Reflective Narrative

Figure: Overview of the three primary digital evidence repository pages (2024–2026) that support this narrative reflection. Hyperlinks embedded throughout the reflection direct readers to relevant sections within these repositories, where supporting evidence, student work, reflections, exhibitions, research outputs, media engagement, conference presentations, and community partnership activities are available. 

1.4 Statement of shared teaching purpose and vision  

Our shared teaching purpose is grounded in inclusive and participatory learning. Many student teachers enter higher education having experienced disconnected forms of schooling. In response, our teaching seeks to create spaces where students can engage more actively and meaningfully with knowledge. We view learning as relational and embodied, emerging through engagement with materials, histories, and social contexts. Our approach challenges product-driven teaching by foregrounding process, creativity, and critical engagement. Through our collaboration, we aim to support student teachers in developing as reflective, critical, and socially responsive educators. This includes opportunities for students to explore identity, history, and knowledge production. We seek to create learning environments where students experience a sense of belonging within the university and their disciplines, recognising that learning and personal growth are closely connected to feeling seen, valued, included, and able to participate authentically in academic and social spaces. Our vision is to contribute to a form of teacher education that is transformative, contextually relevant, and responsive to the complexities of South African classrooms. 

1.5. Overview of key collaborative projects  

Our collaboration is reflected through a growing series of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects. In this context, transdisciplinary approaches move beyond disciplinary boundaries by connecting academic inquiry with community knowledge, lived experience, creative practice, and public engagement (Nicolescu, 2002). Across these initiatives, students engage with personal histories, oral narratives, visual culture, and community knowledge through creative and historically situated forms of inquiry. The individual projects are discussed in greater detail on the accompanying project pages, while this section provides only a brief overview of the broader collaboration and its development.

• The ǀhaos Project, initiated in 2024, marked the beginning of the formal collaboration between History and Visual Arts. Through oral history, archival engagement, and visual arts practices, students explored themes of heritage, identity, memory, and embodied learning. Further detail regarding the aims, processes, and outcomes of the project is provided on the dedicated ǀhaos Project page.

• In Sit Stories 2025 and Sit Stories 2026, the Sit Stories initiative expanded this work into a broader transdisciplinary and community-engaged platform. Sit Stories incorporated heritage walks, storytelling, exhibitions, oral history, music, poetry, public art, and collaborative community projects that connected students, lecturers, artists, schools, and local organisations. Specific initiatives, including the Visions of Wellington Photo Voice, Story Chairs, Collages and Book Projects, are described in more detail on the relevant Sit Stories pages.

• In 2026, the Amabali Wepali (“story poles”) project further explored storytelling, identity, visual symbolism, and collaborative artmaking within higher education spaces. Developed as part of Sit Stories 2026, the project focused on inclusion, dialogue, and spatial transformation through permanent visual installations created in collaboration with students, lecturers, and artists. Additional information and visual documentation of the project are available on the dedicated project page.

These projects demonstrate a sustained commitment to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching and learning that integrates academic inquiry with community engagement, creative practice, embodied learning, and social transformation. They create opportunities for students to engage as storytellers, makers, researchers, and contributors within historically and culturally situated learning environments. 

1.6 Positioning within South African higher education

Our teaching takes place within the broader realities of South African higher education, shaped by ongoing conversations around transformation, decolonisation, and equitable access. In a post-Apartheid, post-#FeesMustFall, and post-pandemic context, it remains important to consider whose knowledge is recognised and how students participate in learning spaces. 

We work with student teachers who often come from rural and under-resourced schooling backgrounds, where access to quality education, learning support, and technology has been uneven. Many enter higher education from rigid and teacher-centred schooling contexts. These socio-economic, linguistic, and educational realities shape both the challenges and possibilities within our teaching context. 

Our collaborative practice responds through inclusive and contextually relevant pedagogies. We seek to create space for multiple ways of knowing grounded in students' histories, identities and communities. Students engage with their own histories and communities as sources of knowledge. In doing so, our work aligns with broader transformation agendas in higher education, not as symbolic inclusion, but as a sustained process of rethinking curriculum, pedagogy, and knowledge production in ways that are responsive to the diverse realities of South African students. 

2. Team Collaboration, Pedagogical Practice, and Collective Innovation (9) 

Our collaboration emerged through a shared commitment to interdisciplinary and socially responsive teacher education within the South African higher education context. Although our disciplinary backgrounds differ, we recognised shared pedagogical concerns around student engagement, identity, creativity, belonging, and knowledge production. These shared interests created opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and curriculum innovation. At the centre of our collaboration is a relational and embodied understanding of knowledge. Many student teachers enter higher education from rigid and teacher-centred schooling environments. Our collaboration developed from a shared desire to create inclusive and participatory learning experiences connected to identity, history, and community. 

We began integrating historical inquiry, oral history, storytelling, heritage engagement, creative practice, and embodied learning into shared projects and teaching initiatives. Rather than treating History and Visual Arts as isolated disciplines, we explored interdisciplinary approaches that deepened student engagement. This collaboration led to the development of projects such as the ǀhaos Project and Sit Stories.

As the projects developed, they also became sites of ongoing pedagogical and scholarly inquiry. Student reflections, exhibitions, collaborative outputs, conference engagements, and research dissemination continuously informed the refinement of our teaching approaches and interdisciplinary methodologies across successive project iterations. 

The ǀhaos Project became a particularly significant example of this interdisciplinary approach. Students conduct family and community history research through oral interviews, photographs, artefacts, and storytelling before translating these histories into symbolic sculptural artworks (see student examples here). They engage with historical inquiry, reflective practice, creative expression, and identity. Students engage as contributors to knowledge production and inquiry. 

Similarly, Sit Stories extends our collaboration into heritage engagement, storytelling, and community-based learning. Through installations, public storytelling, and heritage activities, students engage with local histories, memory, identity, and place. 

Our collaboration is grounded in ongoing reflective dialogue and co-development. We engage in collaborative curriculum planning, shared assessment design, interdisciplinary dialogues and critical reflection. This process enables us to refine our pedagogical practices while maintaining disciplinary depth and academic rigour. We therefore view collaboration as a process through which disciplinary perspectives enrich one another. 

Our collaboration has produced outcomes beyond what either discipline could achieve independently. Students engaged with relational and embodied forms of knowledge connected to their own identities and communities. This has contributed to student engagement, reflective learning, creative expression, and the creation of multimodal artefacts. Our collaboration also contributes to broader conversations around decoloniality and socially responsive pedagogy within South African higher education.

3. Conceptual and Pedagogical Framework

Our conceptual and pedagogical framework was developed through an ongoing collaboration between History and Visual Arts. Rooted in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, our framework emerged in response to the realities of South African higher education. Many students enter university from schooling contexts shaped by memorisation and limited opportunities for creativity or critical engagement. These experiences often result in disconnection from learning educational spaces. Our pedagogical approach is relational, embodied, and socially responsive.

Central to our framework is an understanding of learning as relational and embodied. Our approach draws on decolonial perspectives (Dei, 2014), posthuman and relational understandings of subjectivity and knowledge (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013), and embodied approaches to learning that challenge disembodied and hierarchical models of knowledge production. These perspectives informed the development of interdisciplinary and socially responsive pedagogies across our collaborative projects. 

Embodied and process-driven approaches particularly inform Kobie’s work in Visual Arts. Her teaching challenges formalistic and product-oriented traditions in art education that often reinforce exclusion and narrow notions of artistic “talent” by foregrounding creativity, experimentation, material engagement, and reflective practice. Through creative and embodied practices, students are encouraged to reconnect with creativity as exploration rather than performance. Thinking emerges in the process, rather than being predetermined, as described by Massumi and Manning (2014). This emphasis on thinking while doing has shaped the broader collaborative teaching approach and continues to influence the interdisciplinary work developed across the projects. 

Adrienne’s work in History Education emerged from a concern with how history is often experienced as abstract, rigid, and disconnected from learners’ realities. Her approach draws on historical literacy, historical distance, social history, and critical pedagogy to position history as inquiry, interpretation, empathy, and engagement with multiple perspectives. Influenced by the work of Sam Wineburg (2001), Peter Seixas and Tom Morton (2013), and Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik (2004), students engage with memory, oral narratives, heritage, and lived experience in ways that make the past more meaningful and accessible. 

The alignment between theory, pedagogy, and context is central to our work. The interdisciplinary collaboration between History and Visual Arts emerged from a recognition that many students struggle to engage with traditional disciplinary approaches. Therefore, the projects function as pedagogical spaces where students engage creatively, reflectively, and relationally with knowledge through historical inquiry, storytelling, artistic expression, identity, and reflection. 

A significant dimension of this framework is its decolonial orientation. In the South African context, decolonisation cannot be reduced to symbolic changes in the curriculum or the inclusion of additional content. It requires critical engagement with whose knowledge is recognised, how knowledge is produced, and how educational practices may continue to reproduce exclusionary structures. Our pedagogical approach, therefore, creates space for oral histories, Indigenous knowledge, personal narratives, memory, and community knowledge as legitimate forms of learning and knowledge production. 

Our framework is student-centred and relational. Students engage as researchers, storytellers, makers, and contributors to knowledge production through inquiry, reflection, and creative practice. This process supports confidence, critical reflection, and participation. Public exhibitions and collaborative outputs further contribute to students’ sense of visibility and belonging within institutional spaces. 

Another important aspect of our pedagogical framework is the integration of embodied and experiential learning with reflective practice. Learning unfolds through engagement with people, materials, stories, and environments. The collaborative nature of our teaching reflects this understanding, as both disciplines contribute to holistic learning experiences that integrate cognitive, emotional, creative, and social dimensions of engagement. 

Ultimately, our conceptual and pedagogical framework reflects an ongoing commitment to transformative and contextually responsive teacher education. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, embodied learning, and decolonial pedagogies, we seek to create educational spaces where students can engage critically and creatively with knowledge, while also developing a stronger sense of identity, agency, and belonging. This commitment further resonates with the broader institutional vision of CPUT, particularly the principles articulated through Vision 2030 and SmartCPUT. Our work aligns with the university’s emphasis on transformative and socially responsive education, innovation in teaching and learning, interdisciplinarity, inclusivity, and community engagement. We seek to contribute to the preparation of critically engaged future teachers who can respond meaningfully to complex educational realities in South Africa and beyond. In doing so, our work contributes to broader conversations about transformation, inclusion, and meaningful learning within South African higher education.

4. Reflection on Context

4.1 Reflection on the Collaborative Teaching Context (1)

Our teaching is situated within the Faculty of Education at CPUT, Wellington Campus, specifically within the Intermediate Phase teacher education programme. The collaboration brings together the disciplines of History and Visual Arts, both of which are positioned within broader curriculum debates around relevance, marginalisation, transformation, and student engagement.  

Within this context, Art education is often marginalised, perceived as non-essential, or associated primarily with technical artistic skill, while History education is frequently experienced as abstract, rote-based, and disconnected from lived experience. How do these disciplinary perceptions contribute to student disengagement and limited opportunities for meaningful personal connection with learning? These challenges prompted us to reconsider how interdisciplinary collaboration between History and Visual Arts might create more experiential, embodied, and socially meaningful forms of learning. We had to question all the traditional assumptions about technical skill and content transmission as primary indicators of successful learning. Our teaching shifted towards foregrounding oral history, storytelling, visual symbolism, community engagement, embodied artmaking, and reflective practice as ways to reconnect students with the curriculum, identity, and heritage. 

This relational atmosphere contrasted sharply with earlier reflections from my doctoral research, in which students described how creative engagement was often inhibited by “the constraints of peers or feeling exposed in a physical classroom-based environment” (Meiring, 2024:224). These reflections highlighted how prescriptive, technically driven art tasks could reinforce anxiety, comparison, and creative insecurity in traditional classroom settings. 

This insight later informed a broader reflection in the thesis that “the emphasis on gaining personal and meaningful narratives from sensory notions in story-making through mark-making demonstrates how Eurocentric aesthetics, and an emphasis on representational art or story-making, limit listening and tuning into subjective embodied ‘voices’ in arts-based practice, while simultaneously undermining confidence in creative abilities and perpetuating feelings of inadequacy” (Meiring, 2024:235). Through ongoing reflection, we recognised that when students are given ownership over personally meaningful narratives rather than reproducing predetermined visual outcomes, collaborative engagement, creative confidence, and embodied meaning-making often become more significant than technical performance alone. 

At the same time, we continue to grapple with how to balance the development of artistic skill with more open-ended forms of personal and relational meaning-making. Although Sit Stories revealed powerful forms of student engagement, voice, and creative confidence, these approaches continue to challenge conventional assumptions about assessment, artistic merit, and what is traditionally recognised as “quality” within art education. 

Through our experiences, we realised that macro, meso, and micro dimensions do not function in isolation but are deeply interconnected. Projects such as Sit Stories, ǀhaos, and Amabali Wepali, therefore, sought to position the university as a relational and socially responsive participant within broader cultural and community life, rather than as an isolated academic institution. This led us to question the extent to which curriculum, community engagement, student identity formation, and public participation continue to operate in separate institutional silos, and to reflect on the implications of this separation for meaningful transformation (Sit Stories 2026 Media).

Photos: Students and community members engaged in public conversations during Sit Stories 2026 around the theme of (Un)School. Featured discussions included a conversation between Prof Michael le Cordeur and author Theo Kemp on contemporary educational experiences and schooling, as well as a dialogue between Dr Marlene le Roux and Ds Laurie Gaum reflecting on identity, exclusion, resilience, and lived educational realities. The images further capture students and community members actively participating in and listening to these interdisciplinary and community-engaged discussions.

Our pedagogical approach is shaped by macro-, meso-, and micro-contextual realities, which are deeply interconnected and cannot function in isolation. This insight has transformed our thinking and practice. At a macro level, we engage with national and global debates around decolonisation, inequality, sustainability, and socially just education. At a meso level, we respond to institutional priorities such as curriculum transformation, graduate attributes, interdisciplinary learning, and community engagement. By recognising the interplay between these layers, we are encouraged to adopt a holistic and adaptive approach to pedagogy. At a micro level, our teaching responds directly to students’ lived realities, educational backgrounds, emotional experiences, and identities within the classroom. This layered responsiveness encourages us to continually reflect on how these contexts interact and influence both our teaching and students’ experiences, prompting us to adapt and re-examine our strategies.

Our work is further shaped by broader systemic challenges within South African higher education, including persistent inequality, uneven schooling backgrounds, financial constraints, unequal digital access, and the ongoing effects of historical exclusion. These challenges prompt us to reflect critically: How deeply do these contextual realities continue to shape students’ confidence, participation, and sense of belonging within higher education spaces? Our ongoing engagement with these questions guides our commitment to building more inclusive and responsive educational environments.

In a post-Apartheid, post-#FeesMustFall, and post-pandemic context, we also questioned the extent to which traditional teaching approaches adequately address issues of relevance, access, transformation, and student well-being. It was, and still is, clear that many students navigate varying levels of academic preparedness, limited prior exposure to arts education, and unequal access to resources, all of which significantly influence their engagement, participation, and confidence in interdisciplinary learning environments. Working closely with students from diverse socio-economic and linguistic backgrounds has highlighted for us how uneven schooling experiences continue to shape confidence, participation, and engagement within higher education spaces.  Our teaching responds to this diversity by incorporating accessible, embodied, multimodal, and collaborative learning strategies that accommodate different ways of knowing, learning, and expression. By integrating students’ lived experiences, family histories (2024, 2025 and 2026), oral narratives, and cultural contexts into the curriculum, we aim to support equitable participation and create learning environments that are both inclusive and meaningful. In 2024, a student wrote: “Because of this assignment, I had to spend more time with my grandmother and listen to her stories…”. 

Our pedagogical choices continue to be shaped by both the limitations and possibilities present within our teaching context. Challenges such as restricted resources, unequal access to technology, varying levels of student preparedness, and tightly structured timetables frequently constrain opportunities for slower, process-oriented, embodied, and interdisciplinary forms of engagement. We recognised that meaningful experiential learning often unfolds over time and requires sustained relational interaction, creative exploration, and opportunities that cannot always be accommodated within conventional classroom structures. The interdisciplinary integration of History and Visual Arts further enabled students to engage more deeply and expansively with learning by moving beyond fragmented, silo-based approaches toward processes that encouraged broader exploration across the two subjects and invited layered inquiry, seemingly allowing for more sustained engagement with identity, heritage, memory, and meaning-making. 

At the same time, we see the generative possibilities within our context, particularly the strong connections to community, local heritage, storytelling traditions, and public cultural spaces. These opportunities encouraged us to extend learning beyond formal classrooms into exhibitions (like at Zeitz MOCAA and the Suidoosterfees), the library, the local museum, a heritage walk, and community engagement initiatives, where students could participate more meaningfully in dialogue, public storytelling, and socially responsive forms of knowledge-making. 

This encouraged us to believe that some of the most meaningful forms of student engagement emerged when learning moved beyond formal classroom spaces into community and public spaces. This approach creates opportunities for dialogue, participation, and socially responsive knowledge exchange.  Contextual challenges became opportunities for innovation, relevance, sustainability, and deeper student engagement.  

4.2 Co-curricular Factors that Impact Collaborative Teaching Contexts (2)

A central driver of our collaboration is the ongoing imperative for decolonisation and transformation within higher education. Traditional curricula often prioritise Western and disembodied knowledge systems while marginalising students’ own histories, identities, languages, and cultural knowledge. Movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall foregrounded critical questions about whose knowledge is valued, whose histories are taught, and how curricula can become more inclusive and socially just. These broader institutional and societal debates significantly shaped the direction of our collaborative work and encouraged us to rethink the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy, identity, and community engagement.  

In response, our teaching progressively incorporated oral histories, personal narratives, Indigenous knowledge, local heritage, and community-based learning. Interdisciplinary and arts-based approaches created opportunities to challenge dominant Eurocentric narratives and to open space for multiple perspectives and forms of knowledge production. Breaking the mould of traditional teaching practices in favour of a more Decolonising approach became a sustained pedagogical process involving curriculum redesign, the development of new teaching methodologies, and the transformation of learning spaces and institutional culture. 

Our teaching further encouraged students to engage critically with broader global conversations around colonial legacies, inequality, social justice, ethical citizenship, sustainability, and culturally responsive education. Students engaged with oral histories, symbolism, heritage, community memory, and visual storytelling as meaningful forms of knowledge-making connected to their own lived realities. These projects gradually demonstrated how embodied and arts-based pedagogies can contribute to socially responsive teacher education within both local and international contexts. 

Co-curricular engagement gradually emerged as a significant dimension of our collaborative practice, shaping our understanding of teaching, learning, and knowledge production in teacher education. As the projects developed, we observed that some of the most meaningful forms of student participation and engagement often occurred when learning moved into shared public and community spaces. Public exhibitions, storytelling platforms, heritage walks, festivals, libraries, museums, and community partnerships opened possibilities for dialogue, exchange, and socially responsive forms of knowledge-sharing that extended beyond formal classroom environments. 

We observed that CPUT, particularly the CPUT Wellington Campus, was often represented publicly through deficit-based narratives in recent years. We wanted to create opportunities for the broader community to encounter alternative narratives that foreground the creativity, resilience, talent, and potential of our students, while also highlighting the meaningful and transformative work taking place within the campus community.  Sit Stories 2025 further encouraged us to think differently about sustainability, memory, and material engagement by transforming discarded chairs into storytelling objects connected to heritage, identity, and community histories. These experiences highlighted how interdisciplinary and community-engaged practices can enable students to connect curriculum content more personally and critically to lived experience, public history, and collective memory. 

4.3 Innovative Collaborative Teaching for Hybrid / Remote Learning (3)

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted inequalities related to connectivity, technology, emotional well-being, and access to learning spaces. In response, our teaching, learning, and assessment practices incorporated flexible and blended approaches, including Blackboard, mobile technologies, asynchronous activities, multimodal submissions, digital storytelling, QR-linked narratives, and scaffolded assessment opportunities. These adaptations enabled students to continue engaging with learning despite difficult and uncertain circumstances. 

During Kobie’s doctoral research, which started in 2020, she became aware that some students responded positively to the relative isolation of online creative work. Several reflected that working independently enabled more personal interpretation, experimentation, and expressive freedom without constant comparison to peers. This insight remained with me beyond the pandemic and continued to shape my teaching practice and collaborative work in the years that followed. It prompted us to keep on thinking about how learning environments might intentionally support personal voice, reflective engagement, and embodied meaning-making rather than focusing primarily on visible technical outcomes or comparison-based forms of assessment. 

Rather than focusing solely on content delivery during online and blended learning, we explored how embodied and arts-based pedagogies could remain relational and meaningful across physical and digital spaces. Students worked with accessible materials within their home environments, documented creative processes digitally, engaged in reflective online discussions, and created visual narratives connected to identity, memory, and lived experience. Flexible teaching approaches further enabled students to participate through visual, oral, written, sensory, and digital modes of expression, which was particularly important within a multilingual and socio-economically diverse teacher education context.  

Our collaborative use of technology extended beyond emergency remote teaching to encompass broader pedagogical practices. Mobile technologies were used for oral history collection, storytelling, research, digital exhibitions, and public engagement. QR codes, audio narratives, Archive.org storytelling platforms, online discussion spaces, and multimodal assessments created opportunities for interactive, accessible, and socially responsive learning experiences.  

We recognised that these hybrid approaches often enabled unexpectedly deep forms of personal engagement, creative risk-taking, and student voice. In response to unequal access to devices and resources, we implemented adaptive strategies, including flexible assessments, scaffolded activities, asynchronous participation opportunities, and low-cost, recycled materials. These approaches aimed to reduce barriers to participation while maintaining meaningful engagement, collaboration, and embodied learning. 

5. Reflection on Students

5.1 Collaborative Engaged Teaching for Interactive Learning (4)

Our pedagogical approach encourages students to engage critically and creatively in the learning process rather than merely passively receiving knowledge. Students engage as researchers, creators, storytellers, and co-constructors of knowledge. Learning is structured around inquiry, reflection, experimentation, oral history, creative production, and embodied engagement, with a strong emphasis on process-driven and experiential learning. 

The student cohort within the Intermediate Phase programme at CPUT Wellington reflects significant socio-economic, linguistic, and educational diversity. Many students are Afrikaans-speaking and come from rural or under-resourced communities where access to quality schooling, arts education, academic support, and technology has been uneven. And then in 2026, we even saw an increase in the number of English-speaking students, along with the Afrikaans students, which leads to more multilingual challenges. Prior educational experiences have often been shaped by rigid and teacher-centred pedagogies that limited opportunities for creativity, dialogue, critical thinking, and personal engagement. These realities significantly influence student confidence, preparedness, participation, and engagement with higher education learning environments. 

In response, our collaboration intentionally creates interactive, relational, and inclusive learning environments that encourage participation, dialogue, and critical engagement. Strategies such as storytelling, oral history, reflective writing, embodied mark-making, material-based engagement, collaborative inquiry, and multimodal learning activities enable students to connect academic learning to their lived realities, personal histories, and cultural contexts. The interdisciplinary integration of History and Visual Arts further allows students to engage across visual, oral, written, emotional, sensory, and digital modes of learning, accommodating diverse learning preferences and identities. 

We seek to create learning environments where students experience a sense of belonging within both the university and their disciplines. We recognise that learning and personal growth are closely connected to students feeling seen, valued, included, and able to participate authentically within academic and social spaces. As one student reflected, “This experience gave me a better understanding that art is more than just craft; it is a way to connect and express emotion.” 

5.2 Collective Support Strategies for Diverse Student Needs (5)

Our collaborative teaching approach prioritises inclusivity, accessibility, and relational support. We intentionally create learning environments that accommodate different ways of knowing, learning, and expression through multimodal teaching approaches, scaffolded learning processes, flexible assessments, and collaborative learning opportunities. By integrating students’ lived experiences, family histories, oral narratives, and cultural knowledge into the curriculum, we aim to support equitable participation and create learning environments where students feel recognised, valued, and able to contribute meaningfully. 

Early identification of students who may be struggling is supported through formative assessment tasks, participation monitoring, informal engagement, and continuous reflection. Support strategies include ongoing feedback (2024, 2024, 2025, 2026), one-on-one guidance, tutor assistance, scaffolded assignment structures, and opportunities for peer collaboration. These approaches aim to reduce barriers to participation while supporting confidence, engagement, and academic development. 

The challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and blended learning environments further require adaptive and student-centred approaches. Blackboard discussions, asynchronous activities, multimodal submissions, audio narratives, and mobile phone-based storytelling created accessible opportunities for students to remain engaged despite unequal access to technology and learning spaces. Flexible participation methods helped accommodate students experiencing financial, emotional, technological, or spatial constraints. 

One of the ongoing challenges within our collaborative practice is the gradual development of student voice, confidence, and active participation. Many students initially hesitate to ask questions, share opinions, or confidently position themselves in collaborative and public learning spaces due to prior schooling experiences shaped by teacher-centred pedagogies. We still feel that the development of authentic student voice, agency, and confidence is often a slow and relational process rather than an immediate outcome. One important insight emerging from both projects is that they reflect a pedagogy of care. Motta and Bennett (2018) argue that transformative education within diverse classrooms requires relational, inclusive, and embodied approaches that support belonging and meaningful participation. This awareness encouraged us to think more carefully about how learning environments can intentionally create space for participation, dialogue, trust-building, and reflective engagement over time.  

Open-ended and creative project structures further create opportunities for students with exceptional abilities to extend themselves through independent inquiry, experimentation, creative leadership, and public engagement. Many students moved beyond minimum requirements by producing sophisticated multimodal work that was later showcased in exhibitions, festivals, heritage events, and community spaces. Students began to see themselves not only as learners, but as emerging teachers, researchers, creators, and contributors to society. 

5.3. Collaborative Development of Teaching Materials (6)

A central feature of our collaboration is the co-development of interdisciplinary teaching materials, learning activities, assessments, and public engagement resources that meaningfully and socially responsively integrate History and Visual Arts. Teaching materials are intentionally designed to support experiential, embodied, multimodal, and student-centred learning. Collaborative resources include oral history interview tasks, reflective writing prompts, embodied learning activities, scaffolded assignment guidelines, multimodal assessments, visual art projects, audio narratives, PhotoVoice submissions (link to definition), digital storytelling activities, and public exhibition installations.  

Photos: Interdisciplinary teaching materials and multimodal outputs were developed through projects such as Sit Stories 2025 & 2026, integrating oral history, visual storytelling, digital engagement, reflective practice, embodied learning, and public exhibition. 

The collaborative design process draws on the complementary expertise of both disciplines. Historical inquiry methods, heritage engagement, oral storytelling, and critical reflection are integrated with visual symbolism, creative experimentation, material exploration, and arts-based pedagogies. This interdisciplinary integration allows students to experience learning as connected, relational, and socially meaningful rather than fragmented into isolated disciplinary silos. 

Projects such as ǀhaos and Sit Stories further demonstrate how teaching materials can serve simultaneously as pedagogical and public-engagement resources. Sculptural family trees, painted narrative chairs, collaborative painted poles, QR-linked audio stories, Archive.org storytelling platforms, PhotoVoice submissions, and multimodal artefacts become vehicles for storytelling, memory work, identity exploration, and community dialogue. These materials extend learning beyond formal classroom settings into exhibitions, festivals, museums, libraries, and heritage spaces. 

Teaching materials were also adapted collaboratively in response to blended and flexible learning contexts. Blackboard activities, asynchronous discussion spaces, multimodal submissions, mobile phone-based storytelling, and digital exhibition formats enabled students to participate in varied ways despite unequal access to resources and technology.  The collaborative development of these materials reflects an ongoing process of curriculum renewal, experimentation, reflection, and pedagogical innovation. Rather than functioning merely as classroom resources, the materials support critical engagement, creativity, public scholarship, and socially responsive learning experiences that connect students, communities, histories, and contemporary social realities. 

6. Reflection on Knowledge

6.1 Collaborative Teaching Philosophy and Shared Vision (7) 

Our collaborative teaching philosophy emerged not only through our professional roles as lecturers, but also through our own personal experiences of education, identity, creativity, and belonging. Although our journeys into teaching were different, we both experienced forms of education that often felt rigid, disconnected, and removed from lived experience. These experiences shaped a shared desire to create learning spaces where students feel recognised, engaged, and able to connect knowledge to their own histories, identities, and communities.

Kobie’s teaching philosophy developed from a deep concern about how formal education often suppresses creativity, embodiment, and uncertainty, particularly in art education. Her work seeks to challenge rigid and Eurocentric approaches by foregrounding embodied learning, material engagement, and creative becoming. Adrienne’s philosophy emerged through her own experiences of disengaging history education and her later rediscovery of history as a relational, interpretive, and meaningful discipline connected to storytelling, memory, and identity.

Over time, we realised that our teaching philosophies intersected around common concerns related to student voice, meaningful learning, social relevance, and the need to move beyond teacher-centred pedagogies. This intersection became the foundation of our collaboration. We both believe that learning is relational, embodied, and socially situated. Knowledge is not simply transmitted from lecturer to student, but emerges through dialogue, reflection, storytelling, creativity, and engagement with people, materials, and lived experiences.

Our shared vision is rooted in creating transformative and contextually responsive teacher education. We work with students who often come from rural and under-resourced schooling backgrounds where opportunities for creativity, critical thinking, and personal engagement have been limited. We therefore aim to create learning environments that are inclusive, participatory, and connected to students’ own realities. Students are encouraged to see themselves not only as learners, but also as knowledge producers and future teachers capable of contributing meaningfully to their communities.

Our collaboration is also shaped by broader commitments to decolonisation, transformation, and socially responsive pedagogy within South African higher education. We believe that teaching should create space for multiple ways of knowing, including embodied, narrative, creative, and community-based knowledge. The ǀhaos Project and Sit Stories reflect this vision by integrating historical inquiry, storytelling, identity exploration, and creative practice in ways that position learning as lived, relational, and meaningful.

Ultimately, our collaborative teaching philosophy is grounded in the belief that education should be humanising, reflective, and transformative. We seek to create spaces where students feel a sense of belonging, where their voices and histories matter, and where learning becomes a process of connection, critical reflection, and creative possibility.

What has been particularly significant is recognising how closely many of these approaches align with the emerging directions reflected within the draft History CAPS curriculum (Department of Basic Education, 2026). The revised curriculum places greater emphasis on African archives and sources, oral history, historical thinking, procedural concepts, historical consciousness, inquiry processes, and engagement with multiple forms of historical representation. As the draft CAPS document explains, “An African-centred approach makes the effort to explore, use, and exploit various forms of African archives and sources – oral, archaeological, written, visual, linguistic, and landscape – in investigating historical questions about Africa and its interactions with the rest of the world” (Department of Basic Education, 2026: 14). Students were already engaging critically with many of these approaches before we fully realised how strongly they aligned with broader curriculum transformation processes within History Education. 

These questions also extend beyond the university classroom into broader public conversations around History Education in South Africa. In 2026, Adrienne participated in a Radio Kansel panel discussion (podcast in Afrikaans; YouTube video in Afrikaans) on the proposed History curriculum, decolonisation, historical narratives, and the role of History as a school subject. The discussion reflected ongoing national debates around historical literacy, curriculum transformation, and the teaching of contested histories within diverse educational contexts. 

Students worked with oral narratives, heritage sites, visual representations, material culture, community histories, storytelling, and embodied forms of engagement to encourage deeper historical inquiry and interpretation. Through our ongoing collaboration between History Education and Visual Arts Education, we observed that interdisciplinary, embodied, and multimodal pedagogies not only strengthen engagement and historical understanding but also prepare future teachers for more inquiry-driven, socially responsive, and historically conscious approaches to teaching within evolving curriculum contexts. 

Although our teaching is interdisciplinary and collaborative, we remain intentional about maintaining the depth, integrity, and core practices of our respective disciplines. In History Education, disciplinary depth is sustained. In Visual Arts Education, students engage critically with material exploration, symbolic representation, visual communication, creative experimentation, and process-driven artmaking. Assessment practices ensure that students are evaluated according to the conceptual frameworks and methodologies specific to each discipline, even within integrated projects. 

One ongoing tension within our collaboration has been balancing interdisciplinary integration with the preservation of disciplinary depth. We have at times questioned whether the strong focus on embodied, relational, and creative learning may risk limiting sustained engagement with specialised disciplinary knowledge and skills in both History and Visual Arts. These reflections have encouraged ongoing dialogue between us about how interdisciplinary work can remain both pedagogically transformative and academically rigorous. 

Our collaboration further advances both History Education and Visual Arts Education by demonstrating how disciplinary boundaries can be productively reimagined. Public exhibitions, heritage walks, oral history projects, multimodal artefacts, storytelling platforms, and public installations create opportunities for students to contribute to knowledge production and community dialogue. Sit Stories, the Visual Redress initiatives such as Amabali Wepali, Archive.org storytelling platforms, and public exhibitions such as Ihaos and the red chairs support socially responsive pedagogy, heritage engagement, curriculum innovation, and public scholarship while simultaneously strengthening students’ disciplinary understanding, critical engagement, and professional identity as future teachers. 

Our teaching is further strengthened through active engagement with scholarship and research. Our doctoral research and ongoing scholarly work in embodiment, historical thinking, decoloniality, interdisciplinarity, arts-based pedagogy, and student engagement directly inform curriculum design, pedagogical choices, and assessment approaches. We also draw extensively on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning literature to ensure that our teaching remains critically informed, contextually responsive, and aligned with contemporary educational debates. Ultimately, scholarship informs both our teaching and our understanding of collaborative knowledge production. It enables us to create learning environments that are theoretically grounded, reflective, inclusive, and transformative while modelling inquiry, critical engagement, creativity, and lifelong learning for our students. 

The development of the projects across 2024, 2025, and 2026 further reflects an ongoing cycle of research-informed pedagogical refinement. Student reflections, interviews, Photovoice submissions, exhibitions, assessment practices, and collaborative inquiry generated valuable insights into embodiment, historical literacy, interdisciplinary learning, identity, belonging, and socially responsive pedagogy within teacher education. These findings informed subsequent curriculum redesign, project adaptation, and scholarly dissemination. 

7. Reflection on Growth and Innovation (10)

A central foundation of our collaboration is a shared commitment to relational, student-centred, interdisciplinary, and socially responsive pedagogy. Although our disciplinary backgrounds originate from different traditions, our teaching philosophies have converged through shared concerns with real learning, the development of student and teacher identity, interaction and engagement, transformation, creativity, and community connectedness. Our collaboration has evolved from an initial integration of History Education and Visual Arts Education into a sustained, expanding interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary partnership within teacher education at CPUT. What began as collaborative teaching, where family history research flowed into arts-based expression, gradually developed into the ǀhaos Project, Sit Stories 2025, Sit Stories 2026, and the Amabali Wepali Project.

Over time, the collaboration expanded from classroom-based innovation toward broader institutional, public, and community engagement through exhibitions, heritage walks, storytelling initiatives, public installations, multimodal engagement projects, and community partnerships. This evolution reflects an ongoing process of curriculum renewal, pedagogical experimentation, critical reflection, and responsiveness to student and community needs. We intentionally created learning environments where students engage cognitively, emotionally, materially, socially, and creatively with disciplinary knowledge. It also reflects an ongoing process of collaborative research and reflective inquiry, where each project cycle generated new pedagogical insights that informed subsequent teaching, curriculum adaptation, and scholarly engagement. 

Innovation within our collaboration is evident in the movement away from rigid, teacher-centred pedagogies toward relational, embodied, interdisciplinary, and process-driven approaches to learning. By integrating historical inquiry with arts-based methodologies, we created alternative pathways for engagement that challenge conventional disciplinary boundaries and disrupt disembodied and Eurocentric approaches to knowledge and learning. We view knowledge as contextual, relational, embodied, and collaboratively constructed rather than fixed and transmitted. Students are therefore encouraged to engage as researchers, storytellers, artists, and contributors to public and community knowledge-making. 

We work together through regular conversations about curriculum planning, student involvement, assessment, interdisciplinary work, and new ideas for teaching and learning.  As collaborators, we co-plan, discuss shared assessments and reflections, refine the curriculum, moderate, conduct collaborative research, engage in scholarly dialogue, attend conferences, and publish interdisciplinary work, while recognising the extra time this takes alongside our normal workload. Peer evaluation and collaborative critique further contribute to our professional growth and understanding of socially responsive teacher education. 

The broader impact of the projects is further reflected in how they have begun to inform and inspire scholarship beyond CPUT. The ǀhaos Project and Sit Stories are referenced in Chapter 12 of the forthcoming IGI Global Scientific Publishing volume, Climate Change Education Through Creative Arts, titled "Climate Change Education Through Creative Arts: Global Perspectives and the ICA1501 Module Case Study," authored by Anriët van Deventer and Georina Westraadt, and scheduled for publication in June 2026. The chapter positions the projects as examples of interdisciplinary, arts-based, and socially responsive approaches within teacher education, demonstrating how the work continues to contribute to broader educational and pedagogical conversations beyond the original project contexts. 

Our understanding of teaching excellence shifted from a focus primarily on content delivery to one that facilitates meaningful, transformative, socially responsive, and student-centred learning experiences. This growth has been shaped through scholarship, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, reflective practice, and sustained engagement with the realities of South African higher education. Our collaboration further reflects a shared commitment to decolonial and transformative approaches to teacher education through the integration of oral history, heritage engagement, Indigenous knowledge, social history, arts-based inquiry, and community participation. 

Following Sit Stories 2025, we realised that, despite strong engagement within our own subjects, broader sections of the Wellington Campus student community were not yet meaningfully included in these interdisciplinary and heritage-based initiatives. This reflection prompted us to expand participation opportunities by inviting students from other faculties and residences to engage with the initiative. Although participation remained more limited than anticipated, this experience encouraged deeper reflection on issues of visibility, accessibility, institutional culture, participation, endurance, and student belonging across campus spaces. 

As collaborators, we now know that meaningful institutional transformation and community engagement require sustained relationship-building over time. These experiences continue to shape our understanding of collaborative growth, interdisciplinary practice, socially responsive pedagogy, and transformative teacher education. 

9. Conclusion

Our collaborative work emerged from a shared commitment to rethinking teacher education in ways that are more relational, interdisciplinary, socially responsive, and meaningful within the South African higher education context. Although our disciplinary backgrounds originate from different traditions, namely Visual Arts Education and History Education, our collaboration revealed important shared concerns around student engagement, identity, creativity, historical understanding, belonging, and knowledge production. Our ongoing dialogue, reflective practice, and interdisciplinary experimentation revealed that meaningful learning often emerges most powerfully when disciplinary boundaries become spaces of connection rather than separation.

Across all the projects and the broader heritage and community engagement initiatives, we sought to create learning environments where students could engage cognitively, emotionally, materially, socially, and creatively with disciplinary knowledge. Rather than positioning students as passive recipients of fixed content, our teaching approaches encourage inquiry, storytelling, oral history, reflection, creative expression, embodied learning, and public engagement. In doing so, students are invited not only to learn about history, art, identity, and heritage, but also to contribute to interpretive, creative, and collaborative forms of knowledge-making. 

A central theme emerging from our collaboration is the importance of connecting disciplinary knowledge to students’ lived experiences, communities, memories, and identities. This is clear through responses like: "These stories live inside us. That’s something to always remember, the good old memories that shape who we are”. Many of our students enter higher education shaped by rigid and unequal schooling experiences that often marginalised creativity, critical inquiry, student voice, and relational learning. Our pedagogical approaches, therefore, intentionally seek to create more inclusive and participatory learning spaces where students feel recognised, capable, and able to contribute meaningfully to academic and public conversations. Oral histories, reflective journals, visual artefacts, installations, exhibitions, storytelling, and heritage engagement, students come to see themselves as active participants in both disciplinary learning and broader social dialogue.

As one student reflected, “It’s not always easy to talk about your past, but what stands out for me is how one can now retell the story with a smile because what once caused pain no longer hurts and can now be seen as a lesson.” 

Our work also reflects an ongoing commitment to scholarship-informed and critically reflective practice. Our doctoral research, conference presentations, publications, collaborative scholarship, and engagement with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning continue to shape our understanding of pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, embodiment, historical thinking, decoloniality, and student engagement. Rather than separating teaching and research, we view scholarship as deeply interconnected with pedagogical practice and curriculum innovation. This relationship between research and teaching allows us to remain responsive to changing educational contexts while continually refining and reimagining our approaches to teacher education.

At the same time, our collaboration remains grounded within the broader realities and challenges currently shaping higher education, both locally and globally. Rapid technological change, AI developments, contested histories, social inequality, and ongoing calls for decolonisation and transformation continue to challenge traditional understandings of knowledge, teaching, and learning. Within this context, we view interdisciplinary, embodied, and community-engaged pedagogies as essential for preparing future teachers who are reflective, adaptable, socially responsive, and capable of engaging critically with complexity and change.

Importantly, our work demonstrates that interdisciplinarity does not require sacrificing disciplinary depth or academic rigour. Rather, collaboration between History Education and Visual Arts Education created opportunities for students to engage more deeply with both historical inquiry and creative practice through interconnected, mutually enriching learning experiences. We came to understand knowledge not as fragmented into isolated disciplines, but as relational, embodied, socially situated, and connected to lived realities.

Ultimately, our collaboration represents an ongoing process of learning, reflection, experimentation, and transformation. Through projects, scholarship, community engagement, and collaborative pedagogy, we continue to explore how teacher education can foster more meaningful relationships among students, curriculum, creativity, history, heritage, identity, and community. In doing so, we seek to contribute to forms of teacher education that are not only academically rigorous, but also inclusive, reflective, socially responsive, and deeply connected to the realities of contemporary South Africa.

AI Use Disclosure

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools were used in a limited and supportive capacity during the preparation of this portfolio. AI-assisted support contributed primarily to language refinement, editing, structural organisation, formatting, and clarity of expression.

All ideas, reflections, project descriptions, interpretations, evidence, and scholarly contributions presented in this portfolio are the original work of the authors and are grounded in their teaching practice, research, curriculum development, and collaborative experience. AI tools were not used to generate core reflective content, fabricate evidence, or replace scholarly engagement and critical reflection.

The authors take full responsibility for the accuracy, authenticity, and integrity of this submission.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge CPUT for its institutional support of innovative teaching and learning practices. Our sincere appreciation is extended to the Faculty of Education, the Vice Dean, Professor Hanlie Dippenaar, and the Head of Department for the Intermediate Phase, Professor Lizette de Jager, for their ongoing guidance and support.

We also thank all participating CPUT students, whose engagement, creativity, openness, and willingness to share their stories and experiences have been central to the development and success of these projects. Special thanks are extended to Christel Oosthuizen and other CPUT staff members who contributed to the development, implementation, and public engagement dimensions of the projects.

We further acknowledge our community partners, schools, families, artists, heritage practitioners, local participants, and public collaborators who generously shared their knowledge, stories, spaces, and experiences. Their contributions enriched the learning process in meaningful ways and strengthened the relational, interdisciplinary, and community-centred nature of this collaborative work.