical incidents, fieldnotes, children's workbooks, photographs and vignettes of small group enquiries. Central in my research is the notion of subjectivity in an educational community. The formation of subjectivity in community aligns with Ingold's notion of ‘undergoing' which is a guiding concept throughout. I put forward the thesis that ‘undergoing' offers an important alternative to dominant views of education. ‘Undergoing' refers to what we (on a planetary scale) are becoming, that continuously (re)shapes and (re)orients pre-arranged educational ‘doings'. Research as ‘undergoing' is not about producing knowledge to fill in gaps on a given (transcendently known) plane. ‘Undergoing' troubles such humanist literacy support approaches that focus only on language and are guided by notions such as ‘back to basics' or ‘simple to complex'. The concept of ‘undergoing' works to show how literacy education involves processes of subjectification where relational entanglements precede entities formed. In the thesis I argue how critical posthumanism and, in particular, the concept ‘undergoing' enables affirmative posthuman literacy research and pedagogy. ‘Undergoing' matters ethically and politically, because it renders capable so-called ‘failing' children in literacy pursuits, in a context of poverty. It also renders capable so-called ‘failing' teachers in their pedagogical endeavours.