Completed and ongoing:
1. Centre for International Teacher Education (2015-16)
Currently I am based at the Centre For International Teacher Education (CITE) in Cape Town which acts as a national, regional, and international centre of excellence for research and policy dialogue about education policy and teacher education within South Africa.
During 2015 with the CITE team we made up part of the consortium of partners funded by UNICEF and the ESRC / DFID led by the Universities of Sussex, Ulster and Amsterdam investigating the role of teachers and youth in peacebuilding and social cohesion in Myanmar, Pakistan, South Africa, Rwanda and Uganda. With the in-country team we looked closely at the interconnection between policy intentions and policy outcomes regarding peacebuilding in education in the global South and in South Africa specifically in regards to efforts to support social cohesion.
Over 2016 I am continuing this work upon the project now led by Sussex (Engaging Teachers in Peacebuilding) which is an extension of the UNICEF funded work in 2015. Here my role is as the Research Support and Communications Officer between the University of Sussex, University of Rwanda and CITE in South Africa within the extension of this project for the year.
Funded by the ESRC-DFID joint fund for poverty alleviation, this second year of the project further investigates the role of teachers in peacebuilding specifically within the post-conflict contexts of Rwanda and South Africa. The project will generate robust evidence in an under-researched field where evidence on how teachers engage with each other, with communities and students in challenging environments is sparse or lacks rigour. The ESRC / DFID project runs from September 2014 - to the end of 2016.
2. Emergency Hacklab (2013) Webmaking for emergencies and low-fi environments
During Mozfest 2013 I participated with many other collaborators on a great project to combine Web-making with humanitarian disaster work. During disasters communities need to find new ways to share news, mobilize and rebuild when traditional media, governments and support channels fail. This project was about finding ways to combine web literacy and digital making with grassroots efforts to help people rebuild their lives and communities.
3. VISCED (2012)
VISCED was a project to make an inventory of all kinds of investments into education and ICT in the form of a wiki. It worked by carrying out a systematic review at
international and national levels of innovative ICT-enhanced
learning/teaching "Exemplar" initiatives and "e-mature" major secondary
and post-secondary education providers for the 14-21 age group with a
particular focus on Virtual Schools and Colleges)
This inventory supplies adequate comparative data, statistics and analyses to underpin policy recommendations, critical/key success factors and teacher trainer recommendations - for policy-makers, advisors, government, education authorities and the e-learning industry in the EU. The review has been valorised by pilots at five schools in three countries.
The key aspects of innovation that the project looked for in schools and colleges are "innovation in scale" and "innovation in sustainability" - that is, large-scale routinised solutions aligned with pedagogy and institutional/national goals, from socio-economic contexts with some relevance to EU realities.
Success we hope was reached by adapting, piloting and transferring innovative approaches which already exist in other countries outside the EU (or in the EU) but not widely known, e.g. for linguistic reasons. Good practice examples of fully virtual schools and virtual colleges were studied as well as all major ICT-based "notschool" initiatives.
This inventory supplies adequate comparative data, statistics and analyses to underpin policy recommendations, critical/key success factors and teacher trainer recommendations - for policy-makers, advisors, government, education authorities and the e-learning industry in the EU. The review has been valorised by pilots at five schools in three countries.
The key aspects of innovation that the project looked for in schools and colleges are "innovation in scale" and "innovation in sustainability" - that is, large-scale routinised solutions aligned with pedagogy and institutional/national goals, from socio-economic contexts with some relevance to EU realities.
Success we hope was reached by adapting, piloting and transferring innovative approaches which already exist in other countries outside the EU (or in the EU) but not widely known, e.g. for linguistic reasons. Good practice examples of fully virtual schools and virtual colleges were studied as well as all major ICT-based "notschool" initiatives.
Background:
- I am a teacher / researcher in development and education and am happy to share and exchange research ideas and feedback. I've worked on mobile, online and distance education and connected learning but am broadly engaged in studying the use of technology for education in developed contexts across my work.
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