Group items tagged

"The article introduces the path, the actors and the contexts of the Reflect-OR Project. Reflect-OR is a Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation (TOI) project developed in the framework of the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) and promoted by the European Commission. Reflect-OR aimed at sustaining the empowerment processes of career guidance practitioners by supporting a major awareness and use of their individual, organizational and networking resources. The Reflect-OR project is the transfer of a previous Leonardo da Vinci project called Reflect which experimented with reflective methodologies with teachers and trainers. The path was characterized by an active process of transfer of innovation, constantly constructed and negotiated with the various life-long career guidance (LLCG) practitioners and agencies and based on a creative methodological approach called Participatory and Appreciative Action and Reflection (PAAR). Another important aspect was constituted by the peculiarities of the different contexts involved in the transfer process (Italy, Switzerland and Bulgaria) which allowed a deep reflection on LLCG systems and created a common background for reframing and empowerment."

This sequential QUAL → qual study examines: Phase 1 how reflective practice was implemented in a diversity course in a teacher education program by one teacher educator, and Phase 2 how two of the teacher candidates implemented reflective practice in their diverse student teaching contexts. Data included observations of the course and the student teaching of two teacher candidates (TCs), interviews of the course instructor, three TCs, and two high school students, as well as analyses of key course assignments. This study concludes: (1) cultivation of a reflective practice in TCs is critical to the teacher preparation process; (2) support for TCs in this process is strengthened when led by an instructor who also engages in reflective practice; and (3) teacher reflection on diversity, assumptions and inequity, with opportunities to transfer these course reflections to their teaching practices is central to preparing teachers to teach diverse student populations.

Reflection is generally acknowledged as an important part of teacher education and a central activity in teacher development. The close connection between reflection and identity development has been noted in literature on teacher education. This paper will focus on the interplay among the concepts of reflection, identity and the ideal, and will report the results of a pilot study which attempted to elicit from student teachers their reflections on an ideal identity for their future lives as teachers. The implications of such reflection for teacher education programmes will be indicated.

This reflection, using auto-ethnography as method, explores the value of attunement to feedback in the teaching of a professional postgraduate course for allied mental health professionals. This is, therefore, a story of two halves: a narrative of my learning based on my reflections of my own teaching, and a story of how I have integrated feedback from students and their clinical supervisors to refine my teaching and course development in the programme. The resulting model of teaching and learning I have developed involves a process of 'creative attunement'. 'Attunement' is a psychodynamic concept involving 'contact' or a quality of relationship based on availability, presence, empathy, respect and selective disclosure. The learning activities of the programme aim to develop an awareness of the students' own 'craft knowledge' as graduate social workers and occupational therapists during their intern year in the health services. Through a process of growing the students' awareness of self in the clinician's role by attuning to students' feedback, learning from undergraduate education becomes more available to be applied in a new field of practice. Designing learning activities that incorporate stories of practice and align with clinical supervisors and service user narratives provides access to a variety of learning experiences. I explore the implications for developing critical-reflective practice within a 'community of learners' model.

The purpose of this literary investigation is twofold: first, to make explicit the connections between reflective teaching and critical literacy, and second, to infer from the findings key tasks for teachers in the critical literacy classroom. Specifically, the investigation shows that the following features of reflective teaching connect with and form the core of critical literacy, and are vital to the teaching of critical literacy: giving careful consideration or thought in order to create meaning and pass judgement; questioning personal assumptions, values and beliefs; taking initiatives and using intuition; taking part in development and change; and the use of journal writing. Examples of teachers' tasks in the critical literacy classroom include: building time into lesson plans and implementation for students to give careful consideration and thought to and to pass judgement on the text being studied; guiding students' evaluations and criticisms in a judicious manner; encouraging students to look critically at literature and question what they are reading; emphasizing the readings of texts from a variety of perspectives; allowing students to use journals to write entries that juxtapose multiple viewpoints; and facilitating discussions generally that are based on students' journal entries.

"Research exploring the means by which new media technologies can shape development within marginalized communities worldwide has began to move away from discussion limited to technical and infrastructural, to consider the interactions, beliefs, and values of local communities. Yet most projects continue to focus on enabling communities to access external information, rather than on the possibility of using media to catalyze community reflection and thereby developmental activity from within. This article shows how this promise can be actualized by providing an overview of an experimental project that made available a set of video cameras to a carefully selected group of community members in a ritualized, largely nonliterate village in Andhra Pradesh, India. It concludes that policymakers, researchers, and practitioners would benefit from considering the possibilities that reflective media hold to generate collective action and consensus building, and that these possibilities can synergize with the need to develop scalable projects."

"Brazilian education activist Paulo Freire ( 1970 12. Freire , P. 1970 . Pedagogy of the oppressed , New York , NY : Continuum . View all references ) argues that to create social change, oppressed people must have critical consciousness about their conditions, and that this consciousness is developed through dialogue. He theorizes that dialogue allows for reflection and unity building, tools needed to transform society. When considering racial oppression in K-12 schools, racial minority teachers have an often-untapped insight and power to transform classrooms and schools (Kohli, 2009 21. Kohli , R. 2009 . Critical race reflections: Valuing the experiences of teachers of color in teacher education . Race, Ethnicity and Education , 12 ( 2 ) : 235 - 251 . [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Web of Science ®] View all references ). Connected through a commonality of racial oppression, it is important for teachers of color to engage in cross-racial dialogues about manifestations of racial injustice in K-12 schools and to develop strategies for change. Utilizing Freire's conceptual lens and a critical race theory (CRT) framework, this article highlights critical race dialogue about the educational experiences and observations of 12 black, Latina, and Asian American women enrolled in a teacher education program. Through cross-racial discussions, the women were able to broaden their multicultural understanding of racial oppression as well as strategize solidarity building among diverse students in urban classrooms. This study demonstrates knowledge and insights of teachers of color and highlights the importance of interracial dialogue in school contexts."

Critical thinking (CT) has long been a valued curriculum outcome requirement for Nursing. In the early 1990s conceptualization of CT including two lists: cognitive and affective definitions. A decade later a Nursing expert panel added prediction and transforming knowledge, to the cognitive skills and intuition, open-mindedness and creativity to the affective definition of CT. Yet, there is still concern over how to teach nursing students to be creative, intuitive, and transform their knowledge. In this paper I used a geography of health concept to guide a series of general questions to help nursing students reflect on the physical and social environments to see ethical issues in their community practice. Fostering students' abilities to integrate their learning will nurture the essential affective (for example, intuition, creativity) and cognitive (transforming knowledge) skills that prepare them to make informed personal, professional and civic decisions throughout their lives.

This article describes problem-based learning as a powerful pedagogical approach and an aligned teaching and learning system to explicitly and directly teach critical thinking skills in a broad range of disciplines. Problem-based learning is argued to be a powerful pedagogical approach as it explicitly and actively engages students in a learning and teaching system, characterised by reiterative and reflective cycles of learning domain-specific knowledge and doing the thinking themselves. At the same time, students are guided and coached by the problem-based learning teacher, who models critical thinking skills in the acquisition of the domain-specific knowledge. This article will explore what critical thinking actually means. What are critical thinking skills? How best to teach such skills? What is the potential role of problem-based learning in teaching critical thinking skills? Finally, the article reflects on how critical thinking can be developed through problem-based learning as a pedagogical approach in an aligned learning and teaching context.

Critical multiculturalism and social justice have emerged in educational contexts as primarily pedagogical concerns, confined to the processes of teaching and learning. This article raises the question about the application of these principles to the research process. Through a critical self-reflection on researcher roles and practices, this article highlights four emergent characteristics of the multicultural/social justice researcher: the commitment to a common good; the re-definition of the researcher-researched relationship; the interrogation of the traditional roles, norms and power dynamics of academic research and researchers; and the merging of the tripartite distinctions of teaching, research and service in the role of the professor. These serve as a starting point for dialogue on the re-conceptualization of the role of the multicultural/social justice researcher.

"The time dimension has become increasingly important in organisational management studies. Various concepts have been developed: temporary work, temporary systems, projectification and temporary organisations. Many aspects have already been studied; for example, relationship structures, the characteristics of projects that temporary organisations (TOs) intend to implement and develop, legal forms, the different sectors in which TOs have been disseminated, and the degree to which they have been formalised. However, one aspect that has still not been studied in depth is the specificity of their temporariness and the specificities of the organisational, social and learning systems that this encourages."

"In this essay I reflect on the role of intercultural education in an emerging global crisis. Education systems are characterised by both divergent and convergent impulses. Divergent impulses include tradition, nationalism and religion. Convergent impulses (isomorphism) include science and technology, culture (including the English language), system compatibility and examinations and mobility (including the movement of ideas and the internet). The crisis of globalisation now seems to have four distinct elements: the economic recession, the new international order, hydrocarbon and other resource depletion, and climate change. Crisis is an over-used word but these are all fairly potent forces. What are the implications of these current and impending changes for intercultural education? Can schools and universities ever adapt and can they adapt quickly enough? The necessary curricular changes in schools and universities will involve the interaction of political power at crisis point with often traditionalistic epistemologies. It is possible to predict further international convergence and increased isomorphism but not how, or indeed whether, the crisis will be resolved."

This article focuses on how three dimensions of critical democracy preparation (place-based geographical knowledge, social and political awareness of American Indian history and culture, and orientations conducive to the development of personal connections with American Indians) were impacted by different instructional approaches introduced when implementing an innovative Indian Education for All education program at a K-5 school in Montana. Student-learning outcomes were measured through pre- and post-intervention tests of place-based and social/political knowledge and a short survey of personal orientations. Instructional approaches across first-grade through fifth-grade were identified through interviews and participant observation. In their own ways, participating teachers, working in partnership with Salish tribal educators, demonstrated that Indigenous education contributes to critical-democracy learning. The specific outcomes of the Indigenous-education program varied according to the different instructional approaches teachers elected to pursue. Instructional comparisons showed that combining place-based instruction with guided reflection on personal connections with American Indian people through "boundary-breaking" approaches that aim to bring about critical consciousness ignited the most impressive changes in learners' orientations. The research findings offer particularly valuable insights for teachers striving for equity and excellence in elementary schools with American Indian populations.

"This paper contrasts the notion of 'independent learning' as perceived by two informant groups at a UK institution of higher education: (1) teachers, educators and providers of education and (2) their students or 'consumers' of education. Both informant groups are staff and students studying in a culture different to that of their first education. They are identified in their receiving institution as 'international', or have identified themselves as such. The experience of transition into a UK University was explored with both informant groups, through interviews and focus groups, over a cycle of two years. 'Independent learning' as rhetoric and practice emerged for both groups as an issue in their transition from familiar to unfamiliar learning culture. Three key insights emerged. Firstly, a mismatch is identified between teacher perceptions and student interpretation of 'independent learning' expectations and practice. Secondly, it emerges that student experience of the learning culture is in a state of continuous flux, evolving between first arrival and end of programme through cycles of bafflement and empowerment. Finally, both students and teachers identify a number of strategies for dealing with this experience of 'transitional' independence. The paper concludes by recommending a notion of 'phased scaffolding' that might inform educational practice and by reflecting on the implications for the educator in revisiting received educational discourse from the perspective of participants negotiating a second learning culture."

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of 'art' within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.

"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's long career as teacher, theorist and activist has been characterised by a sustained commitment to pedagogy, and in particular by an awareness of how the dilemmas and problems that teaching throws up - whether in the classrooms of subaltern communities in West Bengal or in the seminar rooms of Columbia University - can offer a beginning for theoretical reflection. Such problems, which often serve as anecdotal starting points in her essays as Spivak describes moments of problematic encounter with resistance, confusion, privilege and silence, often work to trip up, in enabling ways, the kinds of paradigms that theory might otherwise want to impose, whether onto notions of cultural, social or gender difference, or onto ideas of development and globality. They are occasions for Spivak to draw attention to the ideological conditions in which differing forms of education (elementary and tertiary, Southern and Northern, public and private) operate, sutured as they are in their different ways to the nation-state. Yet an equally longstanding insistence of Spivak's work, from earlier essays such as her review of Derrida's Limited Inc, 'Revolutions that as Yet Have No Model' (1980) through to later works such as Other Asias (2008) has been that the classroom, whether located in rural West Bengal or in New York, offers a crucial site for the training of the imagination into the possibility of a different, collective political life of the future."

"This study draws on the application of sociocultural theory to second-language learning and teaching to examine the impact of a design-based research approach on teacher development and literacy instruction to English-language learners (ELLs). Design-based research methodology was employed to derive theoretical suppositions relating to the process of learning as well as the means by which this process is supported. Our research questions were: (a) How will this professional development model result in shifts in teacher thinking about language and literacy learning for ELLs; (b) what innovations in teachers' repertoires of practice will be developed; and (c) in what ways will these shifts in teachers' thinking and innovations in their repertoire of practice bring about new forms of language and literacy learning? Our findings point to the need to place development in the forefront of teacher professional development models. Also foregrounded is the importance of promoting teachers' critical reflection on classroom practices and of creating hypotheses for pedagogical change vis-à-vis new understanding about students' linguistic, cognitive and academic needs."

With the increasing use of video recording in social research methodological questions about multimodal transcription are more timely than ever before. How do researchers transcribe gesture, for instance, or gaze, and how can they show to readers of their transcripts how such modes operate in social interaction alongside speech? Should researchers bother transcribing these modes of communication at all? How do they define a 'good' transcript? In this paper we begin to develop a social semiotic framework to account for transcripts as artefacts, treating them as empirical material through which transcription as a social, meaning making practice can be reconstructed. We look at some multimodal transcripts produced in conversation analysis, discourse analysis, social semiotics and micro-ethnography, drawing attention to the meaning-making principles applied by the transcribers. We argue that there are significant representational differences between multimodal transcripts, reflecting differences in the professional practices and the rhetorical and analytical purposes of their makers.

This article contains our reflections on the experience of using a triple capacity building (TCB) model to train students in community development work in rural China. The TCB approach subscribes to critical pedagogy, which calls for a reinvention of the

This study explores the personal transformation process experienced by future bilingual educators enrolled in a graduate school of education that is committed to rigorous, collaborative, innovative, and transformational research. The majority of these preservice (PST) and novice teachers (NT), largely White, monolingual women, has little direct knowledge about or experience with teaching culturally, linguistically and ability diverse students. Educational researchers have long emphasized the importance of providing PST and NT graduate students with opportunities to analyze and reflect on their personal theoretical beliefs concerning teaching standards and methods of student learning. Additionally, it has been determined that teacher educators must communicate the necessary theoretical foundations to provide their students with a starting point for analyzing their emerging teaching philosophies, the goal being the development of their new visions of reform-minded practices and innovative techniques of teaching. Data indicated that all the PSTs entered the program with images of teaching that were related to their earlier classroom experiences as students, and that, during their 2-year tenure in the graduate school of education, teaching internship, and master's-level coursework, most experienced professional and personal epiphanies.