In this study I wished to understand whether my short-term training intervention enabled teachers to design and implement a lesson in which technology is effectively integrated. Participants were 22 teachers, some of whom held positions on their school’s management team, and 80 learners from 4 districts of the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education. Teachers in the province have been trained in computer literacy; however, sadly, this did not automatically translate into classroom ICT integration. Overall, teachers do not integrate technology into their teaching. A number of reasons for this are identified. People involved in integrating technologies into the teaching and learning process have to be convinced of the value of the technologies, be comfortable with them, and be skilled in using them. Therefore, a short-term training intervention was designed to test whether it can benefit teachers by enhancing teaching and learning through communication and collaboration, by means of ICT. The results revealed that the teachers on the training programme gained knowledge of how to integrate ICT, that they collaborated, that their pedagogy also changed, and that their learners felt that their learning was improved. To ensure realistic and holistic solutions for policymakers, district and school officials, the factors that prevent teachers from making full use of ICT were also iterated. Detailed results and implications of the results are discussed.

Therapeutic education initiatives embodying a whole child approach can be seen to address the intellectual, emotional, bodily and spiritual as being part of a child’s educational self. Through designing and implementing the concept of “aesthetic life narratives” in a primary school classroom, my research produces a curricular example of how therapeutic notions such as those found in psychological thought can be integrated into contemporary Scottish education through narrative and aesthetic means, exemplifying how individual children can make sense of expressive processes and roles introduced to them in an educational context. The specific characteristics of the research space and the particular interactive quality of research participation also illustrate how different children are able to participate in a short-term emotional education intervention specifically designed to be empowering. At the same time, my experience shows that the complex dynamic between the subjective life of a researcher and the historical nature of a child’s experience with caregivers in their home life can shape educational/research experience, as well as its adult and child participants, in ways unanticipated. What transpired in the process of applying philosophical ideas to the real lives of children in my research produced ethical implications regarding critical reflexivity and the socio-cultural regard of the child that are of wider relevance to educators, researchers, counsellors and policy makers who interact with children in their own work.