Email messages: towards a pedagogy of caring.

Abstract

A lecturer in mathematics undertook a study of his students’ perceptions of the various new technologies he was embedding in their extended curriculum programme. This paper is not about that study; this paper is about something seemingly simple and yet profound that happened along the way. The lecturer, aware of the alienation students may feel in their new university environment, used emails to encourage his students to invest time in their university studies. Unexpectedly, the impact of this personal correspondence, which was initially just seen to be a means to an end, turned out to be something worthy of consideration in its own right. This paper examines what that was and how emails can be one way of demonstrating care for our students within the South African higher education context.