Who we are

Professor Paul Ashwin is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on teaching, learning and curriculum practices in higher education and how they are shaped by higher education policies. Paul is the lead author of Reflective Teaching in Higher Education (2015, Bloomsbury), which is designed for all of those working in higher education who are interested in further developing research-informed approaches to university teaching. He is a researcher in the Economic and Social Research Council, Office for Students and Research England funded ‘Centre for Global Higher Education’. As part of this, Paul was co-PI on the Economic and Social Research Council and National Research Foundation (South Africa) funded ‘Pathways to personal and public good: understanding access to, student experiences of, and outcomes from South African undergraduate higher education, which led to the publication of Higher Education Pathways: South African Undergraduate Education and the Public Good. (2018, African Minds). Paul is a coordinating editor for the international journal ‘Higher Education,’ and co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series ‘Understanding Student Experiences of Higher Education’.

Paul is very interested in the notion of quality and social justice and higher education. This was the focus of his co-authored book with Monica McLean and Andrea Abbas How Powerful Knowledge Disrupts Inequality: Reconceptualising Quality in Undergraduate Education (2018, Bloomsbury). Paul is an experienced PhD supervisor and have supervised 25 PhD students to the completion of their PhD theses. Paul is very interested in how we support PhD students to effectively engage in the conceptualisation, research design, data generation and analysis, and writing practices that are required to successfully complete a PhD.

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Dr Chrissie Boughey has been involved in the leadership and management of teaching and learning in South African universities for more than twenty-five years. From 2008 to 2014 she was Dean: Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University and was responsible for the strategic direction of teaching and learning at an institution which produces some of the best student performance data in the country. She has been Deputy Vice Chancellor, at the same university, since 2014 a role in which she has continued to lead and manage both the teaching and learning portfolio as well as that of student affairs. Dr Boughey has extensive experience as a supervisor and researcher having supervised more than twenty doctoral studies to completion. From 2010 to 2014 she led the NRF funded Social Inclusion in Higher Education project which saw the completion of six doctoral studies using a ‘project team’ approach to supervision and student support. Lessons learned from this project led to the refinement of the approach used and more work on doctoral studies programmes. Dr Boughey has also been involved in the Strengthening Postgraduate Supervision project and the Enhancing Postgraduate Environments project funded by NUFFIC and the DHET and the EU respectively.

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Dr Chrissie Boughey has been involved in the leadership and management of teaching and learning in South African universities for more than twenty-five years. From 2008 to 2014 she was Dean: Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University and was responsible for the strategic direction of teaching and learning at an institution which produces some of the best student performance data in the country. She has been Deputy Vice Chancellor, at the same university, since 2014 a role in which she has continued to lead and manage both the teaching and learning portfolio as well as that of student affairs. Dr Boughey has extensive experience as a supervisor and researcher having supervised more than twenty doctoral studies to completion. From 2010 to 2014 she led the NRF funded Social Inclusion in Higher Education project which saw the completion of six doctoral studies using a ‘project team’ approach to supervision and student support. Lessons learned from this project led to the refinement of the approach used and more work on doctoral studies programmes. Dr Boughey has also been involved in the Strengthening Postgraduate Supervision project and the Enhancing Postgraduate Environments project funded by NUFFIC and the DHET and the EU respectively.

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Dr ‘Mamotena Mpeta has been involved in teacher education specialising in science education. She has supervised Honours, Masters and Doctoral research in various topics including evaluation studies. Currently I am supervising students in science, mathematics and ICT education. I have been an external examiner of Masters and Doctoral theses from universities in and outside South Africa. I am currently studying towards post-graduate diploma in Higher Education with the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

Mamotena is interested in seeing research that generates knowledge that addresses and is responsive to, among others, social justice and other related issues and not so much generation of knowledge for its own sake. Such knowledge should be meaningful and of quality in order to be usable in addressing the issues in question.

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Dr Pfarelo Matshidze is the Vice Dean in the School of Human & Social Sciences, university of Venda. Her responsibilities revolve around teaching and learning, research and community engagement amongst others. She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Anthropology and Indigenous Knowledge Systems as well as Indigenous Law for several years. She has supervised Honours, Masters and PhD students in both Anthropology and African Studies. Dr. Matshidze serves as an external examiner of Master’s and Doctoral theses from several universities. She has also been involved in the development of the curriculum of the Bachelor of Indigenous Knowledge qualification which was the initiative of the Department of Science and Technology to offer Indigenous Knowledge in institutions of higher of higher learning. Dr Matshidze is a PhD graduate in Anthropology but she also holds a master’s degree in law. She is also engaged in several community engagement projects. After obtaining a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education at Rhodes University, she has now added research on Higher Education to her academic repertoire.

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Nomfundo Siqwede is the Office Manager at CHERTL, and as front of house she is the first port of call for all enquiries relating to CHERTL work. She provides administrative and secretarial support to CHERTL staff. She enjoys interacting with a wide range of people and administering the many national and international projects run through the centre.

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The principal applicant for this project, Sioux McKenna, started the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning PhD programme in Higher Education Studies at Rhodes University in 2010. This programme has seen thirty academics complete their PhD studies since then and has established a strong community which uses online platforms and “Doc Weeks” to ensure that supervisors and candidates are well supported. Success of the programme is measured not only by the number of graduates but by the quality of their experience and by the ways in which their research contributes to higher education debates.

Sioux has supervised fifteen doctoral and fifteen master’s students to graduation. She has also contributed a number of academic and popular press publications related to postgraduate education and has been an invited guest speaker at various conferences, including giving the keynote address at the upcoming “Postgraduate Supervision” to be held in Stellenbosch in March 2019. Sioux is a C2 NRF-rated researcher and is regularly been listed in the top twenty most productive researchers at Rhodes University.

Since 2017, Sioux has also held the post of Director of Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University. This new centre offers a wide range of short courses, writing retreats, workshops and so on. A short video overview can be watched here. One of the flagship initiatives offered by the Centre for Postgraduate Studies has been the development of peer-led Writing Circles. You can read more about this initiative here, here: and here .

Sioux has also acted as project leader or project partner in a number of international and national initiatives related to doctoral education such as the “Strengthening Postgraduate Supervision” project, the “Enhancing Postgraduate Environments” project, the Phakamisa US-SA project, and the planned “Creating Postgraduate Collaborations” project.

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Humbulani Nancy Mutshaeni has been in higher education since 2006 and has risen through the ranks to the current position of Director (Centre for Higher Education Teaching and Learning) at the University of Venda. Prior to this position she has been a Senior lecturer and Head of Department of Curriculum Studies and Educational Management in the School of Education. As an HoD, she coordinated the Advanced Certificate in Education: School Management and Leadership (ACE-SML) Programme. The programme aimed to achieve the following: Provide leadership and management to enable the schools to give every learner quality education, provide professional leadership and management of the curriculum and therefore ensure that the schools provide quality teaching, learning and resources for improved standards of achievement for all learners, and develop principals who can critically engage and be self-reflective practitioners.

She has supervised Ten PhD and 16 Masters studies to completion, and she continues to supervise. She is particularly interested in issues of quality education and the relationship between schooling and higher

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Dr Langutani Masehela is an academic developer who has, prior to becoming the Head of Unit, been involved in a variety of student and staff development initiatives at the University of Venda. She has been responsible for setting up and implementing the academic mentorship programme at the University. Other than academic mentorship, she is also interested in issues of quality in higher education teaching and learning. In her PhD research she explored the conditions that constrained or enabled the implementation of quality assurance policies in higher education with the University of Venda as a case.

Langutani's PhD experience formed the basis of her interest in quality in every aspect of higher education teaching and learning especially in institutions that are predominately populated by students who are first generation. Her concern about these students is that for social justice to prevail in graduates from institutions that mainly attract first generation students is the issue of capabilities. What does (HDI) university education do to ensure that its graduates compete seamlessly with other graduates from seemingly more ‘prestigious’ institutions?

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Dr Amanda Hlengwa have worked in the field of higher education as an academic developer since 2005. Her contribution to the field of higher education studies emerges primarily from two areas: curriculum development concerns, with a particular focus on the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and teaching and learning, and the second contribution is linked to my role as Rhodes University’s co-ordinator of the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) funded New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP).

The curriculum development concern is primarily where her novice supervision experience is located, with two PhDs and two Master's supervised to completion. Her own research interests are in national interventions related to academic staff development and in particular in the institutional adoption and implementation of programmes focused on developing early career academics.

Her recent experiences of inter-institutional and cross-continental team based research projects such as the ‘Pathways to personal and public good: understanding access to, student experiences of, and outcomes from South African undergraduate higher education’ and the ‘Enhancing Postgraduate Environments’ convinces Amanda of the value of the approach planned in this Social Justice and Quality in Higher Education project.

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Professor Lynn Quinn is an Associate Professor and senior staff member in the Centre for Higher Education Research Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University (http://www.ru.ac.za/teachingandlearning/chertl/). Her main role both at Rhodes University and nationally is to contribute to the development of academic staff as teachers. She has been centrally involved in designing and facilitating a formal postgraduate diploma in higher education for lecturers at Rhodes University and from a range of other institutions nationally. In response to the national need to build capacity in the field, from the start of 2011 CHERTL began offering a postgraduate diploma in higher education designed particularly for staff in Academic Development Units / Learning and Teaching Centres in universities in Southern Africa.

Her research interests include all aspects of academic staff development, including teaching and learning, curriculum and assessment. She is also involved in the supervision of doctoral students who are part of the CHERTL doctoral programme, including a teaching and learning research group. Lynn Quinn and Jo-Anne Vorster were joint winners of the HELTASA National Teaching Excellence Award in 2017.

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Professor Jo-Anne Vorster is an Associate Professor and head of the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning. (http://www.ru.ac.za/teachingandlearning/chertl/). In addition to being involved in designing and facilitating staff development programmes to enhance academics competence as scholarly teachers, she has also played an integral role in initiating and offering a postgraduate diploma in higher education for academic development practitioners from universities in South Africa and further afield.

Jo-Anne conducts research on various aspects of teaching and learning and academic staff development. I supervise masters and doctoral students in the field of Higher Education Studies. As the convenor of the Professional Development Special Interest Group, she contributes to a number of national projects aimed at the continuing professional development of academic staff developers. Lynn Quinn and Jo-Anne Vorster were joint winners of the HELTASA National Teaching Excellence Award in 2017.

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Dr Fhatuwani Ravhuhali is Senior Educational Development Practitioner in the Centre for Higher Education Teaching and Learning (CHETL) at the University of Venda. His responsibilities as an ED practitioner include curriculum development; portfolio development; assessment and evaluation of teaching and learning activities, the provision of student support and development as well as community engagement project. He has a wealth of experience as a part-time lecturer and is currently responsible for supervision of both Honours, Masters, and PhD students. Dr Fhatuwani Ravhuhali areas of research include Professional Development; Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and academic development as well as Foundation Phase (FP) teacher training.

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Sherran Clarence is an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Postgraduate Studies (CPGS) at Rhodes University. Before moving into Education, after her MA, her research focused on gender and immigration studies, particularly the experiences of women migrants in the EU. Between 2009 and 2014 she was the coordinator of the UWC Writing Centre at the University of the Western Cape, where she focused on tutor development and mentoring, academic writing development with students and staff, and pedagogic practices in the disciplines.

Currently, her practical work revolves around academic writing at postgraduate and postdoctoral level, and developing theorised, practical approaches to helping students make sense of the ‘rules of the game’ and produce more successful written texts. Her current research, building on her PhD work, looks at how teaching and learning, and student success, can be enhanced through theorising pedagogic practice using the work of Basil Bernstein, Academic Literacies theory, and Legitimation Code Theory. She supervises students working in higher education and gender studies, and writes a blog for doctoral students and supervisors entitled ‘How to write your PhD in a hundred steps or more’ (https://phdinahundredsteps.com). She holds a Y2 rating from the National Research Foundation.

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Nicola coordinates the efforts of the Educational Technology Unit. She offers capacity building and professional development opportunities for academics to use learning technologies effectively in their roles as educators and provides learning design support and consultation in relation to teaching with technology (technology integration) and blended and online teaching and learning. Nicola is passionate about using her Media Studies and Educational Technology background to support lecturers in Higher Education to design innovative technology mediated learning interventions for their students. She believes in creating online materials and opportunities to enable meaningful and memorable learning experiences. She also supervises postgraduate students and co-teaches on formal courses in Higher Education.

Broadly, her research interests pertain to expanding critical perspectives on educational technologies in Higher Education. In particular, Nicola’s research focuses on online facilitation and networking, learning design, online professional development, teaching portfolios, student video projects, networked scholarship and digital storytelling. Her curiosity driven research area related to her PhD research is digital games and she is one of the few Game Studies scholars in Africa.

Nicola is also a visiting lecturer in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Townand co-convenes the fully online course, Facilitating Online, as part of e/merge Africa’s online offerings. e/merge Africaia a project hosted at UCT, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Nicola regularly represents the network at national and international conferences and events. As a member of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), she is involved in and co-facilitates opportunities for collaboration between e/merge Africa and various divisions or the organisation. Nicola has a strong interest in promoting inclusivity, diversity and recognising marginalised voices in the the Educational Technology field.

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Kirstin Wilmot is a lecturer in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University. She received her PhD, Enacting knowledge in dissertations: An exploratory analysis of doctoral writing using Legitimation Code Theory in 2019 from the LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building, University of Sydney, under the supervision of Prof Karl Maton and Professor Chrissie Boughey. Kirstin combines her background and love of linguistics (MPhil, Cantab; MA, UCT) with higher education studies in her work on academic literacies. She is passionate about research related to academic writing, particularly doctoral writing, doctoral supervision and disciplinary literacy practices. Her research is aimed at finding ways to make elusive academic literacy practices explicit and demonstrable in order to open access and create opportunities for a greater number of students to succeed in higher education.

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Jan McArthur is Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK. Her research focuses on the nature and purposes of higher education and how these relate to practices of teaching, learning and assessment. She has a particular interest in critical theory and in her published work explores the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Axel Honneth, applying these to higher education. She has previously published a book exploring how Adorno’s critical theory can inform our understanding of, and engagement with, knowledge in higher education for the purposes of greater social justice: Rethinking Knowledge in Higher Education (Bloomsbury). Her most recent book uses Honneth's conceptualisation of mutual recognition to rethink the nature of assessment in higher education, where one is committed to greater social justice: Assessment for Social Justice (Bloomsbury). Jan is a researcher in the ESRC and HEFCE funded ‘Centre for Global Higher Education’, and is Editor of ‘Arts and Humanities in Higher Education’.

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Roxana's research agenda is centered around the question of how and to what extent social and economic inequalities, manifested among social groups, institutions and countries, are (re) produced in the scientific and higher education systems. Roxana obtained a PhD in Higher Education from the University of Washington- Seattle. Her dissertation is a mixed-method study that analyzed the effects of the social class of origin on careers of academics in Chile (see here publications related). While conducting her PhD, Roxana participated in several projects that analyzed international graduate experiences in the USA and the notions of interdisciplinarity in the scientific system. Before that, Roxana worked as a journalist (Chile) and institutional researcher at the University of Santiago (Chile) and the University of Washington, Seattle (USA). In her role as an institutional researcher, Roxana developed extensive experience in quantitative data analysis and performance evaluation of higher education institutions and scientific policies.

In CHERTL at Rhodes University, Roxana is primarily involved in the Postgraduate Diploma in higher education (PGDip HE). In addition, Roxana is working on a research project that aims to unpack the effects of gender, race and class in the process of formation and the career outcomes of academics in South Africa and Chile.

Roxana is an associate member of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (University of Washington, Seattle), from where she coordinates a series of webinars about social justice and doctoral education. Roxana is also an adjunct researcher at the Center for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion (COES), linked to different Chilean universities.

When she is not busy with work, Roxana spends her time cooking, dancing, hiking and/or writing poetry about her research findings.

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Siphokazi Mankayi joined the Centre for Postgraduate Studies in November 2019. She has worked in the Higher Education sector since 2001. The Centre for Postgraduate Studies runs various workshops, retreats and short courses for postgraduate students across the whole university. Sipho is looking forward to working with the diverse community in this project. Siphokazi will be managing the Social Justice and Quality in Higher Education project in conjunction with Nomfundo Siqwede in CHERTL.

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