Daisy Pillay

Learning about Co-Flexivity in a Transdisciplinary Self-Study Research Supervision Community

In South Africa, every postgraduate (master’s or doctoral) student is usually assigned one academic advisor, known as a supervisor. “The traditional model is the apprenticeship model of individual mentoring. This model is usually supplemented by informal and ad hoc support programmes” (Academy of Science of South Africa [ASSAf], 2010, p. 64).

Every voice counts: Towards a new agenda for schools in rural communities in the age of AIDS

This discussion piece focuses on possible strategies for taking action around some of the challenges teachers and schools in rural communities face in the context of larger systemic changes in southern Africa, and particularly in the context of HIV/AIDS. For this purpose we examine five key entry points, i.e. teachers’ lives, school leadership and management, the voices of young people, teachers working with communities, and partnerships and pedagogies for preparing new teachers. We propose visual participatory research as a possible strategy for providing a space for dialogue that could be unleashed from the narrow political and economical aims of education transformation in South Africa. In a context where rural communities and schools are often viewed and approached as deficient, we consider the importance of an asset-based approach, invoking specific types of communication as an alternative to a needs-based approach to community development.

A Self-Study of Connecting through Aesthetic memory-Work

In developing the title of this chapter, we were influenced by these words from E.M. Forster’s (1910) novel, Howards End: “Only connect! … Live in fragments no longer” (p. 183). For us, these words encapsulate a shared personal-professional learning experience that began in April 2012 when we were sitting next to each other on the floor in a packed American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference venue in Vancouver and we heard Elliot Eisner answer a question about the value of arts-based educational research with these words: “The opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic!”

A Study of Teacher–Learner Interactions: A Continuum Between Monologic and Dialogic Interactions

PURPOSE Teachers and learners must be able to shift flexibly along the continuum of monologic and dialogic interactional repertoires to advance learning. This article describes how teachers and learners interacted during whole-class instruction along the continuum between monologic and dialogic interaction in primary school classrooms in Western Cape, South Africa. METHOD A video-observation method was used to analyze teacher-learner interactions (TLIs) across 15 lessons in intermediate-phase classrooms. TLIs were analyzed in relation to indicators such as authority, questions, feedback, explanation, metalevel connection, and collaboration. The transcriptions of TLIs were described using quantitative and qualitative techniques. RESULTS The study found that teachers sustained dominant monologic interactions by asserting their authority, asking mainly closed-ended questions, and providing confirming/correcting feedback that constrained the interaction. Learners had limited opportunities for explanations or collaboration. Across most lessons, there were episodic shifts from monologic TLIs to transitional TLIs. These transitions were achieved by using mainly open-ended questions and feedback to expand the interaction. Dialogic TLIs were not evident. CONCLUSIONS Monologic TLIs were dominant, closing down opportunities for communication. Although transitional TLIs were evident, they were episodic and showed the potential for opening interaction opportunities. The absence of dialogic TLIs suggested that collaborative engagement opportunities were unavailable. The opportunity for intervention to increase dialogic TLIs is discussed.

Self-Knowledge Creation Through Collective Poetic Inquiry: Cultivating Productive Resistance as University Academics

We explore how using the literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry deepened our own self-knowledge as South African academics who choose to resist a neoliberal corporate model of higher education. Increasingly, poetry is recognized as a means of representing the distinctiveness, complexity and plurality of the voices of research participants and researchers. Also, poetry is understood as a mode of research analysis that can intensify creativity and reflexivity. Using found poetry in the pantoum and tanka formats, we provide an example of a poetic inquiry process in which we started off by exploring other university academics’ lived experiences of working with graduate students and came to a turning point of reflexivity and self-realization. The escape highlights our evolving understanding that collaborative creativity and experimentation in research can be acts of self-knowledge creation for nurturing productive resistance as university academics.

Composing Object Medleys

Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research follows on from a 3-day international research symposium held in Durban, South Africa in February 2016, organised by Daisy Pillay, Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, and Inbanathan Naicker.

Portrait of a rural health graduate: exploring alternative learning spaces

Given that the staffing of rural facilities represents an international challenge, the support, training and development of students of rural origin at institutions of higher learning (IHLs) should be an integral dimension of health care provisioning. International studies have shown these students to be more likely than students of urban origin to return to work in rural areas. However, the crisis in formal school education in some countries, such as South Africa, means that rural students with the capacity to pursue careers in health care are least likely to access the necessary training at an IHL. In addition to challenges of access, throughput is relatively low at IHLs and is determined by a range of learning experiences. Insight into the storied educational experiences of health care professionals (HCPs) of rural origin has the potential to inform the training and development of rural‐origin students.

“Prison is not a good place … ”: Learning from dilemmas surrounding an inmate's experience

abstract Exploring the complex lives of incarcerated African women is a powerful site for deepening our knowledge and responsibility as a transforming country. Empirical research by South African researchers on circumstances that lead African women to imprisonment, and the conditions they experience in prison, is sadly lacking. We take a narrative inquiry stance to explore what can be learned about life in a South African prison from an ex-inmate, Bakke. Drawing on the conceptual frame of dilemmatic spaces and Foucaults theory of ethics, we analyse two vignettes: Bakkes pathway to prison, and her decision to turn her life around during incarceration. The analysis opens our eyes to a deeper understanding of the dynamic, complex everyday lives of young African women growing up in rural settings, and who turn to crime.

The Bina Gumede story: exploring the ethics of researching the other

JULIET PERUMAL and DAISY PILAY examine issues of reflexivity, difference, power, and voice in relation to the ethical and methodological tensions that emerged for them as feminist researchers during an interview with Bina Gumede, a rural craftswoman

“To Seek Out Something More”: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs

“‘To Seek Out Something More’: Knowing the Teacher-Researcher Self Differently Through Self-narrative Writing and Found Photographs” by Daisy Pillay, Sagie Naicker, and Wendy Rawlinson showcases the power of found photographs for evoking, constructing, and reconstructing memory in written self-narratives. The exemplars are drawn from Sagie Naicker’s and Wendy Rawlinson’s doctoral research in South Africa. Sagie drew on selected photographs to examine how his disability identity influenced his leadership practice, and his journey as an activist seeking social justice for people with disabilities. Wendy’s found photograph evoked a bodily experience of being transported to a more imaginative space that triggered her curiosity for aesthetic pedagogical adventuring in her racially diverse classroom. Taken as a whole, the chapter demonstrates how, drawing multi-methodologically on self-narratives and the visual meaning making perspective of found photographs, the scholarship of self-awareness of teachers’ ways of being, knowing, and doing can make significant contributions to teacher professional learning.