Dr Nokwanda Makunda
“All the research projects that I have ever been involved with have always been applied. It’s always been important to me to be able to do projects that are linked to industry or society because if I thought about changing careers I needed to be able to fit in into another environment – that’s the only way I could see myself being relevant. But I also wanted to do something that would be good, to give something back.”
In this brief Dr Nokwanda Makunda of the Department of Botany and Zoology is interviewed by Dr Catherine Kell, a researcher commissioned by the CTL. Download the full interview here.
This is the third brief in the Centre for Teaching and Learning (or CTL’s) ‘Making a life’ series, where we explore the attitudes and experiences of academics at SU, with regard to their roles in teaching, research and what is generally called ‘community involvement’. The series was approached as a set of interviews with individual academics, which took the form of reflective conversations between a CTL researcher and the individual academic. Academics approached for the interviews were not sampled, but drawn from different departments and different disciplines, and tended to be those who had had some involvement with CTL. At times we have incorporated other texts into the brief, to enrich the sense of the activities academics engage in, in ‘making a life’.
