Daniela Gachago

Daniela is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town, where she works in academic staff development with a focus on course and curriculum design in higher education. Her teaching, research and supervision span digital education, higher education studies and transformative pedagogies.

Her current research focuses on socially just, decolonial and participatory approaches to transforming higher education, particularly within African contexts. She explores how compassionate, emergent and context-responsive learning design, digital and AI literacies, and student–staff partnerships can be reimagined to promote equity, inclusion and participatory parity. A key strand of her work examines co-creation across difference, with particular attention to how students and staff collaboratively design curricula, programmes and learning experiences while negotiating power, representation and relational ethics.

Daniela convenes the Master’s in Higher Education Studies (HES) and the Postgraduate Diploma in Blended and Online Learning (BOLD) at UCT, and co-convenes the Master’s in Educational Technologies. She has supervised three PhD and seven Master’s students to completion.

She holds a Master’s degree in Adult Education from the University of Botswana and a PhD from the School of Education at UCT. Daniela is a C1-rated researcher and a 2022 Fulbright Program Scholar, with more than 90 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters published in the fields of higher education and digital pedagogy. She is the Managing Editor of CriSTaL, a journal dedicated to critical studies in teaching and learning in higher education.

Daniela also maintains a scholarly blog available on Blogspot , where you can find the complete list of her publications.