School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS)

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http://hdl.handle.net/11071/3889
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS) suceeds the Institute of Humanities, Education and Development Studies (IHEDS)

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Browsing School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS) by Author "Dean, Catherine"

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    How am I using my Christian intellect in developing my living educational theory to facilitate transformational learning in my philosophy students? Methodological Perspectives.
    Dean, Catherine
    In this paper I will present a brief overview of the research I am carrying out for my doctorate. I will focus more specifically on the methodology which I am using, known as Living Theory. I hope to situate it within the context of research methodology in general, explain it and offer a critical analysis to illustrate why I have chosen this methodology over other possibilities. I look forward to receiving feedback from members of the Strathmore academic community from different fields, to help me further explain and clarify the methodological dimension of my doctoral research.
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    How can I facilitate the personal development of my students as I live my educational values
    Dean, Catherine
    The title of our Conference leads me to reflect briefly on how I understand transformative education for development. If we look at development from an African perspective we usually understand this to refer to the socio-economic, political and other forms of development of a country. In this context there would be many ways of implementing innovative education techniques which could foster such development. However, in my experience, it is very difficult to bring about socio-economic development in a country even through education, when we look at the matter in general, third person terms. I am convinced that to foster development in Africa we need to educate our students in transformative, innovative ways, which facilitate personal growth and development. If our educational practice focuses on helping each student to transform themselves personally it is more likely that s/he will be able to bring about further change in our society. For these developments at the personal or social level to be genuine they need to have a solid foundation.
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    How the process of doctoral enquiry developed my openness and criticality
    (2014-04-07) Dean, Catherine
    In my recently concluded doctoral enquiry I evaluate and make public nine years of my educational practice at Strathmore University (Kenya). My research focuses on the process of transformation in myself and others through the development of my teaching and learning methods and fostering positive educational relationships with those around me. In this paper I will show how the process of my doctoral research helped me to develop my openness to critical engagement with my own ideas and those of others. This allowed me to identify the deeper values underlying my practice and my relations with students and colleagues. Simultaneously I clarified the historical dimension of the evolution of these values. In this contribution I will highlight some key features that enabled me to evaluate my doctoral research and make it public. I will refer to elements which are normal within this context, but which require one to foster openness to sharing their ideas by interacting with and learning from others. For example, the very first feedback I received from my potential supervisor opened up a totally new horizon for my doctoral enquiry. It also required me to engage in a critically intellectual mind shift to adjust to the proposal. Other contributors to developing my openness and criticality were the process of selfreflection; on-going recourse to student feedback; the transfer paper and oral exam; the use of video and photos to evaluate myself in the classroom; critical analysis of my findings using philosophical and theological perspectives; presentation of my research at various conferences; the oral defence of my final dissertation, etc. My paper will illustrate how I held myself accountable for my doctoral enquiry by evaluating and making it public through openness to and critical engagement with others.
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    How the Process of doctoral enquiry developed my openness and criticality
    Dean, Catherine
    In my recently concluded doctoral enquiry I evaluate and make public nine years of my educational practice at Strathmore University (Kenya). My research focuses on the process of transformation in myself and others through the development of my teaching and learning methods and fostering positive educational relationships with those around me. In this paper I will show how the process of my doctoral research helped me to develop my openness to critical engagement with my own ideas and those of others. This allowed me to identify the deeper values underlying my practice and my relations with students and colleagues. Simultaneously I clarified the historical dimension of the evolution of these values. In this contribution I will highlight some key features that enabled me to evaluate my doctoral research and make it public. I will refer to elements which are normal within this context, but which require one to foster openness to sharing their ideas by interacting with and learning from others. For example, the very first feedback I received from my potential supervisor opened up a totally new horizon for my doctoral enquiry. It also required me to engage in a critically intellectual mind shift to adjust to the proposal. Other contributors to developing my openness and criticality were the process of selfreflection; on-going recourse to student feedback; the transfer paper and oral exam; the use of video and photos to evaluate myself in the classroom; critical analysis of my findings using philosophical and theological perspectives; presentation of my research at various conferences; the oral defence of my final dissertation, etc. My paper will illustrate how I held myself accountable for my doctoral enquiry by evaluating and making it public through openness to and critical engagement with others.
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    Passing on the common human tradition
    Dean, Catherine
    We are here to share ideas on the “risk” of education as the book by Don L. Giussani is called. As we discuss his work, we are also discussing the nature and meaning of education as well as the process of education based on our own personal experiences in the field and keeping in mind our research into and analysis of that same teaching experience. As Don Giussani points out at various stages throughout the book, he is concerned here with the challenge and risk of educating adolescents in today’s world. In this workshop we will probably discover that many of the points made by the author apply to our situation too. In particular, Giussani is concerned about teenagers because they are at a stage where defiance and conformity without conviction (peer pressure) is combined with the fact that they are also becoming more aware of themselves as persons and of the meaning of the reality that surrounds them. Our university students are in a similar situation and so we are asking ourselves, how we can helpthem, how we ought to educate them in a way that responds to their own basic needs. The author proposes a method of education which contains five points and in this paper we will look at the second step in Giussani’s proposal: the issue of the role of tradition in education.
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    Peer review in teaching: the Strathmore experience
    Dean, Catherine
    Peer reviewing is a process that has become popular around the world over the last 10-15 years. It can be used in different professional environments, as well as by students who make use of the collaboration of their peers to improve their academic performance. Given the parameters of this Conference, our paper focuses on peer review in the teaching context. Many third level institutions in the Western world are now using this method for evaluating the teaching performance of their academic staff. It is a system that has given rise to a lot of debate as many lecturers are not willing to have colleagues enter their class-room to analyse their teachings skills; at the same time, Faculties, Departments and Schools need to be able to evaluate the performance of their staff for various reasons. Searching the Internet one can find many sites that offer information, experience, and advice on how to create and implement a peer review system in teaching. In this paper we would like to transmit some experience that we have recently gained at Strathmore University regarding the peer review system in teaching.
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    The role of human freedom in the development of the virtues
    (Spoteczenstwo i rodzina, ) Dean, Catherine
    The term “character” can be defined in different ways but generally it is understood to refer to the distinctive and individual way of being developed by a person based on the initial temperament they have received at conception, as modified by the moral habits that the same person has acquired through his free choices and activity1. These moral habits are qualities of the person that make him act usually in a particular manner. The good qualities are also known as virtues, while the negative or “bad” qualities that a person may have developed are normally known as the vices. When we speak of “forming” a person’s “character” we are referring to a process in which the person is encouraged to develop the virtues, or good qualities proper to a human being. We do not speak of forming character in a dog or a cat or a monkey. Why is this? It is because they are not capable of developing virtues due to the fact that they do not have a spiritual soul with the capacity to know what they are doing and to choose to act in one way or another. In other words, the animal is not free to choose the type of activity he will carry out. Whereas the human being is free and can decide how he will act in each and every circumstance! This is an interesting consideration because when speaking of “forming character” or character-development, the emphasis can often be on the task of parents and teachers who try to teach or educate children in virtue through the small day to day acts that the child carries out2. This is certainly an important step in the process of character-building,however the development of the virtues is not merely an “outside job” of parents and teachers. Ultimately, to develop real virtues each human being needs to take on the task personally and want himself to acquire those good qualities through the exercise of his freedom. We are saying, then, that human freedom comes into play in the process of developing the virtues and thus of forming character. The person concerned has to want freely to develop those virtues; he has to know what virtues are, be attracted by their goodness, and so freely want to develop them in himself. In this way he participates freely in the development of his own personal character. In this article we will delve a little more deeply into the role of human freedom in the development of the virtues and character-formation. To achieve this we must start by looking at the human being as a whole and in his individual features, in order to understand who and what the person is and how he acts.
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    Transforming primary schools in Kenya through action research: experiences from a post experience Diploma in Educational Management
    Dean, Catherine; Kariuki, Margaret
    The aim of this paper is to make public the transformative action research projects carried out by primary school teachers who did the Diploma in Educational Management at Strathmore University (Nairobi, Kenya) from 2009 to 2013. The program was developed to empower teachers to implement effective improvements in their schools in light of the deterioration in public primary schools in Kenya. The paper focuses on the case of one teacher who achieved significant transformation at her school using action research.
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    Truth and the media
    Dean, Catherine
    In Kenya recently, tensions, especially between government and the media, have been reflected in events such as the raiding of The Standard Group offices a few months ago - on 1st March 2006, and the resistance of the President’s security detail to permitting journalists to take photos of the President during the recent youth Forum held in Nairobi in September 2006. Events such as these have given rise to the on-going debate in local media regarding the right to freedom of expression or freedom of press as it is also known and the possible self-regulation of media by journalists themselves through a code of Ethics.In this context, I would like to make some reflections on the art of media communication as related to seeking the truth.