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Herman Botes
& Hein Grove
Biography
Dr Herman Botes and Mr Hein Grové are affiliated with the Department of Visual Communication at the Tshwane University of Technology, where their work extends beyond lecturing into the development of pedagogical initiatives that integrate interdisciplinary practice and industry engagement. Dr Herman Botes is Assistant Dean: Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Arts and Design. His research focuses on design education, with particular emphasis on critical citizenship and socially responsive practice. He is co-editor of Educating Citizen Designers in South Africa (African Sun Media, 2018), which positions design as a site of civic and cultural engagement. His work explores the intersection of pedagogy, industry engagement, and contemporary design practice within the South African context.
Hein Grové is Section Head of Visual Communication and lectures in photography and design research at postgraduate level. His research engages the reconfiguration of photographic ontology in the post-digital condition, with a focus on intermediality and contemporary image-making practices. He is a co-author of “Visualised Liminality: Images of an Empty African City” in Camera in Times of Crisis: Focus on Africa (Emerald, 2025). He is currently completing a PhD in Art and Design at the University of Johannesburg.
REFRAMING THE VISCOM AWARDS AS A COMMUNITY-OF-PRACTICE INTERVENTION IN VISUAL COMMUNICATION PEDAGOGY
Conventional awards functions in creative disciplines often operate as celebratory end-points, recognising selected student work without interrogating the learning relations that make such recognition meaningful. This paper reframes the VISCOM Awards as a pedagogical and artivist intervention that makes visible the values, relationships and practices through which a departmental creative community learns to recognise, critique and extend its practice. Drawing on communities of practice theory, the awards are read as a temporally intensified learning ecology in which a shared domain, community and practice are brought into relation (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015). In the VISCOM context, the domain is visual communication across Motion Picture Production, Integrated Communication Design and Commercial Photography; the community includes students, staff, alumni and industry practitioners; and the practice is constituted through award criteria, curation, production roles, visual technologies, feedback and public recognition. The analysis is deliberately cautious: an awards function is not automatically a community of practice. It becomes pedagogically significant only when it supports mutual engagement, shared repertoires, legitimate peripheral participation and identity formation beyond spectacle (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). The VISCOM Awards operate as both boundary-making and boundary-crossing, defining what is valued while challenging disciplinary silos through integrated production elements. Award categories and identities such as Emerging Trailblazer and Spirit of VISCOM act as symbolic markers through which students encounter professional selves and negotiate excellence. The paper argues that the awards reposition student work from classroom output to publicly visible, industry-oriented participation, generating artefacts and narratives that may form part of a shared repertoire. As artivism, the intervention lies in using a public cultural event to unsettle assessment hierarchies, construct collective belonging and make transdisciplinary creative agency visible. The VISCOM Awards are positioned as a structured learning mechanism through which value, identity and practice are constructed. Selected video documentation: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qiToFdffuG-GN53rv-Z9IqSUNHQ3P3Mf?usp=share_link References Graven, M. and Lerman, S. (2003) ‘Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity’, Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 6, pp. 185–194. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment) Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E., McDermott, R. and Snyder, W.M. (2002) Cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. (Harvard Business School) Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) Communities of practice: a brief introduction. Available at: Wenger-Trayner official PDF. (wenger-trayner.com)