The Team
EDUCATION FACULTY - CPUT WELLINGTON CAMPUS
Artwork by students, Hawequa Mountain, Wellington
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Dr Kobie Meiring & Dr Adrienne van As
Dr Kobie Meiring & Dr Adrienne van As
Lecturer in Visual Arts at the Faculty of Education
(2017 to date)
(Full-time)
(600 students)
Meiring, J. 2024. Embodied mark making as decolonial praxis in South African teacher education. PhD thesis. Stellenbosch University. Available at: SUNScholar Repository
Dr Kobie Meiring
Dr Kobie Meiring
Being a lecturer in Visual Arts Education within the Faculty of Education at CPUT Wellington has significantly shaped both my teaching philosophy and collaborative practice. Working within a South African higher education context marked by inequality, disciplinary fragmentation, and ongoing calls for transformation has continually compelled me to question how art is positioned within teacher education, and how students experience learning itself. Much of my work emerged from a concern that art education is still frequently shaped by rigid, formalist, and Eurocentric traditions that prioritise product over process, technical or artistic skill over embodied inquiry (link to glossary), and assessment over meaning-making and personal and academic growth. Consequently, many students enter university already alienated from art, perceiving it as elitist or inaccessible rather than as an essential human experience linked to identity, creativity, memory, and relational existence, a perspective reinforced by Eisner's (2002:70) assertion that “the arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source”. John Dewey’s (1934) understanding of art as experience has significantly shaped both my pedagogical approach and doctoral research, which explored how embodied and arts-based approaches might challenge prescriptive and disembodied forms of learning and teaching within South African teacher education.
My teaching and research draw on decolonial, posthuman, and new materialist perspectives that challenge hierarchical and disembodied models of knowledge production. Scholars such as Barad (2007), Braidotti (2013), Haraway (2016), Dei and Asgharzadeh (2001), and Murris (2022) have informed my understanding of learning as relational, embodied, and entangled with histories, materials, environments, and social realities. Rather than viewing knowledge as something transmitted from lecturer to student, I came to understand learning as something that emerges through doing, sensing, dialogue, and creative encounter.
A significant precursor to the development of projects such as ǀhaos, Sit Stories, and Amabali Wepali was my participation in the Visual Redress in Africa Conference, hosted by Stellenbosch University from 7 to 8 December 2023. The presentation explored how embodied arts-based practices, decolonial thinking, posthumanism, and new materialist perspectives could contribute to visual redress in art education by disrupting disembodied and normative ways of seeing. Professor Elmarie Costandius’s visual redress initiatives (Costandius & De Villiers, 2023) on the Stellenbosch University campus, together with the broader international conversations emerging from the conference, became an important catalyst for my own pursuit of visual redress practices at the CPUT Wellington Campus. These engagements shaped my understanding of how collaborative artworks and public installations could function as carriers of student voice, memory, identity, and belonging within institutional spaces. The conference further strengthened my conviction that visual and embodied practices could contribute meaningfully to curriculum transformation and more socially responsive forms of teacher education (Link to Book of Abstracts) (Link to Presentation).
It was through these concerns and commitments that the collaborative relationship between Adrienne van As and myself emerged organically. The initiation of the ǀhaos Project became a pivotal moment in this process. Initially developed as an arts-based exploration of identity and material engagement, the project quickly revealed that students’ creative processes became far more meaningful when connected to family histories, oral narratives, memory, and historical inquiry. The incorporation of History into the project, therefore, felt like a natural extension of the learning process itself. Working collaboratively across Visual Arts and History opened possibilities that neither discipline could fully achieve on its own. Students were no longer simply producing artworks or completing history assignments in isolation, but engaging holistically with questions of identity, heritage, memory, community, and belonging through intertwined creative and historical processes.
As our collaboration developed through projects such as ǀhaos, Sit Stories, Amabali Wepali, Ink and Identity, and a range of archival and community-based transformation projects, an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary community of practice gradually emerged. Our collaboration evolved organically through mutual pedagogical need, reflective experimentation, and shared concern for student engagement and meaningful learning. CPUT is one of South Africa's leading technology universities and carries significant responsibility as one of the largest institutions preparing teachers in the Western Cape. We remain aware of the ongoing challenges facing higher education globally. Rapid technological change, AI developments, uncertainty about the future of knowledge and work, and increased demands for socially responsive education are directly transforming teaching and learning, affecting their purpose and practice.
Within this context, our collaboration represents an active attempt to engage meaningfully and researchfully with these uncertainties through embodied, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged approaches to teaching and learning. Rather than positioning education as the transmission of fixed knowledge, we see it as a relational and adaptive process that must continually respond to changing social, technological, and educational realities. This work aligns closely with CPUT’s Vision 2030 and its emphasis on Smart Teaching and Learning, social transformation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community engagement. Through collaborative and arts-based approaches, we continue to explore how students, curriculum, and community can be brought into more meaningful relation within teacher education.
Lecturer in History Education at the Faculty of Education (2023 to date)
(full-time)
(800 students)
Van As, A. 2024. Exploring transactional and historical distances in History Education: An autoethnography. PhD thesis. University of Pretoria. Available at: UPSpace Institutional Repository
Dr Adrienne van As
Dr Adrienne van As
Being a lecturer in History Education and Social Sciences Education within the Faculty of Education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), Wellington has significantly shaped both my teaching philosophy and scholarly practice. Working across diverse educational contexts, including schools, multigrade education, teacher education, and higher education, continually compelled me to reflect critically on how history is taught, experienced, and understood within South African classrooms. Much of my work emerged from a concern that History Education is still frequently approached through content-driven and teacher-centred models that position students as passive recipients of fixed knowledge rather than as active participants in inquiry, interpretation, and meaning-making.
My own educational and professional experiences, shaped by growing up in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa and teaching in varied educational environments, strongly influenced my interest in historical understanding, identity, memory, and student engagement. These experiences informed my doctoral research at the University of Pretoria, titled Exploring transactional and historical distances (link to glossary) in History Education: An autoethnography. This research explored how dialogue, storytelling, pedagogy, and personal experience influence students’ engagement with history and shape their historical understanding. The study highlighted the importance of relational pedagogy, narrative, empathy, and lived experience within History Education, while drawing attention to how social, cultural, and educational contexts shape historical understanding.
My teaching and research increasingly draw on inquiry-based learning, social history, reflective pedagogy, and interdisciplinary approaches that challenge rigid and disconnected understandings of historical knowledge. Rather than viewing history as the memorisation of facts and dates, I increasingly understand historical learning as an interpretive and reflective process shaped through dialogue, storytelling, critical inquiry, and engagement with multiple perspectives. I therefore seek to create learning environments where students actively investigate, question, interpret, and connect history to their own identities, communities, and lived realities.
My earlier work within the Centre for Multigrade Education (CMGE) at CPUT also contributed significantly to my understanding of inclusive and contextually responsive pedagogy. Working in multigrade education, curriculum development, teacher training, and the development of teaching and learning materials exposed me to the inequalities and complexities shaping South African education, particularly in rural and under-resourced schooling contexts. This work reinforced the importance of differentiated teaching, contextual responsiveness, creativity, and flexible pedagogical approaches that support meaningful student participation and engagement.
My work remains shaped by broader questions about the role of History Education in contemporary society and in teacher education, especially here in South Africa. Rapid technological change, AI developments, contested histories, and ongoing debates around decolonisation and transformation continue to reshape how knowledge is produced, accessed, and taught. Within this context, I increasingly view History Education as essential for developing critical thinking, historical literacy, empathy, reflective citizenship, and socially responsive teaching practices.
This work aligns closely with CPUT Vision 2030 and its emphasis on Smart Teaching and Learning, social transformation, interdisciplinarity, and community engagement. Through collaborative, inquiry-based, and heritage-centred approaches to teaching and learning, I continue to explore how history, storytelling, creativity, identity, and community knowledge can be brought into more meaningful relation within teacher education.
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