Cathy Hutchings

Catherine has worked in the LDG since 2001. Before that she was employed as a consultant in the Writing Centre, where she initiated the internship project. Her interests include those of academic mentoring, dialogical journaling and reflective literacy. Currently she teaches on courses in the Humanities and Commerce faculties. These include the Academic literacy course, 'Language in the Performing Arts' (LiPA) for students in the Performing and Creative Arts and the language and commerce section of the Economics foundation course. Apart from course teaching, she has run workshops on academic writing, thesis and scientific report writing.

Her M.Phil in Education in 2002 was entitled ‘An analysis of students' experiences during their acquisition of academic literacy, based on their consultations with the UCT Writing Centre: Looking towards improving the feasibility of academic mentorship within Higher Education'.

Her PhD, entitled ‘'Narrative means towards literacy understandings. Exploring transformations within literacies and migrating identities', is based on the work she did with students in a B.Ed. course, focussing on dialogical journaling. This was an analysis of narrative reflections towards the development of critical reflective thinking by mature students in a classroom of wider access. The transitions undergone by these students relate to their senses of self, their understandings of (socially constructed) allowances within the higher educational institution, their understandings of what constitutes learning, knowledge and meaning making, and their own roles in these processes, including the agency they take on in the process. In examining how agency is adopted, she considers the development of, and changes in the ‘voice’ of the adult student learner/writer, as reported by them and evident in their own writing, both formal and informal