Daisy Pillay

University of KwaZulu-Natal | ukzn · School of Education

This book delves into the complexities of being and becoming an academic in higher education. Inspired by the arts, the book introduces new voices and insights to scholarly discussions about what constitutes data and analysis in higher education research. It demonstrates ABER’s ability to shape and critique academic identity narratives in response...

This chapter sets the stage for Arts-Based Educational Research Narratives of Academic Identities: Perspectives From Higher Education, and directs the reader through the rest of the book. The first section of the book is devoted to the personal scholarly narratives of academics from Canada, the United States, and South Africa whose joint efforts ha...

The conceptualisation of academics as embodied beings is especially significant now, when our workspaces are consumed by a neoliberal culture of erasure that makes us feel like disembodied knowledge factories. Visual art, as a tangible arts-based educational research (ABER) practice, allows for revealing and crossing normative boundaries in academi...

Initial teacher education is a significant site for learning to become a teacher. Central to this phase of becoming are issues around “What do the teachers think, feel, want; what are their ideals, what inspires them, what kind of teachers do they want to be? And above all, What is their potential?” For the past few decades, initial teacher educati...

The Self-Reflexive Methodologies Special Interest Group (SIG) of the South African Education Research Association (SAERA) has been active since 2014, with over 100 academics from more than 20 higher education institutions participating. The 10th Anniversary SAERA special issue of Journal of Education prompted an analysis of the SIG's educational sc...

We are three South African teacher educators who, in collaboration, have edited six collections of methodologically innovative self-reflexive educational research over seven years. For this paper, we asked: “What can we learn about our academic motivations from revisiting our editorials?” and “Why does this matter?” To promote collaborative creativ...

Posthumanism locates, progresses, and asserts knowledge in the openings for interconnection. In this article, we undertake a collective biography using an interconnected arts-based practice that affords us complex relations with each other and material ways of thinking and being together. With a shared interest in posthuman theory and memory work,...

We, a diverse group of South African academics, study embodied reflexivity through poetry, and this article is an account of poetic inquiry inspired by assemblages created by the participants in a symposium, Object Inquiry for Social Cohesion in Public Higher Education. As the symposium’s cofacilitators, we wondered how and what we might learn from...

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated many adjustments to everyday teaching at higher education institutions. While face-to-face lectures were the preferred teaching method of teacher educators prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift to online teaching was heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper draws attention to the shifts we transitio...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many countries adopting containment measures. This transcontinental, transdisciplinary study draws on arts-based research to explore the value of connecting through ‘disease’ at the moment of disease during the COVID-19 epoch. The four researcher-author-educators engaged in collective memory work and drew on collab...

The success of environmental education has been attributed to several factors including teachers’ competencies and attitudes, teaching methodologies, availability of resources, and curriculum design. Many researchers in environmental education suggest that innovative and resourceful teaching approaches may translate into meaningful environmental ed...

The Reader Collective Memory-Work is meant to foster further exchange about Collective Memory-Work, its use and usefulness, methodological questions, aspects of its adaptation/s, critical elements found in CMW, exemplary applications in various fields of practice and research. Included in the Reader are: first-time English translations of texts by...

In this paper, we engage in productive resistance through exploring the application of an arts-based method in expanding the critical research methodology repertoire in the profession of speech-language pathology. There is a specific focus on the value of painting in the data representation process. We explore how a playful, creative analysis deepe...

This qualitative study draws from focus group discussions with primary school boys,girls and their teachers to examine how violence is experienced at a rural school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The study draws attention to ‘amaphara' masculinity’ as conceptualized by Hunter (2021) and stick fighting as key to understanding the local expressions...

Caught up in the "COVID moment and distancing-isolation," the authors came together through a Collective Memory Work initiative to inquire into what solidarity during the COVID moment meant to each of them and collectively assemble un-derstandings about this phenomenon. Critical relationships, methods, and more-than-human relationalities are shared...

We explore autoethnography as a complex and potentially transformative methodology for understanding and enacting higher education. First, we position higher education in the context of global corporate managerialism and consider the possible effects of this on lived educational experiences and practices. In what follows, we each offer an account o...

Traditionally, a storyboard has been used in the film-making industry as part of the preparatory process of film production. In this article, we focus on its use as a creative space for analysis in educational research. Specifically, we make visible our learnings, as social science researchers, about storyboarding as an imaginative, tangible, and r...

In this scholarly memoir, we use mosaic-ing as a metaphor to retrace research connections between and among memory-work, the arts, and professional teacher learning, charting the course of transcontinental methodological variations and considerations over time and space. We chronologically offer this retracing, looking back to some of our earliest...

Abstract Visual texts as fieldnotes offer a material space for articulating researchers’ personal experiences and stories. Drawing on materiality as a lens to view researchers’ subjective positionings, we posit that visual fieldnotes offer researchers imaginative ways to engage with their embodied ways of knowing as entanglements that are in a cons...

The contributions to this themed issue explore both why and how educational researchers across different contexts in South Africa and the United States are enacting self-reflexivity through methodological inventiveness. The six articles are candid and engaging, offering vivid, detailed illustrations and descriptions of the researchers’ experiences,...

This themed issue comprises a collection of object study articles, a review by Logamurthie Athiemoolam of the edited book, Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research (Pillay, Pithouse-Morgan, & Naicker, 2017), and a report by Nosipho Mbatha on the 6th annual international conference of the South African Educational Research...

Going beyond the static, dangerous version of a single story about who an African child inmate is, is an ethical responsibility-especially when we consider the structural and material forces that are tangled in this evil deed. Drawing on a sociological framing of self and Foucault's theory of ethics, we take a narrative inquiry stance to explore wh...

“New Voices, Insights, Possibilities for Working with the Arts and Memory in Researching Teacher Professional Learning” begins with a prologue that tells a story of how the book editors—Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell—have engaged with their own learning, as well as with what the book can offer to others. The chapter go...

“‘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’...

In “Collaging Memories: Reimagining Teacher-Researcher Identities and Perspectives,” Daisy Pillay, Reena Ramkelewan, and Anita Hiralaal explore teacher-researcher identities and perspectives through the piecing together of lived experience and practice using collage. The exemplars are drawn from ongoing doctoral research by two emerging South Afric...

“Creative Nonfiction Narratives and Memory-Work: Pathways for Women Teacher-Researchers’ Scholarship of Ambiguity and Openings” by Daisy Pillay, Mary Cullinan, and Leighandri Moodley, draws on exemplars of memory-work and creative nonfiction narratives presented by two teacher-researchers from their graduate studies. Mary, a Canadian teacher and la...

This chapter draws multi-methodologically on self-narratives and the visual meaning- making perspective of found photographs. The chapter uses self-narrative accounts and found photographs to access, examine, and reflect on memories and past experiences, and to inquire reflexively into imagining teacher-researchers’ lives differently. The exemplars...

Going beyond the static, dangerous version of a single story about who an African child inmate is, is an ethical responsibility – especially when we consider the structural and material forces that are tangled in this evil deed. Drawing on a sociological framing of self and Foucault’s theory of ethics, we take a narrative inquiry stance to explore...

In this paper, we concentrate on our learning conversations as research supervisors of graduate students in our self-study community. Over the years, our evolving supervisory conversations have included up to 10 supervisors at a time (see Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2015). We regularly meet to discuss our supervisory practices and experiences, with the...

How do we get at the meanings of everyday (and not so everyday) objects, and how might these meanings enrich educational research? The study of objects is well established in fields such as archaeology, art history, communications, fine arts, museum studies, and sociology-but is still developing in education. Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilit...

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...

We offer an account of how we, a research team of three South African academics, have dialogued with multiculturalism and equity through collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry. The focus of the article is on our learning through reading and responding to published autoethnographies by three other South African academics. We share our learning a...

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.

Nareen Gonsalves, Pieter du Toit, Theresa Chisanga (together with a team of colleagues at her university), and Daisy Pillay are all higher education teachers and researchers (teacher researchers) working in very different university settings in South Africa.

According to Edwards (2009), photographs have intricately connected meanings as images and as objects. As objects, photographs can be pinned up on a surface, framed, or just stuck on a wall (Edwards, 2009).

Objects are an integral part of our surroundings and, as people, we interact with them for their everyday use or aesthetic appeal.

Institutes of Higher Learning (IHL) must train healthcare professionals (HCPs) able to meet priority needs of the population and address health system deficiencies. Concerns about the mismatch between outcome and policy have led many IHL to review their curriculum content and training context. In this article we argue for a broadening of selection...

The meanings connected with becoming or being an academic are constantly shifting, on account of diverse forces that act on universities. In this article, we portray our learning as a research team of four academics (including one early-career academic) and a doctoral student who took a narrative inquiry approach to listening and responding to our...

Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education invites readers to experience autoethnography as a challenging, complex, and creative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally, and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The peer-reviewed chapters offer innovative and pe...

Academic Autoethnographies: Inside Teaching in Higher Education advances scholarship on autoethnography as a demanding, often unsettling, and necessarily imaginative research methodology that can produce personally, professionally, and socially useful understandings of teaching and researching in higher education. The book invites readers into the...

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 s...

Context: 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...

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 Ca...

We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry can facilitate awareness of, and insight into polyvocality in educational research. Using found poetry and haiku poetry, we present a poetic performance in which we engage with diverse voices that manifest in multiple data sources: a student participant's...

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).

Abstract Postgraduate supervision is a complex and demanding pedagogic practice, which goes beyond research and disciplinary expertise on the part of the supervisor. Considering that a limitation of traditional systems of doctoral research training is the master/apprentice supervisory model, we question whether different genres of research, such as...

This article provides a reflexive narrative account of a collaborative process of moving towards curriculum intellectualising in the context of diverse understandings of African scholarship in a South African university. We reflect on the journey we took in trying to make collective sense of postgraduate students' conceptions of African scholarship...

This special issue of the South African journal Perspectives in Education offers a collection of articles by self-study researchers who are located across diverse disciplines in higher education institutions in South Africa, Canada and the United States of America (USA). The collection begins with contributions from teacher educators (Sandra Weber,...

The articles in this special issue illustrate the significance and potential of enacting reflexivity in educational research. Questioning how to enact reflexivity in ways that can be transformative is a key component of educational research for social change in contemporary South Africa, as it is elsewhere if we are to take up critical issues of se...

Postgraduate supervision is a complex and demanding pedagogic practice, which goes beyond research and disciplinary expertise on the part of the supervisor. Considering that a limitation of traditional systems of doctoral research training is the master/apprentice supervisory model, we question whether different genres of research, such as self-stu...

This paper reports on a study that investigated lived experiences of international post-graduate students from African countries in one School of a South African university. The researchers saw a knowledge gap regarding how much the institution ‘knew’ about these students’ experiences and sought to address the question: What can be learnt from thes...

New spaces for researching postgraduate Education research in South Africa Daisy Pillay & Jenni Karlsson Abstract Universities in South Africa during apartheid reflected the racialised politics of the period. This gave rise to divisive descriptors such as ‘historically white/black’; ‘English/Afrikaans-speaking’ institutions and ‘Bantustan’ univers...

This paper offers an account of our learning from using arts-based approaches in supporting graduate students in their research into memory-work and teacher development in a South African context. We have created a reflexive dialogue to depict a ‘playful’ inquiry into our co-learning. We constructed this dialogue from extracts from two audio-record...

Universities in South Africa during apartheid reflected the racialised politics of the period. This gave rise to divisive descriptors such as 'historically white/black'; 'English/Afrikaans-speaking' institutions and 'Bantustan' universities. These descriptors signal a hierarchy of social status and state funding. We start by explaining how these ap...

This paper presents an understanding of what it means to be a teacher in a school defined as 'rural'. From a sociological perspective, we consider the mechanisms and ways of knowing that are adopted by a teacher for understanding not only the external world but for being a certain kind of teacher for a school in a rural setting. Employing data tech...

In this article, we – a research team of academic staff and postgraduate students – take a narrative inquiry stance to explore what we can learn from one African international postgraduate student‟s stories of experience on a South African university campus. We use the medium of narrative vignettes – brief evocative scenes or accounts – to re-prese...

This special edition of the Journal of Education draws on a contemporary concern with memory and pedagogy in South Africa – as we see, for example, in a themed issue of Perspectives in Education that examines how different “post-conflict societies”, including South Africa, engage with “the past as a pedagogical problem” (Jansen and Weldon, 2009, pp...

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...

My presentation abstract: As an example of that lived experience I will discuss autobiographical memory work, an emerging and unconventional approach to researching policy from a situated personal position. I outline what evidence this methodology might offer policy-makers about, for example, the quotidian of school space.

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