Updated TPS Yr2

Updated Teaching Philosophy Statement, end of Year 2

This is the final stage of a longer progression. The teaching metaphor, the original statement, the end-of-Year-1 update, and a summary of how my thinking has moved across the MPhil are gathered on the Teaching Philosophy progression page. If you have come straight to this page, that overview gives the fuller arc this statement completes. 

My beliefs and values about teaching, learning, and assessment

I believe that teaching is the work of creating conditions in which learners step into the spotlight and take ownership of their own development. The Theatre of Reflective Design remains the spine of how I understand my practice. What has changed is my sense of where the stage manager stands. For most of the programme I pictured that role as backstage and largely invisible, setting conditions and then withdrawing. Year 2 has moved me out of the wings. The stage manager I now recognise is also a producer and, increasingly, a director of change: someone responsible not only for a single production but for the conditions under which a whole company learns, and for the difficult decisions about what the company should attempt next.

The five values named at the end of Year 1 still hold, but two of them have grown teeth. Innovation is no longer a disposition toward creative methods in the abstract; it now means building working artefacts, deploying them, and accepting responsibility when they behave in ways I did not design. Accountability has widened from owning my own outputs to owning the consequences of the systems I introduce into other people's learning, including the technologies that now share the pedagogical work with me, and the honest limits of what those technologies can reach.

The impact of each module on this philosophy

The rubric asks for the impact of each completed module, and the honest account is that no single module rewrote the philosophy. Each one removed a particular illusion.

Teaching and Learning in HPE gave me the vocabulary I had been missing. Constructive alignment turned a vague aspiration toward coherent design into a discipline: outcomes, activities, and assessment as a single system rather than three separate concerns. It also reframed feedback. I had treated feedback as something an expert delivers; the module showed it as a literacy that learners must be taught to use, which is a closer fit to the mirrors in my metaphor than my early practice had been.

Curriculum Development caught me leading with critique. My analytical instinct, to name what is broken before noticing what works, showed up plainly in my curriculum analysis, and the feedback on it was direct. The lasting effect was a commitment to explicit contextualisation: a curriculum, like a production, is answerable to its setting, its resources, and the people in the room, and analysis that ignores those things is merely tidy. Balanced critique, which holds strengths and weaknesses together, is now part of how I read any educational design, including my own.

Assessment in HPE sharpened two things at once. It pressed me on accessibility, the recognition that an assessment which works well for the well-resourced learner can quietly exclude others, and it gave my long-standing preference for visual and design-based artefacts a defensible educational rationale rather than leaving it as personal taste. The question I now ask of an assessment is not only whether it is valid but who it reaches.

Research Methodology is where the surface-level habit was exposed most uncomfortably. Examiner feedback on my protocol showed that I had been handling foundational concepts at second hand. Working through the primary sources rather than their summaries changed how I engage theory across all my teaching, and it fed directly into published work that applies Design Science Research to my own research (Dyers, Mahomed and van Greunen, 2025; Dyers, van Greunen and Mahomed, 2026). Teaching research methodology now carries a personal caution against the very shortcut I used to take.

Leadership in HPE is the module that moved the metaphor. The stage manager, a deliberately modest figure, was reframed as an educational leader and change agent. I stopped seeing leadership as something exercised over a course and started seeing it as the work of shifting a system, drawing on the eCCR and on Theory U's insistence that change begins with a change in the person leading it. The redesign of provincial and academic processes I am involved in is, in this light, the same craft as directing a production, only the stage is larger and the consequences reach beyond the room.

Technology Enhanced Learning did the most to unsettle and then rebuild the metaphor. Through SAMR, TPACK, and PICRAT, and through Fawns's entangled pedagogy as the lens that exposed the limits of each, I came to see that technology is not a tool the stage manager picks up and puts down. It is entangled with the teaching, the values, and the setting, and it redistributes the pedagogical work rather than simply enhancing it. Building ProbleMeisha, a Socratic tutor for Design Science Research problem-scoping, made this concrete. She was designed through the six-activity DSR cycle, and the build forced me to do in practice what I had only resolved to do in principle: scaffold understanding explicitly, because a learner facing an artefact cannot fall back on my improvisation. The blind spot named at the end of Year 1, assuming shared understanding, was finally addressed not by good intentions but by having to encode the scaffolding into something that would run without me. The module left me a caution I have kept: built is not the same as effective, and the bare existence of an artefact proves nothing about what it does for a learner. The cohort forum pressed that on me at the point where I had quietly begun to forget it.

Educational theories that underpin my beliefs

The theoretical base has both deepened and widened. Schön's reflective practitioner, Boud and colleagues on learning from experience, and Mezirow on transformation remain the foundation, and I now read them rather than cite them. Biggs's constructive alignment has become the structural grammar of how I design. Fawns's entangled pedagogy has replaced my earlier, tidier assumption that technology sits outside the pedagogy waiting to be deployed. Design Science Research, through Hevner and the Peffers cycle, has moved from being only my teaching content to being a method I apply to my own educational artefacts, ProbleMeisha among them. The promise I made at the end of Year 1, to ground the theatre metaphor in performance pedagogy, is partly kept and remains a live project rather than a closed one.

How my attitudes have changed over time

The clearest movement this year is from designer of artefacts to leader of change. At the start I measured myself by the learning experiences I could craft. I now also ask what conditions I am responsible for beyond my own sessions, and whether the systems I introduce serve the learners they were meant to serve. Alongside this, the arc that ran through the whole programme, my habit of assuming shared understanding, has reached something like resolution. It was named in Year 1, and it was worked out in Year 2 in the act of building a tool that had to make its scaffolding explicit or fail. I would not claim the habit is gone. I would claim that I now have a method for catching it: a plain four-sentence opening that states the issue, defines any unfamiliar term, says why the issue exists, and names what the piece will do about it, the same discipline I now build into the artefacts I design.

My teaching context

My dual appointment continues to shape the work. As a Senior Lecturer in Health Professions Education at Stellenbosch University and a Public Health Medicine Specialist with the Western Cape Government, I teach mid-career health professionals who arrive with deep clinical and managerial experience and uneven familiarity with educational theory and digital tools. The policy environment rewards pragmatic solutions while academic work demands methodological care, and moving between the two has made me attentive to how context shapes what people assume others already know. Year 2 has added a further dimension: I am now often the person introducing change into these settings, which means my philosophy has to account for resistance, equity, and the slow work of bringing a system along.

How I measure my effectiveness

I still measure effectiveness through multiple mirrors of feedback rather than a single source, and I still ask who is learning rather than only whether learning is happening. What counts as a mirror has widened. Year 2 taught me to treat the artefact itself, and the people who use it, as feedback sources in their own right, alongside teacher, peer and self, an idea I have since put to a wider field in the expanded feedback model proposed with colleagues for digital health education. Two measures have been added. One is whether the artefacts I build can stand on their own and then make themselves unnecessary, scaffolding learners and fading as the learner takes the work over, which is a more demanding test than a session I personally facilitate. The other is whether change outlives my direct involvement: whether a process I helped redesign continues to function, and whether colleagues take it up as their own. Effectiveness, in the language of the metaphor, is no longer only a good performance on the night. It is whether the company can stage the next production without me.

Goals for continued professional development

Before naming new priorities, the three goals I set at the end of Year 1 deserve an honest accounting, since a plan is worth only as much as its review. The first, to build explicit habits of checking assumptions and scaffolding understanding, is the one I have carried furthest; it now has a method rather than only an intention. The second, to engage with foundational sources rather than their summaries, has become the way I read, and it reached into published work rather than staying a private correction. The third, to ground my visual and design-based instincts in the literature, is where I have made the least progress, and it returns below as unfinished business rather than a closed achievement.

The year ahead has four priorities. I intend to bring the Theatre of Reflective Design to a publishable form, grounding it properly in performance pedagogy so that it contributes to HPE scholarship rather than remaining a private organising idea. A second debt is older and narrower: to tie my visual and design-based teaching to the literature it has never been anchored in, work such as Laurillard's account of teaching as a design science, in at least one written piece by the middle of 2027. I plan to evaluate ProbleMeisha beyond mere presence of use, running her through the full workshop sequence at the next cohort, scoring the shift in the problem-statement rubric between each student's draft and revision, and setting an unscaffolded transfer task at the close, so that a claim of implementable can become evidence of effective or fail to. And I want to develop my practice as a change agent deliberately rather than by circumstance, with the Design Science Research short course as the vehicle, seeking out the leadership literature and the mentorship that would let me lead system change with the same rigour I now expect of my course design.