
Dr Navan Govender
Lecturer
Education
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Prize And Awards
- Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA)
- Recipient
- 15/12/2021
- UKLA Vice-President
- Recipient
- 9/2023
- British Association for Applied Linguistics: Book Award (Joint Runner-up)
- Recipient
- 8/2023
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Publications
- Introduction to critical literacies & social media
- Govender Navan, Farrar Jennifer
- English in Education Vol 57 (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2023.2268401
- Critical literacies and the conditions of decolonial possibility
- Govender Navan
- Young People Shaping Democratic Politics Interrogating Inclusion, Mobilising Education (2023) (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29378-8_11
- Queer activism in South African education : a book review
- Govender Navan
- Journal of LGBT Youth, pp. 1-5 (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2023.2209571
- AS IS; Access and Inclusion in KE Events
- Humphrey Harvey, Taylor Yvette, Govender Navan Nadrajan
- (2023)
- Teacher identity : crossing the technical-rationalist and affective divide
- Govender Navan Nadrajan, Ellis Sue
- International Encyclopedia of Education (Fourth Edition) (2023) (2023)
- https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.04038-0
- Teacher identity : crossing the technical-rationalist and affective divide
- Govender Navan N, Ellis Sue
- International Encyclopedia of Education (2022) (2022)
- https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.04038-0
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Professional Activities
- United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) (External organisation)
- Advisor
- 9/2023
- European Conference on Educational Research
- Participant
- 23/8/2023
- Scottish Book Trust - Book Discovery: Decolonising the curriculum through texts (Secondary)
- Speaker
- 1/6/2023
- Queering the Politics of Pronouns
- Speaker
- 16/5/2023
- Helen Adam
- Host
- 4/5/2023
- Finding, framing, focus: Making sense of photographs through critical visual literacies
- Invited speaker
- 4/3/2023
Projects
- Queer Critical Literacies
- Govender, Navan N (Principal Investigator)
- (A)gender and (a)sexual diversity are often viewed as taboo and controversial topics in education, sparking resistance from some teachers, students, and communities to engage with these important topics. Additionally, critical approaches to teaching these topics in schools and universities are still emerging, with many educators feeling uncertain of how to frame discussions and lessons, especially in contexts of widespread discrimination against gender and sexual minorities. In this chapter, we build on a tradition of critical literacies and queer theory to develop a conceptual framework for queer critical literacies (QCL) as an approach to teaching topics of (a)gender and (a)sexual diversity. We review how various educators have approached QCL in their classrooms by guiding their students to practise what we identify as five forms of questioning, namely questioning representation, reading practices, the policing of (a)gender and (a)sexuality, knowledge systems, and self. Finally, we offer a pedagogical tool for doing QCL that can assist educators in their practice. The questions we offer allow educators and students to dialogically do the work of identification, deconstruction, disruption, and transformation in contextually relevant ways. Our framework of QCL queers the reading of texts and bodies, foregrounds queer identities and non-normative gender expression, and challenges heterosexism, patriarchy, and cisnormativity in language, texts, institutions, and everyday practices.
- 01-Jan-2020
- Finding a Place for Critical Literacies in Scotland
- Govender, Navan N (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2019 - 30-Jan-2021
- Ethnodrama and Accessibility: International LGBTIQ+ Research Sharing
- Humphrey, Harvey (Principal Investigator) Taylor, Yvette (Co-investigator) Govender, Navan N (Co-investigator)
- HASS KE Small Grant Funding: £4860
- 17-Jan-2021 - 31-Jan-2022
- Critical Literacies & the Decolonial Turn
- Govender, Navan N (Principal Investigator)
- Both as an instrument and beneficiary of colonialism as part of the British empire, as well as a victim of colonisation, Scotland represents the tenuous negotiations of identity with history, politics and power. While moves have been made in education to regain a Scottish identity through the implementation of Scots language and Scottish literature in the English curriculum, questions about criticality and (de)colonisation still remain relatively unheard (Priestly & Hume, 2010; Priestley, 2018). This has implications for how policy can be interpreted and implemented. Through a critical analysis, I explore how Scottish educational policy on English language and literacy constructs criticality and notions of (de)colonialism, if at all, and measure the emergent themes against critical approaches to teaching and learning as well as decolonisation. I then consider the role of critical literacies as a means for transformative social-semiotic action and interaction in the decolonisation of English language and literacy education.
- 01-Jan-2019
- Critical Transmodal Pedagogies
- Govender, Navan N (Principal Investigator)
- This paper explores how student teachers navigated moving between different modes of representation
from written text to image. This enabled some students to play with genre conventions, rethink
the relationship between word and image, and explore multimodality in interesting ways. Working at the
intersection of Kress’ work on Multimodality, Newfield’s transmodal moment and the critical literacy
project, I designed and implemented a course for English secondary education in one school of education
in South Africa. Firstly, this article outlines the course’s aims and assessment to consider how multimodality
might feature in a unit of work for student teachers. Specific focus is given to the final assessment
task that required students to make a ‘transmodal shift’ from linguistic to visual-linguistic; from written
narrative to multimodal storytelling. Secondly, a critical multimodal discourse analysis of students’ visual
narratives is applied to explore how critical transmodality enabled some student teachers to imagine
beyond traditional narrative structures and explore multimodal semiotic resources in innovative ways,
relevant to the secondary English classroom. Finally, I conclude by considering the implications of multimodal
semiotic play for both research and classroom practice in language and literacy education, including
assessment, the value of non-linguistic modes, and genre as a construct of power. - 01-Jan-2017 - 01-Jan-2019
- Negotiating the Gendered Representation of Sexualties through Critical Literacy
- Govender, Navan N (Principal Investigator)
- The conflations of sex and gender, and then gender and sexual identity in representation becomes problematic in a context where homophobic discourses and violence still persist, despite South Africa’s progressive constitution. Therefore, this study focuses on the implications of the conflations between sex, gender and sexuality for education.
Using literature on theories of power, sex, gender and sexuality, as well as critical literacy, I have designed a critically aware educational workbook that confronts issues of sex, gender and sexuality. Because no text is neutral, this workbook and the process of its production are critically reflected upon and scrutinised in order to understand how critically aware educational materials can be produced. The workbook is then implemented in a critical literacy course for pre-service student teachers at a university in Johannesburg. In these lectures, the workbook is used to deconstruct patriarchal and heteronormative order in the attempt to understand how effective the workbook is, and the responses that participating students give in relation to texts and activities in class. These responses are recorded through field notes and notebooks, wherein students complete in-class activities, and have revealed the complexities involved in reimagining sex, gender and sexuality as socially loaded concepts and its impact on language use in the classroom. Finally, because critical literacy advocates (re)design practice, students are given a task to design their own educational materials. These are then critically analysed in order to consider how students’ design trends and ‘evaluations’ of the course show their changing understandings of sex, gender, sexuality and the conflations between them, or how they remain the same.
Throughout this thesis, I argue the need for critical literacy in education, across learning areas and grades. Specifically, I argue for a critical literacy that is unafraid to deal with controversial issues and difficult conversations, as well as a practice that uses subversive texts and diversity as resources for teaching and learning. - 01-Jan-2013 - 30-Jan-2014