Dr Tabisa Mayisela

I am a senior lecturer, and co-ordinator of the Staff Development cluster at CILT. I have performed different roles in higher education, such as teaching, being an instructional designer/e-Learning Specialist/Digital literacy coordinator who worked with academics on the integration of educational technologies and digital literacies into course curricula, and staff development. I convene and co-teach courses in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education, in both the Higher Education Studies (Higher Education Course and Curriculum Design) and Educational Technologies (Learning, Teaching and Emerging Technology; Research & Evaluation of Emerging Technologies in Education) streams. In these courses, I have worked with Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and design-based research (DBR).  In my PhD thesis entitled “First-year higher education students’ acquisition of digital content creation literacies in discipline-specific settings”, I used critical realism as my meta theory, and the New Literacies and CHAT as my theoretical resources. I continue doing digital literacy work, where I advocate for the social practice perspective of digital literacy. I have supervised Masters students from both the EdTech and HES streams and I am currently co-supervising a PhD student who is focusing on critical digital language pedagogy for English Additional Language Speakers.  Since early 2020, I’ve been the principal investigator of the Cases on Open Learning (COOL) project that is funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). This project has developed 16 Post-School Education and Training (PSET) sector case studies on different aspects of open learning and we worked with Nancy Fraser’s social justice theory. 

My publications can be found here.

Contact details: tabisa.mayisela@uct.ac.za