Lynn Coleman

Lynn Coleman  is a senior lecturer and academic staff developer at Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

In 2015 I joined the Extended Curriculum Programmes (ECP) Unit at the Fundani Centre for Higher Education Development at CPUT.  In this staff development role I work with mostly academic teachers to enhance their teaching and curriculum practices to support their ECP students. Between 2015 – 2017 I facilitated various action research projects with lecturers with the aim of supporting them to undertake small scale practitioner-focused research investigations into their classroom practices.

Previously I taught media and communication and web design in the Film Production, Information Technology and Multimedia departments. I completed my PhD at the Open University in the United Kingdom and my research explored the relationship between literacy practices and the curriculum environment in visual communication and media courses in the vocational university setting. I was Visiting Academic at the Unit for Academic Teaching and Learning at Uppsala University, Sweden in April – May 2018. I also  co-convened the HELTASA Foundation SIG or Special Interest Group between 2016 – 2017.

I am currently working on a joint research project with Jackie Tuck at the Open University in the UK that seeks to explore lecturers’ discourses of students writing in the university of technology context. We hope to share our findings at the HECU 9 and SRHE conferences later this year and publish our research in 2019.

Aspects of my PhD research have been incorporated into edited volumes addressing the theme of literacies in the university. I have also published my work on literacy and textual practices in the vocational university and integrating curriculum theorisation with the academic literacies perspective in the journals Higher Education Research and Development, Teaching in Higher Education CriSTal.  I have secured research funding grants from the NRF and CPUT to pursue my research interests in student writing development, pedagogies of writing and action research as a tool for developing teachers-as-researchers.

For an overview of my published research work, please follow the links below.