Using communities of practice as a tool to analyse developing identity in online discussion

In this article, we address the methodological implications of analysing online discussion boards with a focus on participants' changing identities. More specifically, we propose the use of a Communities of Practice framework as a heuristic method for considering how participants' contributions to online discussion play a role in changing who they become, as opposed to what they learn. We argue that many analyses of online communication fail to take account of learning as a change in identity – what/who the learner is (becoming) – and focus mainly on the opportunity for cognitive development – what they know. In doing so, we use a single case study from a discussion board for secondary-aged students of mathematics which acts as a ‘telling case’ before demonstrating what this might say about other contexts for online learning. We argue that this has important implications for both research into, and the design of, online education.     

Encouraging student engagement in a blended learning environment: the use of contemporary learning spaces

Research shows that some non‐traditional students find the university environment alienating, impersonal and unsupportive. The ‘Quickstart’ project combines traditional lectures and seminars with a sequence of carefully designed online tasks, aimed at lessening the impact of the start of year uncertainties for new students. One thousand students across two geographic locations participated in the programme. The project was evaluated by considering three sources of data: data generated by server statistics of 40,358 successful requests for pages in the first four weeks of teaching; student anonymous responses to an online end of course questionnaire as well as extracts from their reflective journals; and the student experience as viewed through the eyes of a researcher in the classroom. Findings offer insights into how the students blend classroom time with their own time; and student perceptions of their own learning experiences. A collaborative learning experience involving travel to a contemporary learning space (the Tate Modern Art Gallery) mitigated the possible isolating effect of the use of technology; instead the technology enhanced the discussion and participation in activities. The students visited the Tate Modern and then facilitated their discussions by sending each other SMS text messages; they bonded very quickly in the seminar groups, where weekly online tasks that had been prepared individually ‘outside’ the classroom were the focus of group discussion and debate ‘inside the classroom’; their end of semester reflective writing showed very clearly how valuable the early ‘friendship’ groups had been for them settling into university life.     

Exploring ‘learning lives’: community,identity, literacy and meaning

This article explores the term ‘learning lives’ by reporting on three research projects conducted by members of the Oslo‐based research group TransActions. By stressing the term ‘learning lives’ within a range of social ‘educational’ contexts, the article aims to look at learning within and across different learning sites exploring the positioning and repositioning of learner identity across these different ‘locations’. We emphasise how the individual learner relates to other people and objects, drawing on deeper trajectories or narratives of the self as it exists within and outside the immediate learning contexts. We pay attention to processes occurring between people which we find significant for the individual's identity, literacy and learning. By doing so we hope to make explicit the mobilisation of resources within and across specific contexts, in the ‘learning lives’ of Norwegian youngsters.     

Learning trajectories among educational psychologists

In this article, special attention is paid to psychologists’ experiences of learning trajectories in educational counseling. The data consists of two case studies. They were selected from a total of 15 interviews with psychologists conducted as part of a research project on ‘Changing Practices in Educational Psychological Practice (CPEPP) in Denmark’. The article analyses learning trajectories along what we refer to as the clinical versus the educational track in educational psychological practice. Learning trajectories are examples of how individuals combine and connect learning across both time and different places of work, formal education and further education. The clinical and the educational learning trajectories are analysed in relation to the psychologists’ previous educational and present work experience within a context of very substantial organizational change. A general theme of the article is therefore that learning should be analysed over (1) time, past–present–future over the course of a person's life; and (2) place, across contexts of activity and communities of practice with different and overlapping goals, values and rules. In this respect continued learning entails negotiating and coming to terms with a professional identity across time and space.     

Technology,learning and instruction: distributed cognition in the secondary English classroom

In this paper, we analyse interactions between secondary students and pre‐service teachers in an online environment in order to understand how their meaning‐making processes embody distributed cognition. We begin by providing a theoretical review of the ways in which literacy learning is distributed across learners, objects, tools, symbols, technologies and the environment in modern English language arts classrooms. This is followed by a case study where we identify how programme values, textual resources and cultural schema function as distributed tools. In traditional schools, with an emphasis on taking standardised tests, the learning environment is designed on the view that learning is a transaction that happens solely ‘inside the head’. Unfortunately, this pushes many students to the margins of classroom engagement and participation. By analysing students' and pre‐service teachers' online discourse, we argue that virtual spaces can facilitate critical dialogue and can act as catalysts for a distributed theory of mind.     

Love acts and revolutionary praxis: challenging the neoliberal university through a teaching scholars development program

ABSTRACT

There has been significant interest in developing academics through Teaching Scholar Development Programs across the USA, Canada, the UK, and more recently in Australia. At their core, such programs develop academics across teaching scholarship, leadership, promotion, and award opportunities, where universities reap the benefits of developing such a cadre of leaders. This paper pays witness to one such a program in an Australian university to highlight enactments of caring passionately. We use qualitative survey evaluation data, metaphor analysis and reflective practice to nuance the pleasures, passions and challenges of the lived experiences using phenomenological and metaphor lenses to describe our experiences. Metaphors provide powerful insights into the dimensions of experience as they open up how programs are perceived and experienced. Our paper disrupts traditional linear writing through rhizomatic, multivocal and multitextual encounters to challenge dominant authorial voicing. The academic identity work and emotional work required in the program is unfolded through evolving, experiencing and reflecting on the program to inform design and highlight what we have come to (re)value in our academic work when we come together to learn, share, and lead. We forge ways to be and become with and against neoliberal agendas that have choked the soul of ‘the university’ to evolve rich spaces and practices of/for reciprocity and kindness where not only learning can thrive, but where love acts – a much needed revolutionary praxis for our time.     

Crossing the Line

The paper charts the progress of the ‘Window Sills’ project in Exeter, UK which brings together artists, art students, cultural organisations, and the community in a plan for urban renewal. Seeking to loosen boundaries, it uses the idea of ‘thirdspace’ to question the notion of public and private space, using the city's and its river's constant changes as an analogy. The window and the window sill become the interface where the project seeks a transformational act in the lives of those involved by locating the experience in the local and the personal, although the implications cross much wider boundaries.     

Gender Codes at Odds and the Linguistic Construction of a Hybrid Identity

This study traces the ways in which an Arabic-speaking immigrant girl in Cyprus positions herself towards the different gender ideologies that she encounters at home and in school. Through Nadia's linguistic choices and discursive strategies we come to see how competing gender codes, meeting at the crossroads of geographic, linguistic, and cultural transition, lead to the emergence of a hybrid cultural identity. The data also reveal that "passing" is not always the goal of speakers who enter a new culture; instead, social categories such as gender mediate between the ability and the willingness to pass. These findings suggest that L2 users, through their daily linguistic and cultural practices across and within discourse sites, become agents of multiple, dynamic, and flexible identities. The study demonstrates the particular implications of second language learning and use and gender ideologies in the process of identity construction and highlights the complexities of identity work in today's multilingual and multitextual social settings.     

Developing ‘reflective’ development practitioners through an action-learning curriculum: problems and challenges in a South African context

Abstract

The paper begins by looking at the ‘context of practice’: the programmes of the SRCD are briefly described and even more briefly the dominant (global) socio-economic trends as they impact on ours and other tertiary institutions. Because it is important in order to make sense of the programme we then attempt to provide a detailed profile of our students.

The central questions with which we grapple, viz., the problems encountered in the curriculum activities designed to enable students to gain competence in ‘soft’ systems thinking and learning to learn, are dealt with in the sections ‘The Programme’, ‘The Results’ and ‘Bad practice, bad theory, or both’. In the first of these we give a very brief overview of Kolb's learning theory and Checkland's SSM and then show how the two can be (theoretically) integrated — Checkland's learning system is embedded in Kolb's learning cycle (LC). In the next section we report on an evaluation of the programme from the student's perspective. And then, finally, we discuss the shortcomings of Kolb's theory in our context as well as our use of Checkland's SSM. Our critique of Kolb is central to the entire endeavour, because his theory of experiential learning provides the theoretical underpinning of our curriculum development endeavour.

In the final section we make some suggestions for a way forward based on our critique.     

‘A space for you to be who you are’: an ethnographic portrait of reterritorializing Indigenous student identities

ABSTRACT

This article explores the discourse practices of an Indigenous, community-based charter school and its efforts to create space for Indigenous both/and identities across rural–urban divides. The ethnographic portrait of Urban Native Middle School (UNMS) analyzes the discourse of making ‘a space for you’, which brings together rural and urban youth to braid binary constructs such as Indigenous and western knowledge, into a discourse of Indigenous persistence constraining contexts of schooling. We use the concept of ‘reterritorialization’ to discuss the significance of UNMS’s community effort to create a transformative space and place of educational opportunity with youth. The local efforts of this small community to reterritorialize schooling were ultimately weakened under the one-size-fits-all accountability metrics of No Child Left Behind policy. This ethnographic analysis ‘talks back’ to static definitions of identity, space and learning outcomes which fail to recognize the dynamic and diverse interests of Indigenous communities across rural – urban landscapes.     

Illustrations of the analytic memo as reflexivity for preservice teachers

This study illustrates the use of analytic memos during the action research process as a space to support preservice teachers’ emerging teacher identity and construction of practice through critical reflexivity. The authors reviewed 34 sets of analytic memos written by graduate preservice teachers by asking, ‘How are preservice teachers using the space of the analytic memo during the action research process as critical reflexivity?’. Reflexivity is understood in this work as a method of self‐inquiry, and positions teacher identity as fluid and subject to multiple and often competing discourses. The outcome of this analysis demonstrates how emerging action research questions reflect emerging teacher identity; the power of dialogue within the memos to act as a ‘corrective moment’; and the elliptical nature of action research as preservice teachers confront contradictions and paradoxes in learning to teach. The authors suggest that the analytic memo can act as a vehicle of agency and transformation, a space where preservice teachers may practice reflexivity as they begin to critically construct their practice, create and re‐create their teacher identity, and confront assumptions about teaching and learning.     

Editorial

It is arguable whether Singapore's mainstream schools are moving towards ‘inclusion’ by providing support for students with mild to moderate disabilities through the provision of a newly created para-professional called the Allied Educators (Learning and Behavioural) [AED(LBS)]. Since 2005, the government has provided an incremental supply of these trained para-professionals to offer both in-class support and withdrawal sessions. Many primary and secondary schools have one such para-professional catering to an unpredictable number of children with and without assessed learning needs. This paper draws upon data from a study investigating how a group of 30 newly qualified AED(LBS) para-professionals shaped their professional role during their first year in school. Data were generated through an online survey, interviews; and analysed through theories on identity and communities of practice. Findings focus on how the participants had learned to grow into their roles despite contradictory expectations; how they learn to work with student diversity they had never encountered; and how schools should be learning communities to embrace and include the new AED(LBS). The paper discusses the need to define ‘inclusivity’ and the need for the education system to become more professionally inclusive towards AED(LBS).     

Self[ie] reflective practice: revealing student engagement through the photographic performance of the self

ABSTRACT

This paper positions the photographic image of the self (the ‘selfie’) as the reflexive indicator on which students are prompted to reveal their learning behaviours, and uses this mode of reflexivity to construct a qualitative study of engagement in a higher education setting. The study leverages the intensified processes of self –reflection created by the novel forms of convergence across the social landscape in which the selfie is embedded, to reveal how oppositional and indexical selfie-reflective practices can operate to uniquely connect behaviours to learning in this sector.     

Understanding Afro-Caribbean educators’ experiences with Englishes across Caribbean and U.S. contexts and classrooms: Recursivity, (re)positionality,bidirectionality

This interpretive qualitative study describes the experiences of six Afro-Caribbean multilingual educators with Englishes across Caribbean and United States contexts and classrooms. Findings showed how confidence vs. doubtfulness and resistance vs. acceptance seemed visible in the educators' use of Englishes based on the expectations of others and how distance vs. closeness and negative vs. positive feelings were reflected in educators' learning about their use of Englishes. Overall, the findings suggest that the educators' experiences were characterized by recursivity, repositionality and bidirectionality. Recursivity seemed evident because the educators moved back and forth in their thinking about Englishes, English ideologies, and between conflicts about these ideologies in their experiences across Caribbean and U.S classrooms. Repositionality seemed visible in their increasing acceptance of non-standardized Englishes for ‘outer circle’ classroom instruction and through shifts in their ideologies about English as moved back and forth across ‘inner’ and ‘outer circles,’ both via various digital technologies and by way of their physical movement across geographic boundaries. Bidirectionality appeared to be present in the impact of educators' ideologies about Englishes on ‘inner circle’ speakers, and the impact of ‘inner circle’ speakers' ideologies about Englishes on educators. This study raises questions about the ways in which educators' Englishes function as they interact with English speakers in the United States.     

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ Using the researcher's insider and outsider positions as a sensitising concept

This article uses the notion of a ‘sensitising concept’ in order to understand insider and outsider dynamics in cross-organisational field research. The analysis is based on a study of learning and innovation in the social and health care educations in Denmark. As these educations combine classroom training and workplace internships, the students and educators frequently cross organisational boundaries as part of their training and educating. In my attempt to understand the boundaries as learning and innovation resources, I reflect on my own shifting insider and outsider positions as a field researcher. It is argued that the researcher's experience of changing insiderness and outsiderness in cross-organisational field studies can serve as a starting point from where to investigate emotional and material aspects of boundary-crossing.     

Exploring connections between identity and learning

Abstract

Learning is situated in the practices of communities, such that children learn by participating in the communities they inhabit. Learning through participation in the practices of a community influences interpretation of and engagement with the social world, and has implications for the identity of the learner as a participant in a community. In this article, the connection between learning and identity will be explored from a sociocultural perspective. Children participate in many communities and must appropriately generalize learning across communities such as home and school. Research in the connection between identity and learning in schools will be reviewed because in many countries where schooling is mandatory it is an important context for this generalization. Then the paper will explore the choice of when and how to generalize across contexts and whether this choice is conscious. Lastly, the paper will propose some ways that the connection between learning and identity may complicate this generalization.     

A cross-curricular approach to ‘learning to learn’ languages: government policy and school practice

This article connects two fields of research: ‘learning to learn’ and school-based teacher development. The context is a cross-curricular project between English and modern languages teachers. Carried out in two London schools, the study aimed to encourage students to transfer common language learning strategies across the two subjects. Findings from interviews with teachers and students highlight the gap between the government's ‘learning to learn’ agenda and the realities of implementing it. A distinction is drawn between providing school-based opportunities for teachers to share generic ‘good practice’ in relation to initiatives such as Assessment for Learning and those where the actual content of lessons crosses subject boundaries. Recent government guidelines appear to mask inherent tensions in the aims and pedagogical approaches of the two languages – tensions exacerbated by the current preoccupation with performance measures. It is suggested that the differences are unlikely to be resolved without a supportive school culture that provides adequate release time for teachers to engage in extensive cross-curricular dialogue.     

‘I’m teaching,but I’m not really a teacher’. Teaching assistants and the construction of professional identities in Hong Kong schools

Background: In the past decade, educational settings worldwide have experienced a significant increase in the number of school-based teaching assistants (TAs). The deployment of these TAs has been accompanied by reports of confusion and uncertainty about their roles and responsibilities within schools. While the need to reframe the role and purpose of TAs is recognised, it remains unclear how this can be best achieved.

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to explore the ways in which one group of TAs deployed in Hong Kong schools construct their professional identities, to understand the constraints and enablements to these processes, and to consider how different stakeholders might be able to best support this identity work.

Sample: The primary participants in this study are nine English language teacher assistants employed at different schools across Hong Kong. Other participants include full-time English language teachers who have experience of working with one of these TAs, as well as students who attend English language classes in which these TAs participate.

Design and methods: A qualitative multiple case study approach is adopted. In-depth interviews with TAs, teachers and students are used to gain a contextualised interpretation of the primary participants’ experiences of constructing professional identities within schools. A multilevel, multidimensional theoretical framework, which considers identity construction as both a discursive and experiential accomplishment, is then used to understand the constraints and enablements TAs experience in constructing these identities.

Findings: Results indicate that TAs face challenges in constructing their professional identities at institutional, interpersonal and intrapersonal levels within Hong Kong schools. In addition, the TAs believe that exercising agency to contest their positionings within schools is often insufficient to place them on a trajectory towards become a teacher. The results also suggest that the identity conflicts TAs experience can lead some to question their decision to pursue a teaching career.

Conclusions: These results imply that in order to attract and retain TAs, educational authorities need to, first, problematise identity positions such as ‘TA’ and ‘teacher’ and then reconceptualise these identities in ways that allow for a multiplication of the identity positions potentially available to all stakeholders involved in teaching within Hong Kong schools.     

Mapping the daily media round: novel methods for understanding families’ mobile technology use

The pervasiveness of mobile devices in families’ homes has dramatically changed the physical and temporal arrangement of co-viewing media content; the representative image of American families seated around a TV set is an anachronism. But understanding and describing contemporary co-participation arrangements around digital media is challenging because of the mobile nature of these activities. As researchers, our greatest challenge is to observe people's digital media use that is increasingly ‘on-the-move’ in an effort to understand the significance and possibilities these devices have in family life, learning, and engagement in and across different settings. This article describes an innovative study design for understanding how mobile technologies influence the ways in which families learn together. We analyze the movement of digital media practices, where they are located, and how digital co-participation within families is distributed across time and space.