Candice Livingston

I am an Associate Professor, Research coordinator and coordinator of the B.Ed. Hons degree at the Faculty of Education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. I hold a Ph.D. on the influence of self-regulation on online writing. I serve on the Senate Language Committee as well as the Faculty Language, Research, Ethics and Teaching and Learning committees. I am also a member of the English National Language Body which is a sub-committee of the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB). Furthermore, I serve on the council of the English Academy of Southern Africa. I am involved with numerous literacy projects (both nationally and internationally) and have presented courses on reading comprehension, writing and metacognition for the Cape Teaching and Leadership Institute (CTLI) of the Western Cape Education Department as well as serving on the Provincial subject committee: Languages (English).  My research and supervision interests focus on ethics, teaching with technology, English language and literacy studies, and decolonising the English curriculum. 

My Project

My project adds potatoes to the potje. Potatoes add bulk to the stew and soak up all the wonderful juices and gravy. They are also a symbol of nourishment and will grow, even in the darkest of corners. My study looks at the decolonisation of pedagogy and how we can nurture students' voices, especially those who feel like they are in the dark. In the first phase of this project, I aimed to affect change within myself, specifically related to my positionality regarding who and what is being decolonised. The second phase of this project involved working with lecturers in the Faculty of Education by conducting focus group interviews, in an effort to determine how students are given a voice in the curriculum through the specific use of pedagogy, as the first tenet of decolonisation is 'to give students a voice'. The final phase of this project has been to develop recommendations that lecturers can use to ultimately help them choose or develop activities that will give students a voice in the curriculum and aid in decolonising the Language curriculum and how it is taught.