About Us

Soraya Abdulatief holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Language and Literacy studies from the University of Cape Town and a Masters Degree in English Literature from the University of the Western Cape. She has lectured English Communication at a university of technology. She worked as an online editor and technical writer. Her PhD research is on teaching critical literacy and academic literacy practices to Postgraduate Certificate in Education students training to be Senior and FET phase science teachers. Other research interests include multimodalities, using technology in education and debates around race, gender, language and literacy.

Catherine Kell is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at UCT, specializing in language and literacy in education. She is also the Director of the School of Education. She has worked in the field of literacy and language education since the early 1980s, initially as an activist in NGOs teaching literacy and language to adults in the trade union movement and community organisations. Her PhD focused on the theoretical development of the social practices approach in literacy studies with reference to the role literacy plays in participatory development. She has lectured at UWC and at three different universities in New Zealand and in a development initiative in Tanzania, called Twaweza, which has been responsible for the Uwezo literacy project in East Africa. She is currently working on projects around the uses of digital technologies in literacy education.

Glynis Lloyd is a literacy specialist with a Masters degree in Applied Language and Literacy (UCT, 2014). Glynis worked as an English teacher in schools on the Cape Flats for eight years during apartheid. She has worked in teacher development and training, in publishing as a textbook writer, editor and publisher for all three post-1994 curricula, and is currently engaged in literacy intervention programme research and evaluation. Her main areas of interest are critical literacy, feminist theory and materials development.

Pinky Makoe is Associate Professor at UNISA, Department of English Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in English Education from the Institute of Education, University of London. Her doctoral research focused on how children, particularly English language learners, become socialised into dominant linguistic and cultural practices in the early years of formal schooling. Her current research interests include monolingual and monoglossic language ideologies, issues of class and identity, and heteroglossic practices in contexts of diversity.

Athambile is a lecturer in the Humanities Education Department at the University of Pretoria’s Education Faculty. Prior to joining higher education as a teacher educator she was a high school teacher for five years in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Her research interests are wde-ranging and include literacy, African language development, literature and black women’s historiography. As a Mandela-Rhodes Scholar she read for a Masters in Education and her research project was focusing on Foundation Phase literacy education in isiXhosa. She is currently pursuing her PhD on black women writers. She is one of the founders of Molo Mhlaba: a school for girls in Khayelitsha. Athambile publishes widely in journals, national newspapers as well as blogs.

Carolyn McKinney is Associate Professor of Language Education in the UCT School of Education. Her PhD research (2003, London Institute of Education) focused on critical literacy. She has been working in language and literacy education since 1994 and in teacher education at Wits and UCT since 2004. Carolyn has led a number of ethnographic style funded research projects on language and literacy in a range of South African schools (elite to poor) and informal learning spaces (Gauteng, Western and Eastern Cape).

Robyn Tyler is a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape. She specialises in language and literacy in Science and across the curriculum. Robyn was awarded her PhD from the University of Cape Town in 2019 which was an ethnographic case study on the practices of bilingual isiXhosa/English learners in a high school Science class and study group in Khayelitsha. Her work experience includes high school English teaching, lecturing in language and literacy in education and supervising student teachers. Robyn also currently serves as a parent member on the School Governing Body of an ex-model C primary school in Cape Town.

Babalwayashe Molate is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town. Her study explores the language and literacy socialisation practices of Black multilingual families in marginalised communities. Her broader research interest is Language Socialisation in African multilingual communities in the home and school domains, with a keen focus on family literacy, family language policy, and school language policy and language identities of young multilingual children. She also translates (IsiXhosa-English) and edits children’s literature. Her translation skills also extend to other genres, viz, teacher training manuals for teaching literacy, research transcripts and academic writing.