Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning

To Stitch and to Teach: A critical reflection on pedagogy as embodied praxis

Karolien Perold-Bull — 2025-03-30

The late Professor Elmarie Costandius contributed to stitching me together as creative practitioner in the field of South African higher education. In her memory, this paper reflects on the practicalities involved in pedagogy as embodied praxis through an autoethnographic lens. I have read memories of our pedagogical interactions through Tim Ingold’s theories of embodied making. Ingold believes that making is not a process of imposing preconceived form on the material world but rather involves processes that allow meaningful form to emerge through active engagement with the world’s materiality. The result of this autoethnographic enquiry is presented as a patterned memoir; a practical example of stitching together a pedagogical praxis built on the premise of process, trans-disciplinarity, and affecting tangible, real-life change. The purpose of the memoir is to make Elmarie’s pedagogical praxis accessible to other educators, thus facilitating her legacy in shaping future education, specifically locally, in productive, tangible ways.

Embodied frictional artistic encounters: The use of creativity and embodied learning as transformativeand healing space/s

Janine Lewis — 2025-03-30

Offered as conversations with Elmarie Costandius as reflection on practice, this article discusses the use of creative learning processes as transformative and healing space/s, and further proposes that these activation spaces be named embodied frictional artistic encounters. The construct of embodied frictional artistic encounters includes three vital participants, the artist (as creative act) as the facilitator of the immersive experience together with the spect-actor, within a designated intra-active environment. Collectively these participants collaborate to activate the artistic encounters towards a transformative and healing outcome. These communal shared intra-active space/s are heightened through affect, resonance, and wit(h)nessing, where the frictional element pertains to awakening states of doubt to alter perspective forming towards empathy. This article intends to encapsulate creative embodied learning within embodied frictional artistic encounters (celFAE/CELfae) and offer this as a dynamic means to classify such activations that serve to foster change and healing.

Stay with the trouble: Entangled relations – a tribute to Professor Elmarie Costandius’s embodied arts-based practice

Kobie Meiring — 2025-03-30

This paper explores the pedagogical entanglements of embodiment, thinking-through-doing, and visual redress in higher education through a post-qualitative and autoethnographic approach. Engaging with the work of Professor Elmarie Costandius, I reflect on how intra-actions between students, materials, and spaces shape learning in arts-based education. Moving beyond representation, this inquiry considers how embodied arts practices disrupt entrenched binaries, allowing for more relational, emergent ways of knowing. While the discussion is situated within a specific pedagogical context, it also raises larger philosophical and global concerns about inclusive knowledge production and justice—challenging dominant modes of learning that marginalise material, affective, and embodied engagements. In doing so, this paper contributes to ongoing conversations about response-ability in arts-based education, foregrounding the ethical and epistemic stakes of making, knowing, and being in entangled pedagogical spaces.

Towards a critical and active citizenship in architectural education

Alexandra Noble — 2025-03-30

This paper examines how architectural technology education can actively promote social justice, critical engagement, and ethical practice beyond the discipline's technical focus. Situated within South Africa's socio-political-spatial context and the enduring legacies of colonialism and apartheid, it focuses on an Architectural Technology Extended Curriculum Programme at a University of Technology, using posthuman and decolonial frameworks from the author’s PhD research. The paper further advances socially just architectural pedagogies by integrating Professor Elmarie Costandius’ concepts of critical and active citizenship, emphasising the role of education in fostering engaged, socially aware practitioners. Through processual learning, event-based pedagogies, and walking excursions, the programme deepens students' understanding of Cape Town’s urban layout and histories of spatial injustice. These methods aim to enhance students’ critical thinking, encouraging them to become socially responsive practitioners who challenge spatial inequalities and advocate for inclusive design.

Integrating decolonial theory through signature pedagogies in design education

Herman Botes — 2025-03-30

This paper explores the challenges of integrating decolonial theory into design pedagogy within higher education. A case study approach was employed to collect qualitative data from 31 design educators and 23 design students across public and private higher education institutions in South Africa. Based on the findings of the case study, I argue that advancing decolonial design education requires greater engagement with the concepts of belonging and cultural representation, which are recurring themes in the work of Elmarie Costandius. To support this engagement, I propose a matrix that maps conceptions of belonging and cultural representation, as expressed by design educators and students, in relation to Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2015) decolonial perspectives and Shreeve’s (2016) signature pedagogies of design. The aim of the paper is to provide a practical tool for design educators seeking to integrate decolonial perspectives in their teaching, with broader implications for other disciplines striving to decolonise their pedagogical practices.

(Bio)medicine meets Art: A physiologist’s reflections on inter-disciplinary liaisons, curriculum renewal and pursuing social justice

Faadiel Essop — 2025-03-30

This self-reflective article focuses on interdisciplinary intersections between Science, Medicine, and the Arts. It traces the journey of the author, a physiologist, starting with a visual redress project initiated with the late Professor Elmarie Costandius (Visual Arts, Stellenbosch University). The nature of such interactions is considered, revealing the remarkable personality of Professor Costandius, and the unique methodologies she employed to ensure the project’s completion. This project resulted in the author identifying a knowledge gap in the training of science and medical students and thereafter pursuing curriculum renewal for postgraduate students (Features of Science module, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University). There is some reflection on the nature and outcomes of the module, and an exercise that involved Arts and Biomedical students discussing artworks relating to the heart. It is proposed that such inter-disciplinary liaisons can elicit serendipitous outcomes in terms of teaching and learning, and biomedical research pursuits.

Disrupting monolingual practices: The role of multilingualism as a pedagogy of possibility in Writing Centres

Halima Namakula — 2025-03-30

Monolingual practices that dominate university spaces can contribute to othering, resulting in the marginalisation and exclusion of students who are less competent in the dominant discourse. These limitations must be addressed to create a more inclusive learning space that accommodates all students regardless of their social, economic, educational, and linguistic backgrounds. This paper explores how peer tutors in writing centre leverage their South African indigenous language repertoire to help students access disciplinary content knowledge and improve their academic writing practices. This paper discusses the findings from two focus group discussions with peer tutors at the Wits School of Education Writing Centre (WSoE WC). We explore how peer tutors' integration of multilingualism during writing consultations can inform a new writing centre pedagogy. We also leveraged the principles of wayfinding to navigate and orient peer tutors within a complex university space, which challenges the university's stated educational transformation with a concrete proposition. Data analysis shows how peer tutors and students collaboratively explore and map out academic writing using familiar languages to navigate the rigid structure of academic writing in a manner that respects and incorporates students' linguistic backgrounds. Through wayfinding, peer tutors disrupt monolingual practices and by doing so, increase student participation and chances of success in higher education. Writing centres, as wayfinding spaces, are instrumental in championing the adoption of multilingual pedagogies, thus disrupting dominant monolingual practices in higher education.

At the water table: Seeking the trace in research writing

Lucia Thesen — 2025-03-30

This paper describes a process of concept development, written in memory of Elmarie Costandius, who I learnt from in a series of workshops to reconfigure scholarship. Elmarie's humble way of working with concepts in art-based inquiry, with a strong commitment to social justice, widened and deepened my interest in the relationship between knowledge-making and writing – a great interest to me after decades of facilitating writers’ circles for postgraduate scholars. Involvement in the writers' circle, and the inspiration of Elmarie and the scholars around her, alert me to the possibilities of more responsive, situated, tentative ways of knowing that honour the traces of knowledge-making. These traces are an alternative to the limitations imposed by omniscient, conquest notions of knowledge and how they are inscribed in conventional genres of research.

Homage to a gentle giant: Concepts, creativity, and collaboration in our flowing with Elmarie Costandius

Karen Collett — 2025-03-30

This paper revisits our collaborative process of concept development through the use of the Flow process, introduced to us by Elmarie Costandius. We track and trace her influence on our lives as we re-member and honour how she shaped our intellectual and personal journeys in higher education. Using post-humanist pedagogy and new materialist frameworks, we explored how the Flow process encouraged non-linear thinking, sensory engagement, and experimentation in collaborative learning environments. Our methodology incorporates Jackson and Mazzei's zig-zag concept and Derrida and Barad's notion of hauntology to analyse how past influences continue to shape present and future pedagogical practices. Through collective re-membering and diffractive analysis of notes and artefacts, we documented how this approach promoted awareness and created new possibilities for knowledge creation. Results demonstrate that the Flow process successfully facilitated anti-disciplinary thinking and the assemblage of multiplicities, leading to innovative teaching practices across different disciplines. Ultimately, this paper pays homage to Elmarie and affirms how the collaborative, creative process of concept development can both honour intellectual legacies and open new avenues for innovation and critical engagement in higher education teaching and learning.

Closeness-at-a-distance: Reaching out through pedagogies of making

Francois Jonker — 2025-03-30

Elmarie Costandius’s experimental pedagogies challenged the stasis and restriction of top-down, monomodal, cerebral notions of learning, and of knowledge as handed down by experts. The shock delivered by her arts-based approaches was not explosive, but rather a set of vibrations that reconfigured what it means to experiment, traverse, reconfigure, and communicate in classroom events. Her pedagogies fostered encounters with doing, making, and intra-acting as embodied modalities of exploration—approaching new forms of knowing. This article unfolds from our attunement to this gesture of reaching outward. The closeness we seek to approximate emerges from our reaching out towards meaning, memory, and our sense of resonance with Elmarie and each other as kindred companions in thinkingdoingbecoming. We compose this article as a “processual monument” that pays homage to Elmarie’s legacy by advocating for art-based and transmodal practices in higher education pedagogy and inquiry.

“Stopped in the middle” with Elm,arie Costandius: playing with interruptions/continuities

Nike Irene Romano — 2025-03-30

This paper is written in memory of our friend and colleague, Elmarie Costandius, a visual artist and academic, whose untimely and unexpected death deeply affected us. While we had worked with Elmarie in various research projects, short courses, and workshops, over a period of ten years or so, in this article we refer to a series of encounters, in which we came together to explore a decolonial and post qualitative inquiry practice as part of a South African Swedish Universities Forum (SASUF) project (2020 - 2022). Entitled (Re)configuring Scholarship in Higher Education, the project focused on alternative ways of doing pedagogies and inquiry in the current context of higher education precarities and the consequent imperative for transformation. We wanted to explore how feminist new materialist imaginaries could be put to work with affective embodied practices to expand our thinking and reconfigure our scholarship. Guided by Elmarie’s experimental arts-based approach, we opened ourselves to the affordances of playfulness, creative, serious and experimental thinking-making-doings, and the vulnerabilities of these embodied, relational scholarly praxes. Stopped in the middle, we show how our entangled thinking-making-doings continue Elmarie’s legacy.

Introduction to this special issue

Nike Irene Romano — 2025-03-30