BA, BA (Hons), H Dip Ed, MEd (Rhodes), PhD (Rhodes)
Tel: +27 46 603 7618
e-mail: c.vandermescht@ru.ac.za
Biographical details:
Dr Caroline van der Mescht joined the Rhodes Education Department in August 2014 as a lecturer in Academic Literacy. In that role she teaches on all programmes in the Education Department, focusing on the genres and skills students need to read and write for success at university.
Caroline’s love of language and of teaching weave through her career. Her initial training was as a Home Language English teacher, with an Honours degree in English Literature. She has written textbooks for English High School teaching and was involved in designing the FET CAPS curriculum for English First Additional Language. She has presented papers annually at national and international conferences since 2010. Caroline taught the PGCE English Additional Language Method at Rhodes from 2009 – 2017 and again in 2021. She has helped design and deliver national workshops for teacher training in FET Colleges as a consultant for SAIDE. She was a committee member of the Reading Association of South Africa (RASA, now LITASA) Eastern Cape at its inception in 2010 and chaired the RASA conference committee in 2014. She served on the Rhodes University Committee of Teaching and Learning, as a representative on Senate and on the Education Department Higher Degrees Committee.
In 2018 Caroline published a collection of her poetry entitled “Pressed from the Cracks.”
Research
Caroline’s Masters in additional language teaching and her PhD were both supervised in Education and Linguistics, and used discourse analysis, identity theory and ethnographic methods as key analytic and research tools. Her doctoral study, completed in 2014, examined the identity-forming practices of teachers during Grade One reading lessons. This was followed by a postdoctoral scholarship in the Sandisa Imbewu project in the Rhodes Department of Language and Linguistics, where she published articles on early childhood literacy.
Teaching and learning
Caroline teaches academic literacies on all programmes in the Education Department:
Caroline is currently developing a collection of screencasts, slides and activities series entitled The Academic Literacy Toolkit to support students’ academic reading and writing in the Education Department.
Last Modified: Fri, 27 May 2022 11:22:53 SAST