Browsing by Author "Kell, Catherine"

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    Breathing Coloniality: An ethnographic case study of language and literacy ideologies and colonial power relations in the positioning and development of 1st generation black children's learning experiences in and outside school contexts
    (2021) Manganyi-Tawana, Amani Khensani; Kell, Catherine
    This study was inspired by the under theorization of language shifts and the impact that coloniality and language and literacy ideologies have among first generation black children's attending English medium schools positioning and family language planning. I draw on the theoretical framework of [de]coloniality with a particular focus on coloniality of power and the colonial matrix of power in post-colonial South African education and society. I additionally drew upon language ideology and the pedagogization of literacy as conceptual frameworks that helped to investigate the correlation between macro-level discourses that distribute particular types of hegemonic language and literacy ideologies and their effect on the positioning and self-imaging of people from non-mainstream populations. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with parents and literacy instructors around observed practices and views on language use. In relation to language, my analysis revealed a strong correlation between exclusionary anglonormative language ideology and Standard English ideology in the deficit positioning of non-mainstream children in previously white only ex-Model C schools. The study additionally found that Apartheid notions of superiority and inferiority and racial classifications were reproduced in parent discourses around English language varieties valued for their children to use. My findings suggest the need for a meaningful investigation of English language and literacy crisis rhetoric and the positioning of non-mainstream learners. I argue that research into linguistic discursive practices and language ideology in ex-Model C schools will enable the necessary forms of integration requisite in an equity based not assimilatory educational system.
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    Changing Research Communication Practices and Open Scholarship: A Framework for Analysis
    (University of Cape Town. Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme, 2014-04) Czerniewicz, Laura; Kell, Catherine; Willmers, Michelle; King, Thomas
    "It is important that academics’ research communication practices are explored to complement these system approaches. How do we think about these issues in order to investigate and illuminate changing forms of knowledge creation and communication? The project from which this paper is drawn was interested to answer three interrelated questions: • What are the research communication practices of academics? • What enables or constrains the flow of research communication within these practices? • How closed or open are academics’ scholarly communication practices? This paper describes our thinking as we developed the analytical framework that would enable us to answer these questions. The analytical framework was developed from the conceptual framework we used to shape our study through an iterative process with the data collected."
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    Changing the game: public education and the discourses and practices of privatisation in educational technology policy and intervention
    (2020) Staschen, Orrie; Kell, Catherine
    Privatisation in education is a contentious issue, inseparable from the shift in focus from community-based education initiatives to individualistic and economically driven ones (Ball and Youdell, 2007). This raises ethical issues with initiatives like the Western Cape Government's Game Changer initiatives, given the range of access issues that learners experience in the pervasive social inequity of South Africa. There is a lack of existing research on privatisation practices in public education in the Western Cape, specifically what linguistic strategies are utilized in the official texts promoting it. The Game Changer initiatives and their associated ‘Roadmaps' promote non-state collaboration in extra- curricular eLearning classes and broader technology rollout in under resourced public schools. Analysis of the Roadmap policy reveals discourses of fast capitalism, skills talk, datafication and digital nativism. These discourses were mirrored in the practices, text and talk generated in an after-school mathematics intervention run by an EdTech company, which I have called ZipEd, in a Cape Flats school between 2017-2018. The company prioritized their funder's mandate and to prove their software's efficacy, spun data to reflect largely positive results. In the rush to provide this data, ZipEd entered several schools without fulfilling ethical clearance requirements. Obtaining access to Game Changer pilot sites ensured ZipEd's product rollout, continued growth, and financial success, revealing the neoliberal approaches which dominate ZipEd's practices. The Game Changer policy texts and the intervention observed, treated languages as silo-ed entities, ignoring family or community approaches to literacy initiatives, curricular reform, trans-languaging strategies and inclusive language learning. While EdTech is a useful teaching tool, this promotion of “exogenous” (Ball and Youdell, 2007) privatisation in the Western Cape, blurs the lines between state and non-state involvement, ultimately resulting in the commodification of public schooling.
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    Conceptions of language and literacy and the role of digital technologies in Home, First and Second Additional language lessons: a case study of 6 grade four teachers in South African state schools.
    (2020) Stewart, Cathryn Anne; Kell, Catherine
    Research into classroom practices in South Africa has highlighted various disjunctures between the conceptions of language and literacy evident in the CAPS curriculum documents, teachers' pedagogical approaches, and the multilingual reality of classrooms in South Africa. This research study asks whether the current promotion of digital technologies in classrooms, so evident in both South Africa and in the world at large, might be in danger of similar disjunctures. The study explores teachers' conceptions of language and literacy across English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa in the Grade 4 classrooms of two schools in the Hout Bay area, examining how these play out in their accounts of their daily teaching practice and whether and how they facilitate the successful integration of digital technology into language lessons. The study draws on Blommaert's ‘artefactual ideology of language' (2008), combined with the concepts of an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984) and language ideologies (McKinney, 2016), as well as Durrant and Green's (2000) digital literacy theoretical frameworks. While teachers are exhorted to promote the use of technology in their lessons and the rhetoric of the “the fourth industrial revolution” adds to the pressures, there are many factors involved in the uptake of technology in schools - perhaps the most important being the existing practices and ideologies of the teacher themselves. The study focuses specifically on six Grade 4 teachers' accounts of their conceptions and practices in relation to the CAPS curriculum, in order to analyse how teachers manage the much higher language and literacy levels of the curriculum specifications when learners move from Foundation Phase (Grades R-3) to Intermediate Phase (Grade 4-6) in language and literacy lessons, and also on how their uses of technology align or not with the specifications in the curriculum. Despite both schools being positive towards technology, it was soon apparent that CAPS specifications and teachers' conceptions of language and literacy (which leant towards the artefactual ideology of language and literacy) did not align easily with the kinds of tasks and assessments that are called for in using digital technologies (which lean towards agentic and critical engagements with texts). In addition, despite most of the teachers being highly critical of the CAPS curriculum, the study found that most of the teachers do stick closely to the CAPS specifications in both the Home Language and Additional Language classes and that these perceptions, combined with existing ideologies present in CAPS curriculum documents, are influencing their teaching practices and approach to using technology in their lessons.
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    Constructing the gap between past and present literacy practices in the South African Police Service
    (2002) Arend, Abdul Moeain; Kell, Catherine; Prinsloo, Mastin
    The study seeks to answer the research question: "What constructs the gap between past and present literacy practices in the South African Police Service (SAPS)?" To answer the research question, ethnographic methods were employed to gather data in a police station on the Cape Flats, renamed Phatisanani police station. In researching the gap between past and present literacy practices of police officers in the station, the effects the shift in institutional discourses from the early years of the South African Police (SAP), to after the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa had on police officers' professional discourses and their associated literacy practices were illuminated. The study suggests that institutional discourses after 1994 are conflicting with the professional discourse and associated literacy practices of police officers at Phatisanani police station. The research argues that the conflict between contemporary institutional discourses in the SAPS and the professional discourse of police officers in the station is leading to 'disorder of discourses' (Wodak, 199B). Drawing on theories from the New Literacy Studies the research concludes that the gap between past and present literacy practices in the SAPS is embedded in the 'disorder' between contemporary institutional and professional discourses, the 'disorder' between the social roles of 'insiders' and 'outsiders'; and the recontextualisation of literacy practices across various sites of practice in the SAP prior to 1994.
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    Contradictions in policy and implementation of adult education and training : unifying the system or accommodating diversity?
    (2001) Kikuchi, Yuko; Kell, Catherine
    This study attempts to examine and answer the research question: "What is the feasibility of the integration of education and training through promotion of the GETC as envisaged within the NQF discourse?" Focusing on problematic educational policy implementation in South Africa, the study also attempts to examine causes for the disparity between intended policies and implemented policies.
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    Digital literacy practices of three high school learners across home and school contexts: challenges and opportunities
    (2021) Jenkin, Jessica; Kell, Catherine
    This study investigates the literacy practices of three high school learners both in and out of the classroom. The study focuses on the role digital devices play in their literacy practices at home and at their school in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. The study focuses on how different learners, their teachers, and the wider institution in which they are located ‘take hold' of contemporary literacy, how their practices are affected, challenged and influenced by their engagement with or orientation towards digital technology. The study uses a comparative case study method, informed by ethnographic research methods. As the research question itself is an exploration of changing cultural literacy practices it is ideally suited to ethnographic research as exploratory. The study follows a qualitative methodology and is centrally grounded in a socio-cultural perspective of literacy, based in the work of the New Literacy Studies. This approach to literacy situates literacy in social practice, as an organisation of human activities, valued and determined differently depending on the context. Over a few months, data collection involved following the three teenagers, from one school but different grades, through their classes and back to their homes, tracing their engagements with digital devices through observations and short discussions. It also drew on observations in the classrooms, interviews with their teachers and document analysis of the school's policy on digital technologies. It found that beliefs and perceptions about technology profoundly influence how that technology is implemented and taken hold of in educational institutions. There is considerable fear surrounding young people's engagement with digital technologies from both parents and teachers seriously limiting an educational approach to their integration. The study also found that home contexts are still profoundly influential in shaping children's approaches to literacy and that school contexts need to engage with the differing realities of learners to engage their literacy practices and help prepare them for a world that is saturated with digitally-mediated literacy practices. Further education in terms of engaging young people with their own digital literacy engagements is clearly needed. Discussing digital citizenship and life online, as part of a life reality to manage and negotiate is essential to developing the literacy of young people in their online engagement. This research is important in terms of broadening our understanding of the changing nature of literacy practices in South Africa where there is limited research. The normalisation of the integration of technological devices into the functioning of our everyday lives means that shifting literacy practices are often left unexamined but are highly variable and profoundly influential in developing ourselves and our literacy engagements. In South Africa, in particular, schools and learners differ enormously in characteristics on a local and provincial level with regard to language and socio-economic characteristics. Essential to any digital implementation programme is the consideration of the particularities of each school, their teachers, their learners, and the communities from which they operate – as these are not always the same – nor require the same interventions. Different studies on this topic are therefore essential to help represent a picture of more South African schooling experiences, South African high school learners, and their families. Understanding what educational institutions, teachers and high school learners are doing in and out of the classroom in their literacy practices can help to inform considerations for future curriculum and policy development, as well as implementation.
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    A framework for analysing research types and practices
    (2014-11-05) Czerniewicz, Laura; Kell, Catherine
    This presentation by Assoc. Prof Laura Czerniewicz was given at the Networked Learning Conference Edinburgh 2014. The presentation is based on the work in the full paper: Czerniewicz, L; Kell, C; Willmers, M; King, T (2014), “Changing Research Communication Practices and Open Scholarship: A Framework for Analysis”, available at http://hdl.handle.net/11427/9068.
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    Language Ideologies and Decoloniality in Vernac News
    (2018) Mkula, Lwazi; Mckinney, Carolyn; Kell, Catherine
    This study examines the language ideologies constructed in the publication Vernac News produced by students at the University of Cape Town. These language ideologies seek to challenge and subvert dominant language practices within the university community. These dominant language ideologies are challenged through various ways, such as the specific use of indigenous African languages, and the use of urban vernaculars in formal contexts, English platforms such as the student newspaper. The study also looks at the ways in which media are used as tools for social activism as seen in the Vernac News publication. The study treats language as a social tool, integral in constructing identities, meaning-making, and accounting for the lived experience of its users. The study used twelve articles from six issues of Vernac News and interviews as the source of data. Language ideologies looks at the way in which languages and speakers are perceived and treated in society. In the period of the call to decolonise the university and the curriculum in South Africa, it was particularly important for the study to explore what this meant for language and the language practices within the university. The research explores various understandings, and discourses, of Decolonisation and Decoloniality, and other related discourses, as discussed by scholars such as Maldonado-Torres, Mignolo, Santos, amongst others. Additionally, the study examines the practices of ‘languaging’ in several urban contexts, let these be spoken or written accounts. The study is largely qualitative and makes use of linguistic ethnography to generate data from the various available sources. The linguistic ethnography approach here is coupled with Critical Discourse Analysis as tools for data analysis. The data analysis process foregrounds and highlights situated language uses in seven selected texts from the publication as well as interviews with members involved in the early development of the publication. The analysis looks at the various ways in which practices such as Translanguaging are essential language practices in the creation of identity, history and resistance and challenging of the hegemony of English in the university community. The study found that the language practices of students involved in the publication were capable of challenging and subverting dominant language practices in formal context such as the university space, thus, it enabled the development of a truly integrated language ideology. The study also confirmed that language is social, and can reflect the social condition within which it operates, through the development of Discourses on social issues such Decolonisation and Decoloniality.
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    Reading in the Digital Age: A case study of print and digital literacy practices and dominant discourses around reading in the homes of middle-class children in Cape Town across Grade R and Grade 1
    (2021) Harris, Chandra; Kell, Catherine
    Young children who are learning to read are exposed to digital technology from a very young age and many contemporary families have access to a range of digital devices. This project investigates the reading practices, both digital and print-based, of six middle-class suburban children in Cape Town and how the children and their mothers conceptualise reading. By analysing reading practices and associated discourses, this study aims to ascertain how the dominant discourses of the mothers influence the children's reading practices. This research project is a case study using a qualitative approach, with ethnographic data generating techniques. These included observations, interviews with the six children and their mothers and a questionnaire. Analysis of the data showed that middle-class pre-school children engage in many emergent literacy practices, both digital and print-based, in their homes. Both mothers and children conceptualise reading as being the decoding of print, thus not recognising the multimodal meaning-making strategies to access and read screen texts as being part of the children's emergent literacy practices. A critical discourse analysis of the mothers' answers to the interview and questionnaire revealed that their dominant discourses are ‘literacy is a skill' and ‘being a good parent'. This resulted in the mothers in my study all exposing their children to digital technology, but also restricting the amount of time that their children spend engaging with it. The mothers failed to acknowledge the emergent literacy practices present in their children's digital activities and viewed online and offline literacy practices as separate, not acknowledging the relationship between the use of digital technologies and print-based decoding, seeing their digital practices as ‘other' to what they needed to achieve. This serves to marginalise these digital literacy practices in the children's ‘coming to literacy'. In trying to be a good parent, they feel conflicted by the need to expose their children to digital technology and the need to protect them and thus limit their access by imposing restrictions. Thus, discourse shapes which literacy practices are valued and which are restricted. Regimes of truth about what reading is and the need to restrict access to digital technology reinforce the suburban middle-class ideas and ways of becoming literate and being a good parent. Discourse is thus shaping literacy practices in suburban homes and constituting knowledge, marginalising particular ways of being and doing and, thus failing to recognise the child's potential to contribute to their own learning and full participation in their emergent literacy practices. This project concluded that despite literacies changing as a function of social, cultural and technological changes, how people view reading has not changed since the 1950s. If people regard the contribution that the digital is making towards a child's emergent literacy, the ‘formal' literacy learning that occurs in schools and other institutions may improve.
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    Redesigning landscape architecture in higher education: a multimodal social semiotic approach
    (2020) Price, Christine Rosalie; Kell, Catherine; Archer, Arlene
    This investigation is a case study of landscape architectural design education in South Africa. Current forms of landscape architectural education are influenced by Global North perspectives and often, if not consciously, privilege particular ways of meaningmaking, and exclude or marginalise experiences or ways of knowing that are different. The aim of this research is to develop a landscape architectural pedagogy for diversity that fosters multiple perspectives and valorises resources that students bring to their learning environment, in order that students may both access and challenge the dominant landscape educational discourse. In grappling with these concerns, this research finds resonance with a multimodal social semiotic approach. Instead of labelling students as (in) competent or (under)prepared, a multimodal social semiotic approach emphasises the interest, agency and resourcefulness of the student as meaning-maker. The research thus reframes landscape architectural design processes through a multimodal social semiotic lens, providing new insights and clarity to these processes. The approach foregrounds interpersonal and social meanings of space and, to some extent, challenges traditional landscape architectural design practices that tend to value compositional and conceptual meanings. The methodology centers around a spatial model project in the second half of a first-year landscape architectural design studio subject. The data includes students' texts and their presentations. The research develops a methodological framework that outlines a range of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaningpotentials of landscape spatial and visual texts and applies this framework to the analysis of students' 2D and 3D texts. Through careful analysis of students' design trajectories, this research uncovers the types of resources students draw on, including semiotic, experiential, social, interactive and pedagogical resources. The analysis shows that students' transformation of resources results in innovative spatial designs, and expands on what and how landscape spaces can mean. Through the investigation, tenets for a multimodal pedagogy for diversity are developed: recognition of the rich and diverse resources students bring to their learning environment; acknowledgment that these resources are apt ‘precedent' for landscape architectural design processes; and explicit attention to multimodal moments and activities that may prompt re-(inner) conceptualisation in design trajectories. This pedagogical approach begins to address past educational imbalances and inequalities, and ensures that diverse, Global South perspectives contribute to the production of knowledge.
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    Scholarly Communication at the University of Botswana: Case Study Report
    (2014-05) Trotter, Henry; Kell, Catherine; Willmers, Michelle; Gray, Eve; Totolo, Angelina; King, Thomas
    This report, "Scholarly Communication at the University of Botswana", is one of a series of four institutional case studies. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity system at UB.
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    Scholarly Communication at the University of Cape Town: Case Study Report
    (2014-05) Trotter, Henry; Kell, Catherine; Willmers, Michelle; Gray, Eve; King, Thomas
    This report, "Scholarly Communication at the University of Cape Town", is one of a series of four institutional case studies. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity system at UCT.
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    Scholarly Communication at the University of Mauritius: Case Study Report
    (2014-05) Trotter, Henry; Kell, Catherine; Willmers, Michelle; Gray, Eve; Beeharry, Girish Kumar; King, Thomas
    This report, "Scholarly Communication at the University of Mauritius", is one of a series of four institutional case studies. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity system at UoM.
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    Scholarly Communication at the University of Namibia: Case Study Report
    (2014-05) Trotter, Henry; Kell, Catherine; Willmers, Michelle; Gray, Eve; Kingo Mchombu; King, Thomas
    This report, "Scholarly Communication at the University of Namibia", is one of a series of four institutional case studies. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity system at UN.
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    Scripted curriculum and the quest for improving reading for meaning: Conceptions of language and literacy in Malawi's Grade 4 English scripted curriculum and amongst Grade 4 English teachers
    (2021) Kapito, Patrick Mavuto Stranger Paul; Kell, Catherine
    Various scholars in education have argued that policy, practice and opinions about language and literacy teaching are consciously or subconsciously underpinned by particular conceptualisations of language and literacy (Ivanic, 2004). These conceptions about language and literacy teaching are usually reflected in curriculum documents and teachers' views and practices about the teaching of language and literacy. In the quest to mitigate dwindling standards in language and literacy in education, governments and their development partners have embarked on literacy projects/programs. A key feature of these programs, in recent times, is the quest to promote reading for meaning through the use of a scripted curriculum. Malawi's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, through its National Reading Program (NRP) has been implementing a scripted curriculum for Grades 1-4 English and Chichewa. My study aimed at exploring the conceptions of language and literacy which underlie the approach to the teaching of Malawi's Standard/Grade 4 English scripted curriculum and how the teachers conceive language and literacy, as they engage with the scripted lessons, and whether such conceptions promote the NRP's aim of ‘reading for meaning'. The analysis of conceptions of language draws on Blommaert's ‘artefactual ideology of language' (2008) and Makoe and McKinney's (2014) ideology of languages as bounded entities, while the analysis of conceptions of literacy draws on the concepts of autonomous and ideological models of literacy (Street, 1991). To explore the conceptions of language and literacy that underpin the scripted lessons and inform the teachers' views of language and literacy, the study focussed on the Standard/Grade 4 English Teachers Guide (TG) and Learners Books (LB), related documents of the Malawi's National Reading Program (NRP), and Standard 4 teachers of English's accounts of their conceptions and practices in relation to the Standard 4 English scripted curriculum. The study established that though the social nature of language and literacy is acknowledged by the NRP and teachers, both the TG and teachers' conceptions of language and literacy are strongly informed by the view of language as an abstract system that has forms independent of their social uses, and that literacy is conceived as consisting of decontextualised skills. Thus, despite the NRP's emphasis on and calls for a greater focus on reading for meaning, meaning is largely abandoned/neglected as the ideologies/conceptions of language and literacy do not allow teachers to teach reading for meaning. The implication is that if the social nature of language and literacy continues to be backgrounded, with the structural view of language and the view of literacy as decontextualised skills being foregrounded, efforts to improve education standards through promoting literacy levels might be futile and waste of resources.
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    Seeking Impact and Visibility: Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa
    (2014-05) Trotter, Henry; Kell, Catherine; Willmers, Michelle; Gray, Eve; King, Thomas
    The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was a three-year research and implementation initiative that took place between March 2010 and August 2013. Hosted by the University of Cape Town, the programme engaged the Universities of Botswana, Namibia and Mauritius in a process aimed at better understanding the dynamics around scholarly communication in the Southern African higher education environment and advancing the open access agenda for the purpose of increasing the visibility of African research. This work was made possible by a grant from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC). This report synthesizes research and findings from the four institutional case studies conducted at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity systems at work in these four Southern African universities.
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    The ‘four resources model' in South Africa: An analysis of an in-service teacher training intervention for literacy at foundation phase level and its uptake by teachers at a Cape Flats school
    (2020) Cairns, Deborah; Kell, Catherine; Guzula, Xolisa
    Despite a wide range of teacher training literacy interventions in South Africa at foundation phase level, literacy results have declined according to local and international tests. This research outlines the basis of these interventions and then compares them with a new teacher training intervention based on what has been called “the four resources model” (Luke and Freebody, 1990). This intervention, designed by a specialised teacher trainer and offered by a Western Cape based NGO, is currently taking place in some schools that have achieved poor literacy results at foundation phase and is sponsored by the Western Cape Education Department. The research outlines what an intervention based on the four resources model involves, where the approach is compatible with the CAPS specifications for literacy teaching and where it diverges from the CAPS, and explores how foundation phase teachers at one school respond to the intervention in their teaching. This programme has not yet been researched and is the only teacher intervention programme in South Africa that is based on the four resources model. It differs from other interventions because it emphasises the importance of meaning making and of writing (particularly shared writing) in literacy development, as well as the role of higher order thinking, as opposed to decoding and comprehension which are emphasised in the literacy curriculum and pedagogy and in other teacher intervention programmes. Data was collected through observations of teacher workshops and classroom visits of the teacher trainer, teacher trainer interviews, classroom observations and teacher interviews. Refracted through the reflections of the teacher trainer on her decades of experience in literacy training and on the current programme design, the analysis probes the value of experimenting with an enlarged understanding of literacy as outlined in the four resources model. It charts the ways in which teachers' understanding of literacy pedagogies slowly changes and adapts, revealing how teachers start to see the possibilities of creative engagement with text types, critical thinking, engagement with children's prior knowledge and linguistic resources. While the hope is that the intervention will improve tests scores, the research was not able to verify this since the timing of the intervention does not correlate with the systemic testing schedule and release of results, nor the next international benchmark tests. The research reveals that the four resources model intervention does emphasise higher order thinking skills, in contrast to other interventions, and that this could have a positive effect on the PIRLS tests results, in the schools where it is offered. It also shows that there are limitations to the four resources model, in that it does not address the inclusion of multimodal pedagogies nor does it consider the realities of multilingual classes in South Africa.
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    Understanding the unintended consequences of a capacity building program :
    (2001) De Sousa, Jane; Kell, Catherine
    Capacity building programmes facilitated by development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) often fail to achieve their expected outcomes, resulting instead in a series of unintented consequences. These unintended consequences become legible when viewed as instrumental elements in the resultant constellation of the 'truths' of the developmental discourse that shape these capacity building programmes. This study identifies two unintended consequences of a capacity building programme facilitated be a rural support NGO. Firstly, the fact that the development discourse stresses the importance of people's empowerment and participation, results in processes which are more successful at assisting people to acquire the development discourse than training people in specific skills and to apply specific tools. Secondly, that the power relations between institutions operating within the development discourse, result in contradictions in the development practice of NGOs, such as the use of specific tools whose requirements are incompatible with the truths of the participatory development discourse within which most NGOs operate.
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    Visibility of Scholarly Research and Changing ResearchCommunication Practices: A Case Study from Namibia
    (IGI Global, 2016-09-27) Kell, Catherine; Czerniewicz, Laura
    Scholars globally are increasingly required to account for the visibility and impact of their research, and visibility and impact are increasingly digitally-mediated through the platforms and practices associated with Web 2.0. Traditional prestige-based metrics of visibility (ISI/WoS Impact Factor) measure only scholar-to-scholar outputs like journals and books. In many African universities with nascent research cultures, legacies of colonialism and imperatives of national development, these measures present scholars with particular challenges. This paper reveals the pressures shaping African research communication practices and the visibility of research, using data from a case study at the University of Namibia.