Learning in practice

I see myself as a lifelong learner, and I am grateful that academic life gives me many opportunities to keep learning from different people and spaces, including senior colleagues, peers, students, postgraduate researchers, farmers, extension officers, industry partners, mentors, and others I meet along the way.

This part of the website is a space for reflection, noticing, and sharing things I have found useful in practice. Some of these are thoughts on what guides my own learning as an academic, teacher, supervisor, and researcher. Others are links, tools, ideas, frameworks, books, videos, and resources that I have returned to, used for a season, or simply found worth sharing.

Where I can remember the source, I have tried to give credit. I share these in the spirit of generous learning, because much of what helps us grow as academics is passed along through conversation, example, encouragement, and the willingness of others to share what has helped them.

I do not see this as a perfect or complete collection, but as a growing space for thoughts along the way and resources that may be useful to someone else too.

Why this site exists

One of the most valuable professional development opportunities I have participated in has been the Emerging Scholar Accelerator Programme (ESAP) at the University of the Free State.

The programme brings together emerging academics from across the institution and creates a dedicated space to think intentionally about academic careers, leadership, research, and personal development. While many of us recognise the importance of these topics, they are often the first things to be crowded out by the day-to-day demands of teaching, supervision, administration, and research.

One of the reasons I chose to participate in ESAP was the opportunity to protect time for reflection and growth. As academics, we often speak about the importance of strategic thinking, career planning, and developing our academic identity, yet these activities rarely appear on our calendars. The programme creates a structure that encourages us to step back from immediate tasks and invest time in thinking about the bigger picture.

For me, this has been one of the programme's greatest benefits. The scheduled sessions provide accountability and external motivation to engage with topics important for long-term career development, but that can easily be postponed when deadlines and responsibilities compete for attention.

A specific session with Prof Johannes Cronjé (a not so retired, retired Professor of Digital Teaching and Learning) became an important turning point for me. During this session, I was encouraged to think more intentionally about my own academic journey and how I share it with others. The workshop I attended became part of the inspiration for creating this website.

I already have a website for our research group, McLab Field Pathology and Epidemiology, which I created using R and GitHub Pages. That site has been valuable for sharing our group’s work, but I also realised that I wanted a simpler personal academic space, one where I could reflect, share my journey, and show others that creating a personal academic profile does not have to be complicated.

This Google Site was born from that idea. Google Sites lets you create something simple, useful, and visually engaging without any coding skills. While I enjoy design and have some experience from creating the McLab site, I also wanted this website to show that a personal academic profile can be created with limited time, limited technical skills, and a willingness to start.

More importantly, it has been fun. Building this site has reminded me that academic work does not always have to be heavy or complicated. Sometimes, sharing our work and our stories can also be creative, accessible, and enjoyable.

As I continue through ESAP, I hope to use this space to capture ideas, questions, and lessons that emerge along the way. These reflections are not intended as definitive answers, but rather as snapshots of an ongoing journey of learning, growth, and becoming.

Welcome to this space. I look forward to sharing more reflections, lessons, and moments from this journey as it continues to unfold.

Date: 02-06-2026

Mariana (PhD researcher) capturing images of semi-selective media for canola petals infected with Sclerotinia sclerotiorum.

I love this photo because it shows both the technique and Mariana in action.

A sclerotium from an infected sunflower head, shown to give context to the survival capacity of the pathogen after a field epidemic.

So useful for extension materials.

I love capturing ampersands around the world, this one is from Viçosa, MG, Brazil (2019).

These small images are also something I can use when I get back home and share my experiences with the Department in our seminar sessions. It shares something personal with everyone.

If plant pathologists had an album cover for “Plants Not Dead”, this would be it. Featuring Neo Hlongwane and Kwanele Sabela.

This was really just an in-the-moment field photo taken on self-timer, which turned into a little fun moment.

Making Science Beautiful

Another reason for this site’s existence is that something people do not always tell you is this: as a researcher, you are also going to need to create and design, recreate, and design some more.

For me, this is something I love.

One of the things I would like to share on this platform is some of my creations. I love making science beautiful. I can really see how I have embraced my own creative style over the years. Whether it is through posters, presentations, illustrations, extension material, websites, or small visual details that help communicate an idea more clearly, design has become part of how I work.

There are so many different types of design in our roles as knowledge workers, a term for academics I have learnt from a book I have been reading, “How to be a Happy Academic”. We design posters and presentations for conferences and symposia. We create promotional material for open days, farmer information days, and extension events. We prepare lecture slides, teaching resources, reports, diagrams, and sometimes even websites in various formats, whether that is GitHub, Notion, Google Sites, or something else entirely.

With cameras on our phones, design and creation have also become more accessible. Not necessarily easier, because good design still takes thought, time, and care, but more possible. We can take beautiful pictures, contextualised pictures, landscape and portrait images, close-up and far-away shots, macro photographs, field photographs, silly moments, serious moments, and everything in between.

I think it is worth taking the time to capture these things, and capturing them well. Pause, take the picture. Take in the context. Capture the close-up. Take the photo of the field, the people, the disease symptoms, the trial, the process, and the moment. Then make a space to save your images, preferably in a common or organised space, because over time you build a treasure trove that you can return to for future work.

Since last year, I have also really been enjoying the fact that I can now co-create images with ChatGPT. This is something I would not have been able to do before without access to a graphic designer, which I unfortunately would not have been able to afford, though that would have been amazing too! For me, this has opened up a new way of creating visual material that feels more personal, more accessible, and more aligned with how I want to communicate science.

Professor Emerson Del Ponte, my co-supervisor from Universidade Federal de Viçosa (UFV) in Brazil, taught me about sharing my work through the Open Science Framework. I have been keeping everything from research compendia to conference posters and presentations there. Maybe no one will ever look at them again, but they are still useful. They give me a DOI with a findable URL for QR codes and also for my CV, they make the work more findable, and they also become a reference point for myself when I want to return to something I have already created.

So, this part of the website is also about that: the creative side of knowledge work. The part where we design, make, arrange, capture, communicate, and try to make knowledge not only accurate, but also accessible and beautiful. I will also reflect on my creations and designs over time. I have found this a useful instructional tool in my supervision.

Posted: 13 June 2026

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