Final Reflective Narrative

I began this programme thinking that teaching was something I knew how to do. Both of my parents taught, my technical background in data visualisation gave me ready material to work with, and I had survived enough lecture theatres to feel at home in front of a room. The MPhil has taken that confidence apart and rebuilt it on different foundations. The teaching metaphor I sketched in March 2025, a Theatre of Reflective Design with myself as stage manager rather than lead performer, has held up across two years. What has changed is what I think the stage manager is for, and how much of the work happens out of sight.

This narrative draws on the evidence assembled across the ePortfolio: my initial teaching metaphor and three philosophy statements, six module sub-pages, the Year 1 Professional Development Plan, response tables for examiner feedback, a published methods paper, and two design artefacts (the Lusaka workshop and the ProbleMeisha tool).

Academic writing and higher-order reasoning

My first synthesis assignment was a useful failure. I had read four articles, set up a tidy contrast between qualitative research and Design-Based Research, and discovered partway through that the contrast did not hold because qualitative research sits inside DBR. Rather than confront the structural problem, I softened the language and used "considerations" where I had meant "differences". The mark was honest about what I had done.

What I notice across the four formal assessments since then is a slow shift in how I write. The Curriculum Development feedback asked me, repeatedly, to explain why. Why Marope's definition of curriculum. Why the SPICES model. Why DSR mapped onto Kern. The Assessment feedback flagged claims that I had asserted without referencing. The Research Methodology feedback drew my attention to Mezirow, whom I had cited only through secondary sources, and to terms ("Built Environment disciplines", "mature contexts") that I used fluently but had not defined for readers outside my field. The Leadership feedback pressed me to move past integrating Senge and Scharmer into actually interrogating them, including the empirical thinness of Theory U in health professions education. Four different assessors, four different modules, the same pattern: I leave too much for the reader to reconstruct.

I have started to treat this as a craft issue rather than a character flaw. A four-sentence opening has helped (the issue, a working definition of the unfamiliar term, why the issue exists, what the piece does about it). Every framework now earns a paragraph on what it cannot account for. Strong claims get citations; tables get source attributions. The audit table I built after the Leadership feedback has become a pre-submission checklist that travels from one assignment to the next.

The deeper movement, harder to evidence in a single page, is in the kind of reasoning I now bring to a problem. The Curriculum Development assignment forced me to balance critique with recognition of existing strengths. The Research Methodology protocol forced me to articulate epistemological positions I might otherwise have taken for granted. The TEL assignment forced me to test four assumptions I had carried into the work and to abandon all four. I am not yet writing at the Excellent end of the rubric across the board; my marks have clustered in the lower Good band. The remaining gap, I think, sits between competent integration of literature and genuine interrogation of it. That is where my Year 2 work has been heading.

Reflection, feedback, and the community of practice

The cohort experience has mattered more than I expected. The peers I started with in March 2025 included clinicians, allied health professionals, and academic developers, several of whom have far more teaching experience than I do. The online forums became spaces where I tested provisional thinking. The Research Methodology forum in particular was where I first set out my SPIDER framework and research onion publicly, and the response confirmed something I had been finding for myself: that articulating decisions in front of others sharpens them.

The Teaching and Learning forum surfaced a different kind of insight. I had posted on Nicol's internal feedback model, and a peer extended the discussion into mental health implications for healthcare students. The thread stayed with me because it named something I had not seen on my own: that feedback is emotionally weighted, not only cognitively shaped, and that high-stakes reflective assignments touch students' sense of self. That observation has changed how I now talk to registrars about feedback on their work.

Engagement with assessor feedback has been the more sustained development. I keep a structured response table for every assignment, listing each comment, my reflection on it, and the forward action it points to. The table for the Research Protocol ran to sixteen comments; the table for the Literature Review to two substantive ones. The discipline of writing the table has done two things at once. It has slowed me down enough to separate the parts of the feedback I accept fully from the parts where I read the framing differently, and it has produced a paper trail that the Year 1 PDP could draw on. The "Lessons from MPhil HPE Assignment Feedback" document, compiled in May 2026 across all four module assessments, is the comprehensive output of that practice.

What I cannot quite measure but want to name is the role of foundational reading in shifting my thinking. Schön's Reflective Practitioner and Boud, Keogh and Walker on reflection have given me a vocabulary for what I was already trying to do. Mezirow on transformative learning, which I should have engaged with from the outset, has given me a way of thinking about the disorientation that AI introduces into faculty practice, which is the topic of my dissertation. The pattern across all three is the same: I get more from primary texts than from the summaries I had been relying on, and the gap between the two is larger than I had assumed.

From philosophy to practice, and into identity

My initial teaching philosophy, written in March 2025, leaned heavily on the language of performance and improvisation. The metaphor still works, but the philosophy underneath it has thickened. The version I wrote at the end of Year 1 added constructive alignment, blended learning, and reflection-in-action, drawing on Biggs, Schön, and Taylor and Hamdy. The version that now sits at the end of Year 2 makes three further moves. It names equity (the "single-device test" I borrowed from my Teaching and Learning reflection) as a design principle rather than an afterthought. It positions feedback as a redistribution of evaluative work between teacher, peers and artefacts, not a one-way transmission. And it treats technology, including AI, as entangled with pedagogy in Fawns' sense, rather than as something to be added or resisted.

These shifts have changed what I actually do in the room. The Burden of Disease session that anchored my Teaching and Learning reflection has been redesigned. The multiple-choice quiz has been replaced with a short brief addressed to a district health manager, which aligns with the cognitive level my outcome verbs were always meant to invite. A peer-review step now sits between draft and submission. Activities assume a student may have only a phone, with printed back-up for the unreliable evening connection. None of these are large innovations; together they have changed the feel of the seven-day block.

The Postgraduate Diploma in Healthcare Management module has been the laboratory for the more ambitious work. ProbleMeisha, the AI tutor I built for the Evidence and Information module, is now in its third refinement cycle. She asks rather than writes, listens for the five qualities of a tight problem statement, and is designed so that what she returns to the student is a better question rather than a finished sentence. The development log carries the design decisions for the next cohort; the methods paper I led with two co-authors in November 2025 (in the African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine) gave me the underlying argument that design artefacts are knowledge carriers, not technical fixes.

Reading my Year 1 PDP back, I can see the trajectory the goals were pointing at. The first goal was explicit communication; the four-sentence opening and the working definitions are now habitual rather than effortful. The second goal was direct engagement with Mezirow; that reading is done and the framework now sits inside my dissertation theoretical chapter rather than at its edge. The third goal was the Design Science Research short course; that work is in proposal stage at the Stellenbosch short course office, with the ProbleMeisha case study earmarked as a worked example. The goals were modest by design. Modesty has paid off where ambition might not have.

The identity these shifts add up to is unfamiliar. I have always thought of myself as a public health practitioner who teaches on the side. The MPhil has slowly reorganised that hierarchy. Cleland's AMEE Guide on HPE scholarship was uncomfortable reading because it asked me to take seriously a trajectory I had been treating as secondary. Scholar of teaching, not only of public health, is a description I am still trying on. The peer-reviewed methods paper, the SAAHE 2026 abstract, the work-in-progress dissertation, and the short course proposal are evidence that the work has been there, even when I was reluctant to call it that.

Change agent in HPE

The change-agent question is the one I have found hardest to answer without overclaiming. I am wary of the word, and the Leadership in HPE feedback rightly pressed me on contingency, resistance and power when I had drawn change processes too linearly. With that caution registered, I can name three sites where the work has begun to do change rather than only describe it.

The first is the Lusaka workshop at PRIMAFAMED 2025 in June 2025. The brief was to introduce DSR to family physicians and primary care educators across the region. The workshop report records the artefacts that emerged: patient flow dashboards, registrar logbooks with feedback loops, CPD planning tools. What the report cannot record is the conversation in the room when participants realised that the workarounds they had been improvising for years could be reframed as design moves with scholarly and service value. Several departments have since been in touch about adapting the workshop locally.

The second is the Stellenbosch short course in DSR for Public Health, which sits at the intersection of my government and university roles. It is designed for clinician-managers, registrars, and faculty colleagues who need a methodology for the artefact work they are already doing without a name for it. The curriculum is in review. The design discipline from Kern and SPICES, and the explicit contextualisation the Curriculum Development feedback pressed me toward, sit underneath every decision in that proposal.

The third is the dissertation, which is the slowest of the three but conceptually the largest. The research question (how DSR faculty experience and adapt their teaching practices as AI transforms the feedback ecosystem central to the methodology) sits inside HPE conversation about technology integration, professional identity, and what counts as scholarly practice in a generative-AI present. Recent feedback from Prof Archer on the protocol, and from Dr Meyer on the literature review, has moved the work toward a stronger HPE positioning. The contribution, if it lands, will be a small one: the kind of evidence base that policy and faculty development can actually use, which feels like the right scale of ambition.

What ties these three together is a particular dual identity that I am no longer trying to flatten. Public health policy and health professions education are different cultures with different paces, different criteria for what counts as good work, and different stakes. Most of the change I can credibly claim sits at the seam between them, not on either side.

Other matters worth surfacing

Two further matters belong in this narrative. The first is the question of AI use and transparency. The Research Methodology examiner asked me to declare AI use clearly, and the request has been harder to honour than I expected. I use AI iteratively, as a thinking partner rather than a content generator. The stochastic, context-sensitive nature of the interaction does not sit easily on a one-line declaration. I have begun to record AI-assisted work at the level of design decision rather than turn-by-turn transcript, and to be candid about the limits of what can be reconstructed. This is one of the live conversations my dissertation will need to enter.

The second is the question of voice. I have resisted advice that would lower the conceptual register of my reflective writing. The MPhil is a postgraduate degree; the register is the register the work calls for. What I have accepted is that signposting, definition, citation and density are craft issues that need fixing on their own terms. The forward actions in my feedback audit address them without conceding the broader framing.

Professional development goals for the next year

Three goals organise the year ahead, structured around Bryson's PDP cycle and integrated with my Year 1 plan rather than replacing it.

Goal 1: Complete a peer-reviewed dissertation on DSR faculty experiences with AI integration - The protocol has been approved; ethics and supervisor sign-off are the next gates. The forward markers are: ethics clearance by end of Q3 2026; data generation complete by mid-Q4 2026; first full draft to supervisor by March 2027. Member checking will run at two levels (transcript verification and interpretive validation) following the examiner's recommendation.

Goal 2: Launch the DSR for Public Health short course at Stellenbosch University - The course curriculum is drafted; the next steps are the short course office review, pilot recruitment, and a first cohort in Q1 2027. Success looks like a cohort of 12 to 15 participants, formal participant feedback on at least four design dimensions, and a reflective write-up positioning the course as a worked example of DSR applied to its own teaching.

Goal 3: Move one piece of work into the Excellent band of postgraduate writing - The marks across four modules have clustered in the lower Good band. The audit table is in place; the forward actions are clear. The TEL portfolio and the dissertation chapters are the two natural sites where the craft changes can be tested. The marker is not a higher numerical mark for its own sake; it is whether the writing now does what the rubric actually asks for, especially around the interrogation of theory rather than its competent integration.

A fourth, lower-key goal sits underneath these three. I want to keep the theatre metaphor working. The Year 2 ePortfolio gave me a chance to ground it in performance pedagogy literature, which Year 1 had flagged as a gap. Carrying that grounding through into a teaching philosophy publication, perhaps with the SAAHE 2026 workshop as the empirical hook, would close a loop the metaphor has been holding open since 2025.

The MPhil has not made me a different kind of educator. It has made me a more deliberate one. The theatre is the same theatre. The mirrors are clearer, the cues are written down, and the stage manager has learned to ask, before each cue: why this, why now, and for whom.