Analysis of a physics teacher's pedagogical ‘micro-actions’ that support 17-year-olds’ learning of free body diagrams via a modelling approach

Great teaching is characterised by the specific actions a teacher takes in the classroom to bring about learning. In the context of model-based teaching (MBT), teachers’ difficulty in working with students’ models that are not scientifically consistent is troubling. To address this problem, the aim of this study is to identify the pedagogical micro-actions to support the development of scientific models and modelling skills during the evaluation and modification stages of MBT. Taking the perspective of pedagogical content knowing (PCKg), it identifies these micro-actions as an in-situ, dynamic transformation of knowledges of content, pedagogy, student and environment context. Through a case study approach, a lesson conducted by an experienced high-school physics teacher was examined. Audio and video recordings of the lesson contributed to the data sources. Taking a grounded approach in the analysis, eight pedagogical micro-actions enacted by the teacher were identified, namely ‘clarification’, ‘evaluation’, ‘explanation’, ‘modification’, ‘exploration’, ‘referencing conventions’, ‘focusing’ and ‘meta-representing’. These micro-actions support students’ learning related to the conceptual, cognitive, discursive and epistemological aspects of modelling. From the micro-actions, we identify the aspects of knowledges of PCKg that teachers need in order to competently select and enact these micro-actions. The in-situ and dynamic transformation of these knowledges implies that professional development should also be situated in the context in which these micro-actions are meaningful.     

Doing business: knowledges in the internationalised business lecture

This paper investigates the oracy (listening/speaking) genres enacted in an undergraduate entry point unit in the internationalised university and the kind of knowledges these genres elicit and perform. Focusing on a series of lectures in a business studies unit, it explores how anecdotal knowledge from both the lecturer’s and the students’ lived experiences was elicited for the curriculum. The analysis of lecture talk suggests that the business lecture is no longer a monologic display of expert disciplinary knowledge bestowed upon the learner. Rather, it is increasingly a multi‐modal performance with an underlying ethic of engagement and interactivity. Of particular interest is the way international students’ knowledges were elicited to resource the internationalised curriculum with authenticity and insight. The knowledges assembled are analysed through Bernstein’s distinction between vertical and horizontal knowledge structures. The paper offers suggestions on how to maximise the potential and minimize the risks of this more interactive genre of lecture, with particular regard to enabling the participation of the international student.     

Rethinking the role of Indigenous knowledges in the academy

This paper is an invitation critically to engage in the discussion of ‘Indigenous knowledges’ and the implication for academic decolonization. Among the issues raised are questions of the definition and operationalization of Indigenous knowledges and the challenges of pursuing such knowledge in the Western academy. The paper draws attention to some of the nuances, contradictions and contestations in affirming the place of Indigenous knowledges in the academy. It is pointed out that Indigenous knowledges do not ‘sit in pristine fashion’ outside of the effects of other knowledges. In particular, the paper brings new and complex readings to the term ‘Indigenous’, maintaining that different bodies of knowledge continually influence each other to show the dynamism of all knowledge systems. It is argued that when located in the Euro-American educational contexts, Indigenous knowledges can be fundamentally experientially based, non-universal, holistic and relational knowledges of ‘resistance’. In the discussion, the paper interrogates the notions of tradition, authenticity, orality and the assertion of Indigenous identity as crucial to the educational and political project of affirming Indigenous knowledges.     

Learning About Other People’s Families

While the call for teacher education students to learn about their students’ family and community lives remains urgent and compelling, educating teachers about the Other is tricky business. In this article I discuss the use of two performed ethnographies, Harriet’s House and Ana’s Shadow, to provide opportunities for teachers to learn about Other people’s families in ways that work against presenting a singular, dominant narrative of the Other’s experiences and positioning Other students as experts. Although the outcomes from educating teachers about Other people’s families are unpredictable and do not always disrupt the prior, potentially harmful, knowledges teachers bring with them to teaching, I argue, along with Kevin Kumashiro, that ongoing labour to stop the repetition of harmful knowledges is important anti-oppressive educational work.     

Interrogating single‐sex classes as a strategy for addressing boys’ educational and social needs

This paper explores the policy of single‐sex classes that is currently being adopted in some schools as a strategy for addressing boys’ educational and social needs. It draws on research in one Australian government, coeducational primary school to examine teachers’ and students’ experiences of this strategy. Interviews with the principal, male and female teachers responsible for teaching the single‐sex classes and the students involved in these classes are used to illustrate the impact and effect of the strategy on pedagogical practices in this particular school. The data are used to raise critical questions about the impact and effects of teachers’ pedagogical practices in light of the current literature and research about single‐sex classes. In this case study, it was found that teachers had a tendency to modify their pedagogical practices and the curriculum to suit stereotypical constructions about boys’ and girls’ supposed oppositional orientations to learning. It is concluded that teacher knowledges and assumptions about gender play an important role in the execution of their pedagogies in the single‐sex classroom.     

A student-centred approach: a qualitative exploration of how students experience access and success in a South African University of Technology

This article investigates students’ understanding and students’ experiences of access and success at a Higher Education Institution. There is a growing discourse around how students at Higher Education Institutions experience access and success. These discussions are imperative so that educational practices, university systems and processes as well as educational development initiatives can be tailored to meet the needs of all students. This specifically relates to issues of how students access the university, both epistemically and culturally and what their stories of success are in their path to and through the university. Qualitative research methodologies have been used for data collection and analysis. This article describes a six-month pilot study, which falls under the Siyaphumelela (‘we succeed’) student success project. In this pilot, forty-five interviews were conducted with undergraduate students. This article is underpinned by Tinto’s theory of integration. Moving away from the discourse of unprepared and underprepared students, our approach advocates that institutions prepare better for students who have not had the advantage of acquiring the necessary skills and knowledges that would assist them to be successful in their higher education journey. This study has found that the institution is already providing services which are much needed by students for their success. However, an extension of these systems needs to take place so they reach the entire student population. Our approach in this project is holistic because we understand that how students experience access, success and student centeredness is intricately linked to becoming university students.     

La perception d’une discipline scolaire par les elèves. Représentation et effets identitaires

The students’ perception of a subject is approached as being a pure construction aiming at giving a meaning to their real everyday school life and, therefore, is not done regardless of the social conditions in which they were worked out, nor the social meanings conferred on this subject and his contents. A survey done on French students from a comprehensive school about their own representation of «Education Manuelle et Technique» shows that, according to their social background, the students have a different perception of its practice and of the value of the knowledges called for. A further interpretation puts forward the instrumental role that might be played by the representation of a subject in psychosocial processes of identity and then, in return, the weight of these problems of identity when working out this representation.     

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ motivation to continue in senior science: An expectancy value theory and intersectional identity approach

Researchers have noted a persistent decline in Australian students’ participation in senior science in secondary school (Year 12). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) students are significantly less likely to continue with science, in part because western science and the present science curriculum have ignored and delegitimized Indigenous knowledges and cultures as “unempirical.” Moreover, Indigenous students who sit at multiple marginalized science identities (i.e., girls, low socio-economic background) may be less likely to continue with science. Drawing on expectancy value theory and considering intersectional identity, this study examined the extent to which Indigenous students’ science self-efficacy, intrinsic value, and utility value predicted their Y12 science enrolment and science subject selection, and if these associations were moderated by gender or socio-economic status. Multi-class logistic regression and multi-group path analysis were conducted with n = 334 Indigenous students and n = 2,801 non-Indigenous students. Utility value predicted Y12 participation and self-efficacy predicted science subject selection for Indigenous students. Socio-economic status was a significant moderator. Findings suggest that particular attention should be paid to these factors to better support Indigenous students in science.     

Revisions to rationality: the translation of ‘new knowledges’ into policy under the Coalition Government

This article gives an account of the use of knowledges from emerging scientific fields in education and youth policy making under the Coalition government (2010–15) in the UK. We identify a common process of ‘translation’ and offer three illustrations of policy-making in the UK that utilise diverse knowledges produced in academic fields (neuroscience, network theory and well-being). This production of ‘new knowledges’ in policy contexts allows for the identification of sites of policy intervention. This process of translation underlies a series of diverse revisions of the rational subject of policy. Collectively, these revisions amount to a change in policy-making and the emergence of a different subject of neoliberal policy. This subject is not an excluded alterity to an included rational subject of neoliberalism, but a ‘plastic subject’ characterised by its multiplicity. The plastic subject does not contradict the rational subject as central to neoliberal policy-making, but diversifies it.     

Opportunities missed and/or thwarted? ‘Funds of knowledge’ meet the English national curriculum

North American curriculum theorists Gonzales and Moll and their colleagues have argued that working with children's ‘funds of knowledge’ allows teachers to build on what children already know in order to meet the mandated outcomes. The approach also has the potential to change the knowledges that are valued and which advantage some children over others. In this article we examine three instances in which children's ‘funds of knowledge’ leaked into English classrooms: these were not fully taken up. We suggest that these instances represent opportunities wasted, but that they offer some insight into the challenges of introducing a ‘funds of knowledge’ approach into the English ‘curriculum space’, as well as some of the possibilities. We suggest that while there are current initiatives which do work with children's peer and family knowledges, these are isolated and that coordinated debate is required about the potentials of such an approach in the English context.     

Re-envisioning land-based pedagogies as a transformative third space: perspectives from university academics,students, and Indigenous knowledge holders from Manitoba,Canada

ABSTRACT

This research project examines experiences at the University of Winnipeg in facilitating land-based pedagogical (LBP) courses to ascertain the potential of land-based learning in strengthening students’ connection with Indigenous ways of knowing in Manitoba. The overarching aim of the research was to create empirical support for building bridges among the pedagogical approaches of land-based learning, two-eyed seeing, and transformative learning as a strategy for promoting transformative third space through land-based education programs. Transformative third space is utilized to conceptualize the process of weaving together Indigenous knowledges and academic knowledge to encourage intercultural dialogue and perceptual shifts in students’ understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing.     

数值模拟结果演示推进岩石力学课堂教学

岩石力学课程的理论性比较强,单靠书面的讲解,学生难以深刻领会,需要丰富授课资料。通过对课程中的相关问题进行数值模拟并将结果演示于教学中,有助于课程教学效果的提升,使学生了解到更多岩石力学领域的知识和信息,进一步加深了对岩石力学概念和相关知识点的认识和理解;通过数值模拟结果演示资料的补充,极大改善了课程内容难懂、难以深入和授课资料不丰富、不直观、不全面等问题,极大地激发了学生学习和投身科研的兴趣,使学生理论水平和创新思维大幅提高,并开阔学生的视野;数值模拟也是岩石力学实验教学的有益补充,为实验教学打下良好的基础。     

Mexican and Mexican-American children’s funds of knowledge as interventions into deficit thinking: opportunities for praxis in science education

In this case study, I use an ethnographic-style approach to understand the funds of knowledge of immigrant families living in colonias on both sides of the US/Mexico border. I focus on how these “knowledges” and concomitant experiences impact the ways we perceive and treat immigrant students who have all too often been viewed through deficit lenses that relegate them to the lowest expectations and outcomes in the classroom. I find that Mexican and Mexican-American families hold unusually sophisticated and relevant “knowledges” to mitigate their everyday lives. In this paper, I will refer to citizens of Mexico, whether they reside in Mexico or have crossed to the United States legally or without documentation for purposes of work, as Mexican. People who have crossed the border and are living in the US as legal residents or have gained citizenship are referred to as Mexican-Americans. They live a hybrid identity that is varied and dynamic, an issue that adds to the complexity of the content and contexts of this study. These families know and use these “knowledges” on a daily basis, yet they are not recognized by teachers in the US as a starting point to affirm and support immigrant children. Instead, immigrant children are relegated to the non-gifted and lower track classes where science is taught from an abstract and non-contextual and therefore less engaged basis. The approach I outline here, based on insights from my case study, can greatly improve teachers’ abilities to prepare their curricula for diversity in science education and science literacy as well as for broad expectations for student success.     

类比法在物理教学中的应用

类比法是借助于事物之间的相似性,通过比较将已经掌握的知识推移到新的研究对象的学习方法。在物理教学中,类比法不仅能帮助学生加深对物理概念、物理规律的理解和把握,在相似知识间的比较中,快捷地掌握新知识,同时也可以培养学生丰富的想象力和加强思维能力。     

Undoing diversity: knowledge and neoliberal discourses in colleges of education

In this article we analyze discourses of ‘diversity’ in colleges of education in Chile. We contend that the use of discourses of diversity, as reproducing the separation between mainstream subjectivities and those uncontained by the category of normal, is one of the ways universities align themselves with the rules of a democratic society, based on ideas of multicultural understandings and tolerant communities proliferated by inter-governmental institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and others. Our interest is to question the marginalization of cultural politics through the intensification of these discourses. At the same time, we explore the relations between the advancement of neutral discourses of difference and the value-free practices expressed in neoliberal educational agendas. We use discourse analysis to read interviews with future teachers. We understand students’ narratives as perpetuating normative ways of thinking and legitimating those knowledges promoted by institutional curricula.     

新疆高校大学生历史观教育探索

要使各族大学生树立正确的历史观,新疆高校必须大力抓好新疆历史以及民族史基本知识的教育。根据新疆大学生的特点,尽可能地依托历史事实,把握新疆的整体历史,在学习新疆历史知识的同时,还要学习其他少数民族的历史知识、中华民族整体历史知识。授课教师也必须是一个“史才”,增强历史观教育的实效性,为实现新疆跨越式发展和长治久安做出贡献。     

Searching for the Songlines of Aboriginal education and culture within Australian higher education

The introduction of spaces that encouraged the participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in higher education became a reality in the early 1980s. Since then, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators and leaders have worked tirelessly to find their ‘fit’ within the Western academy, which continues to impose a colonial, Western educative framework onto Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. More recently, universities are attempting to move towards a ‘whole of university’ approach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander higher education. To achieve such a major shift across the academy, Indigenous values, perspectives and knowledges need to be acknowledged as a strong contributor to the environments of universities in all core areas: student engagement, learning and teaching, research and workforce. In a move to achieving a ‘whole of university’ approach which revolves around Aboriginal culture and knowledges, the Wollotuka Institute at the University of Newcastle developed a set of cultural standards, as part of an international accreditation process, to guide a culturally affirming environment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and staff. This environment acknowledges the unique cultural values and perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In this paper, the authors explore, from an Indigenous Standpoint, the creation of a university environment that privileges Aboriginal values, principles, knowledges and perspectives. The paper exposes how traditional Aboriginal Songlines, particularly in Aboriginal education, were disrupted, and how the creation and emergence of a contemporary environment of Aboriginal educational and cultural affirmation works towards the re-emergence of Songlines within higher education.     

基于Web2.0的学生个人知识管理模型

Web2.0及其典型代表性软件RSS、维基、博客等为学生进行个人知识管理提供了零成本、零技术的环境和技术条件。Web2.0代表性软件在功能特点、技术优势等方面具有不同的侧重,综合运用它们的优势,构建基于Web2.0的学生个人知识管理实施过程模型,可帮助学生有效管理个人知识,为网络环境下学生个人知识管理的实施提供直观、具体的借鉴方法。     

Conversations on cultural sustainability: stimuli for embedding Indigenous knowledges and ways of being into curriculum

While Australian higher education agendas and literature prioritise Indigenous knowledges and perspectives across policy, curriculum and pedagogy, enacting this in practice remains problematic and contentious. Often the result is the inclusion of simplified Indigenous knowledges, rather than sustained engagement with and embedding of multiple and ‘messy’ ontological and epistemological positions. This paper explores ways of engaging with this ‘messiness’. Taking messiness as a focal point within our own context of teacher education at a regional university, this agenda and tension inform an ongoing dialogue about ways of assuring a conscious approach to cultural sustainability to embed, value and foreground Indigenous knowledges and ways of being and doing in curriculum. This endeavour can be conceptualised as a heuristic project, an ongoing conversation in response to multiple stimuli rather than a fixed endpoint or framework. In response to this exploration, this paper presents the stimuli for our conversation: situated, plural and reflexive knowledges that work together in inherently relational ways to nourish the cultural sustainability of Indigenous knowledges.     

‘Capitalising’ on community? Understanding and critiquing instrumentalist approaches to Indigenous schooling

This paper provides insights into non-Indigenous teachers’ efforts to engage proactively and productively with students to enhance their learning in a predominantly Indigenous community in northern Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon notions of ‘funds of knowledge’, forms of capital as part of community cultural wealth, Critical Race Theory, and ‘whiteness’ studies, the research explores and challenges how white teachers draw upon community as a form of ‘capital’ to enable them to foster their students’ learning. These efforts to ‘capitalise’ on community reveal the school as a site of struggle for genuinely inclusive educational practices. These struggles were evident in: teachers' and school administrators’ ostensive care about their students but struggles to translate this into robust expectations as part of a genuinely inclusive curriculum; the cultivation of social and cultural capital to learn about the nature of the communities in which teachers worked but a tendency to deploy such knowledges for more instrumentalist reasons as part of their engagement with both the ‘official’ curriculum and Indigenous students; and, a desire and capacity to develop connections between community cultural capital and more dominant forms of capital but in ways which do not adequately foreground Indigenous epistemologies as curriculum. The research reveals teachers’ efforts to develop understandings of community cultural wealth and the funds of knowledge within communities, but also how their understandings were partial and proximal, and how subsequent social and teaching practices tended to instrumentalise Indigenous perspectives and insights.