Professor Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan of the School of Education has been appointed as an executive editor of the international multidisciplinary journal, Teaching and Teacher Education (TATE). She is the first academic from an African university to serve in this position. 

Teaching and Teacher Education, which aims to enhance theory, research, and practice in teaching and teacher education, is one of the most prestigious educational research journals globally and receives over 2 000 manuscript submissions annually.

Pithouse-Morgan will work with the journal’s two editors-in-chief and a team of executive editors from around the world to manage the peer review process for submitted manuscripts. She will also contribute to strategic discussions on the journal’s development and growth.

‘I am honoured to have been invited to take on this responsibility. I expect that this role will allow me to make an important contribution to educational research globally, while also working to cultivate a research environment that is supportive of the achievements of early career academics and academics from the Global South. I also anticipate gaining new insights that I can share with colleagues and students at UKZN,’ said Pithouse-Morgan.

Pithouse-Morgan is a South African National Research Foundation (NRF) B-rated researcher. Her scholarship is in the field of professional learning, with a specific focus on better understanding and supporting teachers as self-directed and self-developing learners. Her academic work has given rise to poetic professional learning as a literary arts-based mode for researching and enriching professional learning.

Another noteworthy research outcome has been the innovative conceptualisation of polyvocal professional learning, developed through an eight-year international research partnership with Professor Anastasia P Samaras (George Mason University, USA). Their book that introduced this work, Polyvocal professional learning through self-study research (Pithouse-Morgan & Samaras, 2015), was nominated for the 2016 American Educational Research Association Qualitative Research Special Interest Group Outstanding Book Award. Pithouse-Morgan also led a research team that received the South African Education Research Association award for the Outstanding Peer Reviewed Chapter/Article Published by a South African Researcher in 2015.

In 2018, Pithouse-Morgan received UKZN’s Distinguished Teachers’ Award, and in 2019, was awarded the National Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award by the Council on Higher Education (CHE) and the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA).

Recent book publications include Memory Mosaics: Researching teacher professional learning through artful memory-work (Pithouse-Morgan, Pillay, & Mitchell, 2019). She is the Chair of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and Convenor of the Self-Reflexive Methodologies Special Interest Group of the South African Education Research Association (SAERA).