The University of South Africa (UNISA) has recently redesigned its honors degree in Gender Studies. The course design team members have been mindful of three key factors while redesigning this degree. First, we are aligning our course design with the demands of open and distance learning (ODL) and UNISA's institutional move to online delivery of all teaching materials. Second, we are guided by the theoretical principles of feminist pedagogy. Third, we are committed to producing graduates who can take on the challenge of being gender change agents in a country with an escalating rate of gender-based violence. This article charts the development of the Gender Studies curricular initiative at UNISA with reference to the pedagogical insights provided by feminist scholarship on teaching, learning, and technology. We hope that our experience will provide insight into the parameters and process of creating an effective program in Gender Studies within an ODL context.

The South African secular media do not frequently portray men in parental roles; on the other hand, it seems that media and visual culture created by the Christian sector is more likely to engage with issues of fatherhood. Accordingly, it is relevant to explore representations of fatherhood in the Christian context, as these constitute some of the few examples of men’s parental roles in the South African visual culture landscape. Through a Barthean visual semiotic analysis, this article describes and problematises the representation (and non-representation) of certain aspects of fatherhood in the recent visual culture of three Afrikaans corporate churches in the Pretoria-Centurion area. It further establishes that strong connections between breadwinning, male headship and fatherhood exist in images created by these churches. Fathers are mainly shown as patriarchs, heads of households and as active outdoor adventurers. We argue that although men are depicted as involved parents, there are certain limitations and exclusions to this involvement

In this article, we described how gender is represented on two Christian book covers by popular author, John Eldredge, namely Wild at Heart. Discovering the Secret to a Man’s Soul (2001) and Captivating. Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul (2005). Through semiotic visual analysis, we explored how the active male–passive female opposition functions on these covers. This opposition is constructed by visually associating the male figure on the cover of Wild at Heart with active outdoor adventurism and the female figure on Captivating with passive situatedness in nature. The titles of the two books also contribute to positioning the male as active and the female as passive. We further investigated how certain myths are created on these covers in support of an active male–passive female opposition and its underlying ideologies. The cover of Wild at Heart creates and also taps into the colonial myth of conquest. The cover of Captivating creates and taps into the myth of the fairytale and visually represents the female figure in a whimsical manner, thus constructing her as a representation of the spiritual or divine. The article questioned the role this information design plays in prescribing the expectations of gendered identity

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