Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Faculty Member, Education: Research and Engagement

Professor

Education

About

I am Professor of Research and Engagement at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa, and an Adjunct Professor in the Faculties of Education at the Universities of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. I am also a Faculty Associate of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education at The University of British Columbia. Recently, I consulted in the College of Education at the University of Qatar, Doha. Prior to these current positions, I was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Scholar for two years based at the University of Alberta, and before that a postdoctoral scholar with the Imaginative Education Research Group at Simon Fraser University. I completed my Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies and Mathematics Education at the University of British Columbia (with a Category 1). My doctoral work is a critical exploration of the construction of disadvantage in school mathematics in social context. For my dissertation, Voices in the Silence: Narratives of disadvantage, social context and school mathematics in post-apartheid South Africa, I was honoured with the 2006 Illinois Distinguished Qualitative Dissertation Award [International Centre of Qualitative Research]; the 2006 American Educational Research Association Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, Curriculum Studies Division; the 2005 Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award; and the 2005 Ted T. Aoki Prize for the most Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Curriculum Studies, UBC.

My research interests span curriculum studies; mathematics education; teacher education; critical theory / pedagogy; cultural studies; indigeneity; development studies; and socio-cultural and political theories of education. i write from poststructural and postcolonial perspectives. I also have a strong focus on interdisciplinarity; spirituality, ethics and (African) indigenous epistemologies; arts-based approaches to teaching, learning and inquiry; narrative and poetic inquiry; and other innovative approaches to qualitative research in general. I embrace alternative methodologies towards decolonizing practices in research, teaching and learning. Critically important to me in my work are issues of social, ecological and global justice. My experience living, teaching and researching in both 'developing' and 'developed nations' contexts have informed my interest in and commitment to anti-oppressive education and pedagogy, especially in respect of issues of privilege, poverty, social difference discourses and constructed disadvantage, marginalization and social erasure, discourses of silence, and global economic and ideological colonization. Drawing on lived experiences within contexts of conflict and socio-economic and political oppression, I have commitments to democracy education, sustainability, indigenous thought, eco-justice as well as the collectivist and pluralist engagements with a critical global citizenship. In this respect, I seek, through my work, to find dialogical openings of possibility that may provide emerging praxes and pedagogies of  egalitarianism, democracy and justice.

Contact Information