Position: Senior Reseacher
Office: Old Arts Building
Email: rrtyler@uwc.ac.za 

Bio
Robyn Tyler is a senior researcher in the Centre.Robyn supervises graduate students and student teachers and is a member of the bua-lit language and literacy collective (www.bua-lit.org.za). Her research and teaching focuses on multilingual learning, translanguaging, school language policy, biliteracy, bilingual learning materials development, language across the curriculum and research methodology. Robyn leads the NRF-funded Bilingual Learning Materials Project (2024-2026) working on trialling bilingual learning materials in two Cape Town primary schools. She also serves on the Arts Research Committee, manages the Centre’s events calendar and runs a postgraduate writing group. Robyn believes that the most important part of her job is making sure that there are chocolate biscuits for staff tea each week.      
 

Lecturer

Bio
Jason Richardson is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research His primary research interests include sociolinguistics, multilingualism, disability and youth studies. He has a particular interest in interactional sociolinguistic theory. He is current a Ph.D. candidate in the linguistics department at UWC his Ph.D. focuses how young disabled multilingual speakers use language and other semiotic resources in everyday setting to talk about their own disabilities.        
 

Position: Associate Lecturer
Location: Old Arts Building
Email: bmolate@uwc.ac.za
 

Bio

Babalwayashe Molate is an associate lecturer in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research. BM has experience in ethnographic research, teaching modules in applied linguistics and language and literacy studies, pre-service teachers’ school experience supervision, and supervising honours research projects. Broadly, BM’s research area is language socialisation, with a keen focus on African languages and multilingualism, family literacies, biliteracy development, family language policy, and school language policy. BM also has experience in children’s literature and has been involved in the translation and editing of children’s literature and various text genres, for several years, working with isiXhosa and English texts. BM advocates for multilingual material development in the interests of diversity, social justice, and language rights. Most of this work is realised through collaboration with the bualit language and literacy collective (www.bua-lit.org.za) in which BM has been a member for the past few years.
 

Publications:

Molate, B & McKinney, C. (2023). Resisting the coloniality of language through languaging and making of a multilingual ikhaya in South Africa. Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, Vol 4(2): 201-221
McKinney, C & Molate, B. (2022).  Coloniality and Family Language Policy in an African  multilingual family. In Lynn Wright & Christina Higgins (Eds). Diversifying Family Language Policy. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Molate, B. & Tyler, Robyn. L. (2020). The status of African languages in previously white schools. Daily Maverick. 

Administrative Officer

Bio
Elrika Dlephu is Administrative Officer for the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversity Research. She has a Secretarial diploma and a certificate in Human Resource. She's worked at Protea Hotel Victoria Junction as a receptionist. Later moved to Boland college as secretary to the campus head, then to Stellenbosch University as an Administrative Officer and later became Senior Secretary.An honest person no matter what the circumstances are, taking accountability for her actions, success or failure in the work place and always enthusiastic in learning new things are some of her best traits.
 

Position: Professor
Location: Old Arts Building
Email: djbrown@uwc.ac.za 

Bio

Professor Duncan Brown is Professor of English in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape. He has published widely in the field of South African literary and cultural studies, and his books include Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance (1998), Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa (1999) , To Speak of this Land: Identity and Belonging in South Africa and Beyond (2006), Religion and Spirituality in South Africa: New Perspectives (2009), Are Trout South African? Stories of Fish, People and Places (2013) , Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments (2019) , and Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature (2020), and a co-edited volume Notes from the Body: Health, Illness, Trauma (2023).

He is Principal Investigator on a multilingual interdisciplinary project on “Rethinking South African Literature(s)”, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and involving a large group of researchers from UWC, as well as from other universities (2019-2024).

He is also Principal Investigator (with Prof. Knut Nustad, University of Oslo) on the South African section of the project “Global Trout: Investigating Environmental Change through More-than-Human World Systems” (2019-2022).

This is an interdisciplinary project bringing together humanities scholars and scientists from Norway, Denmark, Japan, Argentina, South Africa and the UK.

He is lead researcher for the UWC section of a collaborative research project on the Environmental Humanities, which includes researchers from the University of Oslo, Aarhus University, University of California (Santa Cruz), University of Hokkaido, University of Cape Town, and University of the Western Cape (2021-2026).

Brown is also a Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.
 

Publications

2019. Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. (216 pages)

2019. “‘That Man Patton’: The Personal History of a Book”. Current Writing 31(2): 107-115.

2020. Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

2020. (Ed. with Antjie Krog). Special Issue of Multilingual Margins 7 (2) on “Writing Abuse”.

2021. “Afterthoughts: Multilingual Citizenship, Humans, Environments and Histories”. In: Zannie Bock and Chris Stroud (eds). Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education: Reclaiming Voices from the South. London: Bloomsbury: 201-215.

2023. (Co-ed. With Kobus Moolman and Nkosinathi Sithole). 2023 Notes from the Body: Health, Illness, Trauma . Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

2023. (Co-authored with Knut G Nustad and Heather Swanson). “Hatching Conflicts: Trout Reproduction, Properties of Water, and Property Ownership in South Africa”. Ethnos. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2023.2221832
 

Biography

Sindiwe Magona was born on 27 August 1943, in the village of Gungululu in rural Eastern Cape (formerly Transkei). The first born of eight children, Magona earned her secondary and undergraduate education by correspondence, and later won a scholarship to study for her Master’s Degree in Social Work at Columbia University in the United States of America. Magona is one of many internationally prominent South African writers whose work is informed by her experience of impoverishment, femininity, resistance to subjugation and being a domestic worker. She traversed South Africa’s racially-defined socio-cultural-economic spaces while simultaneously being a mother, wife and community leader in a township. These interlaced themes and realities are pronounced throughout her literary career.

A former primary school teacher and civil servant, she is a prolific author who has produced nine books, among them an autobiographical work, a collection of short stories, novellas and an anthology of poetry.

She has produced various plays and continues to lecture and deliver key addresses at universities and conferences, both locally and internationally. Until her retirement in 2003, she contributed immeasurably in various capacities to the work of the United Nations (UN), an organisation she served for 20 years.

Even in retirement, she continues to pen literary works, to initiate writers’ conferences, lead women’s rights advocacy groups and write children’s educational books. Among her internationally acclaimed works are Beauty’s Gift; Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night; To My Children’s Children; Teach Yourself Xhosa; and Push-Push and Other Stories. Her plays include I Promised Myself a Fabulous Middle-Age and Vukani.

Magona is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Molteno Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement for her role in promoting isiXhosa, the Permio Grinzane Terre D’Otrantro, and the Department of Arts and Culture Literary Lifetime Achievement Award (all three received in 2007); the Bronx Recognises Its Own Fiction Award in 2000; a Fellowship for Non-Fiction from the New York Foundation of the Arts; the Xhosa Heroes Award; and the UNdimande Grand Prize. The Hartwick College of New York conferred her with an honorary doctorate in 1993. She was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2009.

She remains an accomplished motivational speaker, author, poet, playwright and story-teller in South Africa. Many of Ms Magona’s essays, short stories and poems have been anthologised. She has been published in, among other publications, the New York Times, The New Internationalist, Fair Lady, Oprah Magazine and Femina.

She is also recognised for her work in women’s issues, the plight of children and the fight against apartheid and racism. Ms Magona is the founder and Executive Director of South Africa 2033. A worker for peaceful change during the years of struggle in South Africa, she was one of the founding members of the Women’s Peace Movement in 1976.

With her inspiration and encouragement, the Gugulethu Writers’ Group meets once a month and nurtures new writers. The group has already published a collection of short stories, Umthi ngamnye unentlaka yawo, and won First Prize in the Maskew Miller Longman Story Competition in 2009.

In recognition of her literary and humanitarian contribution, the State President, Jacob G Zuma, conferred Sindiwe Magona with the Order of Ikhamanga in Bronze on 27 April 2011.

Biography

Jason Richardson is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research His primary research interests include sociolinguistics, multilingualism, disability and youth studies. He has a particular interest in interactional sociolinguistic theory. He is current a Ph.D. candidate in the linguistics department at UWC his Ph.D. focuses how young disabled multilingual speakers use language and other semiotic resources in everyday setting to talk about their own disabilities.        
 

Publications

Stroud, C., & Richardson, J. (2019). Multilinguismo na África do Sul. Ciência e Cultura, 71(4), 25-29
Williams, Q., Adams, T. & Richardson, J., “Towards a Sociolinguistics of Non-Racialism” Forthcoming
Richardson, J., & Williams, Q., Youth Multilingual Interactions and Discourses of Disability at a Special Needs High School in Cape Town, South Africa”

Forthcoming
Richardson., “Weaves of vulnerability: narratives of escape” In C Stroud and Q. Williams (Eds). Pluriversal vulnerability: The making and unmaking of language and selves. Bloomsbury Press. Forthcoming

Biography

Robyn Tyler is a senior researcher in the Centre. Her research focuses on language, literacy and identity in education with a special interest in language across the curriculum in multilingual contexts. She graduated with her doctorate in 2019 from the University of Cape Town. Her thesis reported on a linguistic ethnography conducted over nine months in a township high school. It explored meaning-making by bilingual English-isiXhosa Science learners in two learning sites: the traditional classroom setting and an after-school study group. Robyn is a researcher on the CMDR project Leveraging languages for Science learning in multilingual classrooms (2020-2022) which seeks to develop best practice in multilingual Science classrooms through teaching and supervising pre-service Science teachers in multilingual methods and tracking their uptake of these in their teaching. She has seven years of high school English teaching experience in South Africa and the United Kingdom. During this time she became interested in the role of language and identity in learning beyond the language classroom, particularly for non-dominant, multilingual students, and decided to pursue postgraduate studies in language and literacy education. Robyn has taught and supervised pre-service teachers in two South African universities and is currently co-supervising two doctoral students at Ghent University, Belgium. She is also a member of the bua-lit language and literacy collective which advocates for a rich literacies approach to the education of multilingual South African children. Robyn serves on the governing body of an ex-model C primary school in Cape Town where she has led the recent school language policy reform.

External links:
https://bua-lit.org.za/
https://uwc.academia.edu/RobynTyler
 

Publications

Tyler, R (2016). Discourse-shifting practices of a teacher and learning facilitator in a bilingual Mathematics classroom, Per Linguam 32 (3): 13-27, http://dx.doi.org/10.5785/32-3-685

Guzula, X; McKinney, C and Tyler, R (2016). Languaging-for-learning: Legitimising translanguaging and enabling multimodal practices in thirdspaces. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 34 (3): 211-226, DOI: 10.2989/16073614.2016.1250360

McKinney, C. & Tyler, R. (2019). Disinventing and reconstituting language for learning in school Science. Language and Education, 33 (2), 141-158.

Tyler, R. (2019). Semiotic repertoires in bilingual Science learning: a study of learners’ meaning-making practices in two sites in a Cape Town high school (Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town).
Tyler, R. & McKinney, M. (forthcoming). Language ideologies and learning Science: expanding semiotic repertoires. In V. Pfeiffer and C. van der Walt (Eds.) Multilingual classroom contexts: perspectives from the chalk face. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media.

Tyler, R. (forthcoming). Language and identity meshing in learning Science bilingually: tales of a “coconuty nerd”. In Christie, P & McKinney, C (eds). Teacher education in contexts of de/coloniality: conversations in the borders. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Biography

Professor Christopher Stroud is a Professor of Linguistics at UWC and an affiliated Professor of Bilingual Research at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University, Sweden. Before coming to UWC, he spent six years in Singapore at the National University of Singapore, Department of English Language and Literature. He has researched in Southern Africa (Mozambique and South Africa) in the fields of linguistic human rights and linguistic citizenship, colonialism and post-coloniality in constructions of multilingualism, language ideological debates, the development of Portuguese L2 varieties and mother tongue and bilingual education.
 
He also did research in Singapore in the areas of politics of language and literacy education and the sociolinguistics of globalisation and mobilisation; in Sweden in the fields of language loss, maintenance and revival, the metaphorical use of language in public debates (particularly, the notions of Semi-lingualism and Rinkeby Swedish), second language acquisition and bilingual language pathologies; and in Papua New Guinea with linguistic descriptions of small languages, the sociolinguistics of contact and code-switching, and emerging vernacular literacies. 

He has worked as a consultant for international organisations such as the Finnish International Development Agency (FINNIDA), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the South African Renewable Energy Council (SAREC) with research and capacity development at the National Institute of Education in Mozambique, and in the development and evaluation of language curricula and its implementation.

His current research interests focus on practices and ideologies of multilingualism in social and politically transforming economies in Southern Africa. For the past five years, he has been working on semiotic landscapes and consumption in the townships and informal settlements of Cape Town and exploring the potential of multilingual mobile literacies and modes of local engagement in emerging community literacies, for voice and agency in the townships of Manenberg and Khayelitsha. He is working towards a notion of linguistic/multilingual citizenship as an approach to multilingual dynamics and the politics of language.

Publications
Stroud, C. & Wee, L. (2008). Political economies of literacy in multilingual South-East Asia. Special Issue of International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (eds. Stroud, C. & Wee, L.), 11/2: 129-133. 

Stroud, C. & Wee, L. (2007), Language policy and linguistic practices in Singapore. Sociolinguistic Studies, 1/2: 197-216. 

Stroud, C. & Wee, L. (2007), Consuming identities. Language planning and policy in Singaporean late modernity. Language Policy, 6: 253-279. 

Stroud, C. & Wee, L. (2007), Identity, second language literacy and remedial crossing: Exploring liminalities in social positioning in the classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 41/1: 33- 54. 

Stroud, C. & Wee, L. (2006), Anxiety and identity in the language classroom. RELC, 37/3: 299-313.

Position: Research Fellow
Location: Old Arts Building
Email: mprobyn@uwc.ac.za 

Bio

Dr Margie Probyn is a Research Fellow in the CMDR. Her research interests are in language and education in multilingual classrooms, language and science education, language-in-education policy and practice, teacher education, literacies. Margie has experience as an English teacher in multilingual classrooms, and as a researcher and teacher educator.

Current and recent research and development projects:

1. Languaging for Learning (L4L) 2021- 24:

This research and teacher development project has been funded by the Zenex Foundation and involves a collaboration between teacher educators and researchers at UWC, UCT and Stellenbosch.
The collaboration was born of a common concern with the role of language in education in schools where learners learn through their home language in the Foundation Phase but from Grade 4 are expected to switch to English medium instruction.
The resulting challenges for teachers and learners are frequently framed in deficit terms; instead the L4L research team views the challenges as stemming from systemic failures to provide all learners with equal opportunities to learn by ignoring their home language/s as important resources for learning.
The L4L pilot programme was developed for Grade 8 and 9 English First Additional Language, Natural Sciences and Mathematics teachers in ten schools in the Western Cape Province.
The intervention aimed to equip English, Science and Mathematics to address systemic language inequalities in multilingual/EFAL classrooms so that learners have the opportunities to:

• develop the necessary literacy skills for learning and functioning in society, including in English and their home languages.
• systematically engage their full linguistic repertoires, including their home languages alongside English, in order to access and engage with the curriculum content knowledge for effective learning.
  
  The pilot intervention took the form of workshops and classroom-based support and mentoring over two years in 2022 and 2023. The classroom-based support has been a critical factor in supporting teachers as they try out new ways of working with languages in the classroom.
  
  The research findings are currently being written up by the L4L team and the teachers involved.
  
  L4L Research Team:
• Dr Margie Probyn, CMDR, University of the Western Cape(Coordinator)
• Dr Robyn Tyler, CMDR, University of the Western Cape
• Prof Carolyn McKinney, School of Education, University of Cape Town
• Dr Xolisa Guzula, School of Education, University of Cape Town
• Dr Soraya Abdulatief, School of Education, University of Cape Town
• Dr Simthembile Xeketwana, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University
• Prof Monica Hendricks, Associate Professor Emeritus, Rhodes University
  
  2. Leveraging languages for access and equity in multilingual science classrooms 2021-2022:
  
  This project aimed to prepare BEd science education students for teaching and learning science in multilingual classrooms and in particular for them to engage with learners’ home languages as important resources for learning: to open access to science knowledge, affirm learners’ identities and facilitate links between home and classroom.
  
  Dr Margie Probyn and Dr Robyn Tyler from the CMDR worked on the project with Science Method lecturers from the Education Faculty, UWC: Dr Shafiek Dinie and Ms Zainoenisa Allie.
  
  We developed and piloted a 6-week unit of work for 3rd year BEd Science Education students which was taught online in 2021.
  
  A sample of students was tracked during their 4th year teaching practice to provide support and mentoring as they tried out multilingual approaches to teaching and learning science.
  
  It was hoped that the research findings from this intervention would inform teacher education in the field of teaching science in multilingual contexts, and the professional development of both newly qualified and experienced science teachers to address some of the long-standing linguistic challenges facing South African learners.
  
  Recent publications:
  
  Hattingh, A., McKinney, C., Msimanga, A., Probyn, M. & Tyler, R. (2021) Translanguaging in science education in South African classrooms: challenging constraining ideologies for science teacher education. In A. Jakobsson, P. Nygård Larsson & A. Karlsson (Eds.) Translanguaging in Science Education. Springer
  
  Probyn, M. J. (2021)Translanguaging for learning in English-medium instruction classrooms in South Africa: An overview of selected research. In B. Paulsrud, Z. Tian & J. Toth (eds.) English-medium instruction and translanguaging. Multilingual Matters.
  
  ______ (2019) Constructing science knowledge in linguistically diverse South African classrooms: Opportunities and challenges for learning. In Wright, C., Harvey, L. & Simpson J. (Eds.). Voices and Practices in Applied Linguistics: Diversifying a Discipline. Leeds: White Rose University Press.
  
  _______ (2019) Pedagogical translanguaging and the construction of science knowledge in a multilingual South African classroom: challenging monoglossic/post-colonial orthodoxies. In Classroom Discourse: Special Edition edited by Li Wei & Angel Lin 10 (3-4) 216-236.
  
  _______ (2017) Pedagogical translanguaging: Bridging discourses in South African science classrooms. In C. Kerfoot & A-M. VandenBergen (Eds.) Language in epistemic access: Mobilising multilingualism and literacy development, Routledge.
  
  _______ (2017) Languages and learning in South African classrooms: Finding common ground with North/South concerns for linguistic access, equity and social justice in education. In P. P. Trifonas, T. Aravossitas (Eds.) Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education, pp. 1-19. Springer International Handbooks of Education. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-38893-9_28-1

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