Maud Buhle Donda is a developmental lecturer at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN). I hold a PhD in medical education.  I was born in the 70’s at Imbali, a township in Pietermaritzburg. My home was a community hub charecterised by Ubuntu and activism.  The influences on my identity and the self, came from experiences in my family and community. Those experiences later shaped my choice of carreer and continue to influence who I am as a person and a professional. I joined UKZN (Edgewood campus) as a tutor in 2009.I did my Masters in Education in the continuing teacher professional development discipline (CPTD).  For my masters my study was on principals’ in rural schools titled: “telling lives: principals work as intellectual work in rural settings”. Like other scholars in the field I believe that identity can be used as a frame or an analytic lens through which to examine aspects of one’s teaching practice.  Gaining a more complete understanding of identity generally and teacher identity in particular could enhance the ways in which teacher education programs are conceived”- relevant to the 4^th industrial revolution and covid-19 pandemic versus realities of the South African educational landscape. The eclectic approach that I have as I teach is influenced by: different education theory, assumptions, beliefs and values which underpin my teaching practice, ability to implement this rationale in practice, and that I am informed by current educational changes and debates in the discipline, and take the special challenges of South African higher education context into account. I joined the School of Clinical Medicine as a research assistant in 2011. I was later employed as a developmental lecturer and became a coordinator of the Nelson Mandela Fidel Castro Medical Collaboration programme (NMFCMC). In practice   as an NMFCMC Coordinator I collaborated efforts from different departments and taking cognisance of the student wellbeing which in this case involved: facilitating interdepartmental / disciplinary networking, designing the orientation programme and mock assessments in the programme. The socialisation techniques used by the university as outlined by Van Maanen and Schein (1977)   made me aware of the importance of such techniques in socialising students in an institution.  Further, as suggested in the Weidman’s framework of undergraduate socialisation, institutional tactics including the peer climate as pivotal to graduate socialisation (Weidman, 1989 I conducted a PHD study titled “Challenges and resilience: Socialisation narratives of Nelson Mandela- Fidel Castro Collaboration students returning to a South African medical school after six years’ formative training in Cuba”.  This study, applied the sociological frameworks of assimilation, socialisation and identity theory to the context of the returning NMFCMC student. This study suggests that, though the educational challenges are real, they may be of secondary importance in comparison with issues of assimilation and socialisation, since they address the proximate as opposed to the ultimate cause of the difficulties in integration. Classic assimilation demands that newcomers emulate the receiving group’s ways of thinking and acting to the point where they abandon their previous identity and internalise the host identity and culture as completely as possible. These challenges prolong training, impact negatively on both self- and professional identity, have a service delivery and cost implication for the South African government and a potential for loss of the opportunity for the students to make a valuable contribution to the transformation of health care in South Africa. The study  recommends that the underlying intentions of the NMFCMC programme are re-addressed in terms of the nature of the graduate which it hopes to produce, and that the curriculum, particularly that which follows the return of the student to South Africa, is carefully addressed from a sociological as well as a pedagogic perspective in order to ease assimilation while maximising the likelihood of the graduate emerging with the professional attributes required for a repurposed healthcare system. My research interest is in professional development from an identity perspective. Cognitive aspects of learning and expertise in clinical medicine, and the sociological aspects of the return of the South African students trained in Cuba. I have an interest in rural education. I have co-supervised two Masters students in Education in the discipline of (CPTD) Both   my Masters and PhD projects that I have done look different from a glance. However, they are drawn together by my interest in personal and professional identity, rural education, narrative inquiry and participatory research.  Studies in identity have elements of psycho sociology and sociology in education that focus on participants’ lived experiences.

List of Publications

1. Donda, B. M., Hift, R. J., & Singaram, V. S. (2016). Assimilating South African medical students trained in Cuba into the South African medical education system: reflections from an identity perspective. BMC medical education, 16(1), 281.