Participatory evaluation: implications for improving electronic learning and teaching approaches

This paper examines the participatory approach used by a group of academic support staff in evaluating an academic professional development resource designed to support e‐learning and teaching. The resource, titled Designing Electronic Learning and Teaching Approaches (DELTA), showcases examples of electronic learning and teaching approaches developed at Monash University, Australia. The evaluation included individual and collective reflection, dialogue and action, drawing on the features of participatory action research. This paper explores the value of this critically reflective, participatory approach for evaluation to improve the use of new learning technologies, demonstrating how it provided a clear decision‐making framework for iterative improvement of the DELTA site by identifying consensus items for action and recording other items for later consideration, while also contributing to team members’ own professional development.     

Symbolic Storytelling,Freedom Movements,and Church Education: Cesar Chavez as Virtuoso of Identity

Freedom movements historically have shown power to transform social and personal identity. Absorbing the narrative of a movement can lead to something not unlike conversion. Accepting the truth of a movement's story implies change in who one believes oneself to be and may reorient one's life story. Movements like Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association of the 1960s offer a distinctive reading of history that refocuses individual and collective memory around a cause. In this article, I explore one movement's holistic approach and urge that church education should be re-imagined as comprehensive storytelling.     

Bridging knowledge: A collective undergraduate thesis development approach

While there are various approaches to gerontological and geriatrics (and social sciences) education globally, a component commonly included in undergraduate education is a final thesis project. In Turkey, the Department of Gerontology at Akdeniz University has undertaken a unique approach to thesis development that values and draws on accessing the greater expertise and knowledge of faculty and students through joint collaborations. We offer an overview of the eleven stages of a collective thesis development approach as an alternative to the conventional way of conducting oversight of undergraduate thesis projects. With four years of experience, observed benefits of a collective thesis development approach for students include the opportunity to draw on the comradery, insights, and experience of a plurality of educators and aspiring students while developing, executing, and documenting a thesis project. Benefits to advisors/educators include profiting from the strengths in other advisors and wider exposure to current research, findings, and methodological approaches. So while there may be multifold variations in curriculum content and educational approaches, it is of great importance that educators create “spaces” that give value to and foster the pursuit of collective wisdom through joint collaborations. (188 words)     

Impact in participatory health research: what can we learn from research on participatory evaluation?

Participatory Health Research is a collective term adopted globally for participatory action research in a health context. As an approach to research, it challenges current ways used within the health sciences to measure research impact as research, learning and action are integrated throughout the research process and dependent on context and participation. The literature on participatory evaluation is explored to see if it can offer some insights into how best to articulate impact. Similar debates are taking place particularly concerning the relationship between degree of participation and impact, how impact should be defined and the role of wider social forces on the evaluation process. A focus on core values, such as social justice, differentiates transformative evaluation from more pragmatic participatory evaluation, but this is poorly conceptualised in evaluation models.     

社会变迁中的个体生命——转述一个农村妇女的故事

这是一个"叶公好龙"的故事新编,是一个自以为有良知、关注弱势群体的女性学者面对若干农村劳动妇女的困惑和反省.笔者在叙述一个农村妇女的故事的基础上,试图就"研究的价值"、"个体的能动性"、"社会结构变迁中的个体生命"、"集体劳动"、"社会生活空间"等问题做一些清理,以寻找或联结一种"共同经验"和"共同记忆".     

Integrative Anthropological Method in History of Culture and Education

This is the story of three professors who found collective success in certain old-time approaches to teaching. Using three different first-person perspectives from Professors Burg, Piedmont, and Kamke, we examine some of the key components of such teaching orientation that may be helpful for professors navigating increased enrollments, while trying to engage students to learn not only the subject matter, but also, perhaps more importantly, about themselves as human beings.

The relevance of this classic approach is reflected in the fact that all of us, typically unawares, continue to apply, and expand on, the way of education to which we were introduced a long time ago. In essence, that old-time teaching showed us how to be, in the words of Angyal, simultaneously autonomous (i.e., being oneself, standing alone) and homonomous (belonging/surrendering to something greater than oneself).     

Measuring social capital among youth: applications in environmental education

Although critiqued for circular reasoning and lack of definitional and analytic clarity, social capital has garnered widespread interest in two areas relevant to environmental education (EE): the impact of family and community-level social capital on positive youth development and of community-level social capital in fostering collective action to manage natural resources. Although EE is normally considered for its value relative to environmental outcomes or natural capital, intergenerational, community, and other approaches to EE may also foster social capital. Drawing on Putnam’s definition of social capital, which emphasizes civic engagement, we developed and tested for reliability a survey to measure cognitive and structural attributes of social capital among youth. We conclude that although several attributes of our instrument are useful for use with youth aged 10–18 years in EE contexts, much more work needs to be done on conceptualizing and developing measures of social capital that are relevant to EE. Further, we suggest that social capital presents a framework for how EE programs can bring youth and adults together to create the conditions that enable collective action, as a complement to ongoing work in EE focusing on individual behaviors.     

An Exploration of the Relationship Among Teacher Efficacy,Collective Teacher Efficacy,and Goal Consensus

This study explored the relationships among individual teacher efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, and goal consensus/vision. Participants included 113 teachers of a high school located in the southwestern USA. During a teacher inservice meeting, teachers completed three surveys that measured the variables under study. Correlational and regression analyses were performed to examine the relationships among individual teacher efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, and goal consensus/vision. Collective teacher efficacy was found to be correlated with all of the other variables examined, but was most highly correlated with goal consensus/vision. Individual teacher efficacy, while related to collective teacher efficacy, was not found to be related to goal consensus/vision. Findings from this study suggest that, because individual teacher efficacy, collective teacher efficacy and goal consensus/vision are related, changing one could have an impact on the others. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

教育改革的逻辑:主体意图与行动路线

在基于平行时间的视角对中美俄三个大国教育改革的历史做了梳理之后,可以总结出"情境、主体、意图、行动、结果、评价和资源"是教育改革的基本要素,"价值与信念、治理与制度、资源与机会、教学与课程、评价与督导"是教育改革的基本观察点。随着主体层次变化,教育改革的复杂性也在相应变化。教育改革是改革惯习与场域文化的集体行动。一切教育改革都需从个体惯习找到突破口,并上升到场域文化的变化。在整个过程中,与意图相关的认知因素发挥着作用,同时,集体行动中因微观政治和社会互动的存在,教育改革也表现出复杂的动力学特征。要保证教育改革的效果,需要加强对教育改革的管理和评价。在行动科学的指导下改变学习观,创建学习型组织和学习型社会,是教育改革的行动逻辑。     

The Core Archetype of The Lottery

Shirley Jackson’s famous work The Lottery is an archetypal tragedy, with Sin as the core. This essay explains Sin in The Lottery and analyzes the story from an archetypal approach, finding collective violence is a kind of Sin which should be extinct in modern age.     

从电影《看上去很美》反思幼儿园教育——以福柯的规训理论为视角

影片《看上去很美》以幼儿园为观视场域,通过对幼儿园日常生活的纪实性场景呈现,聚焦了“方枪枪”的个体性存在状态以及幼儿园日常管理背后的诸多问题。在这个以个体存在与集体秩序相互纠葛的幼儿园故事里,或许福柯的规训理论有助于我们对此问题的认识。故而,从规范化活动、标准化管理以及等级化考核三个方面来剖析电影中幼儿园教育所存在的问题,进而引发我们对幼儿园教育中存在的相关问题的反思。     

A survey on evaluation practices in teaching and learning centres

There is general consensus that teaching and learning centres have a positive impact on promoting and supporting a culture that values teaching and learning, yet there is limited evidence on how centres evaluate their work. For this purpose, a survey was developed and administered to the directors of 88 Canadian centres; 46 of which completed the survey. In this paper, we share centres’ approaches to evaluation that emerged from the survey findings and the artifact analysis. By raising awareness of evaluation approaches, we are better positioned to identify further opportunities to develop a more systematic and coherent approach to evaluation.     

合作化小说“个人”故事的讲述及其问题——以马烽和《韩梅梅》为例

"集体"与"个人"之间的关系,是社会主义农村小说的一个极为重要的症结。由于前合作化时代并无"集体",两者的关系除了在利益层面的起源变化,更重要的,是它们在知识层面上的缘起。这预示着后来社会主义农村小说对于集体和个人话题的某种叙述范式。新中国教育部1953-1954年的教育整顿,造成了在个人认知的层面"集体"和"个人"的相遇,并引发了两者之间关系的难题。由此,"个人"的故事如何被讲述,将不仅仅与历史有关,同时也关乎文学自身。1954年马烽先生的小说《韩梅梅》,正是讲述了一个"个人主义"的故事,但是在历史化的视野上,它却呈现了多重隐晦与纠结的意味。     

Factors influencing pro-environmental collaborative collective behaviors toward sustainability transition – a case of renewable energy

The transformation to sustainable social systems requires both individual and collective pro-environmental behaviors. In this study, we quantified the impacts of factors that promote or impede collective pro-environmental behaviors around the use of renewable energy. An online questionnaire was completed by Japanese high school and college students, and covariance structure analysis was performed on groups with strong or weak intention to participate in collective behaviors and groups with rich or little experience with community activities. Our results revealed that the belief that a global environmental crisis can be avoided by individual efforts was negatively related to collective behavioral intention. We also found that environmental education that aimed to enhance attachment to community and social norms, would be effective for the youth with weak collective behavioral intention, but not so for youth with strong collective behavioral intention. It would be more effective for youth with strong collective behavioral intention to learn the practical approaches for community participation and raise awareness of the perceived importance of collective pro-environmental behaviors.     

Curriculum of Connection: What Does Sense8 Teach us About Love,Community and Responsibility in Days of Despair?

The TV show Sense8 tells the story of eight strangers from all around the world who realize they are connected to each other in a unique way. While taking their first steps of their quest to understand what bonds them and how they relate to one another, they are challenged by powerful people who want to capture them. Their individual journeys become a collective one, and through practicing a love ethic, they grow individually and collectively—an important lesson that can be taught in our classrooms. This article discusses what a love ethic entails and how it relates to restoring a sense of community within our schools and classrooms as a counteraction to neoliberal ideology and practices that harm our schools and atomize our communities.     

Individual | collective dialectic of free‐choice learning in a community‐based mapping project

In this article we describe an instance of free‐choice learning in the context of an eelgrass mapping and stewardship project (the Project) that covers over 500 kilometers of coastline in British Columbia, Canada, and involves 20 volunteer groups. In this ethnographic case study we sought to (a) explicate the relationship between individual and collective learning in this free‐choice setting and (b) understand how a network of Project participants could both constitute a free‐choice learning setting and support such a setting. We articulate a dialectic relationship between individual and collective learning, which, unfortunately in our view, has not yet been explored in educational research. In this relation, collective learning fosters individual learning and vice versa, whereby individuals produce resources in action and as outcomes of their activities. These resources expand the action possibilities of the collective, and thus constitute learning. The stability of the network of Project participants, which brings about and supports collective and therefore individual learning, rests on the flexibility of the Project that enables local innovation and tailoring of mapping activities as well as access to expertise and tools produced by other groups and Project partners. The possibilities that arise in the Project for local people to participate in relevant ways constitute free‐choice learning settings.     

Coding Classroom Interactions for Collective and Individual Engagement

This article characterizes “engagement in science learning” from a sociocultural perspective and offers a mixed method approach to measuring engagement that combines critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social network analysis (SNA). Conceptualizing engagement from a sociocultural perspective, the article discusses the advantages of a mixed methodological approach, and specifically how mixed methods can expand and enrich our understanding of engagement in certain science learning situations. Through this sociocultural viewpoint, engagement is defined as meaningful changes in disciplinary discourse practice, which captures the dialectical relationship between the individual and collective. The combined use of CDA and SNA integrates an individual's relative position in a group with her situated language use.     

Evaluating the effects of faculty development: theoretical framework and empirical implementation

ABSTRACT

This article implements a systemic framework to evaluate the long-term effects of a program characterized by a SoTL approach and a hybrid learning environment. The importance of the difference between the perception of long-term effects on individual professional development on the one hand and the development of collective practices on the other, is interpreted with reference to certain shortcomings of the faculty development program’s learning design and its non-alignment with institutional practices. Based on this in-depth research, concrete ways to take account of the complexity of faculty development programs are proposed, both for research into and development of such programs and their impact at individual and institutional levels.     

Well-founded social fictions: a defence of the concepts of institutional and familial habitus

This article engages with Atkinson’s recent criticisms of concepts of collective habitus, such as ‘institutional’ and ‘familial’ habitus, in order to defend their conceptual utility and theoretical coherence. In so doing we promote a flexible understanding of habitus as both an individual and a collective concept. By retaining this flexibility (which we argue is in keeping with the spirit of Bourdieuian philosophy) we allow for a consideration of the ways in which the individual habitus relates to the collective. We argue that, through recognition of the complexity of the interrelated habitus of individuals, collective notions go beyond individualist accounts that perceive only the relational aspects of the individual with the social field. Our approach allows us to consider social actors in relation to each other and as constitutive of fields rather than as mere individuals plotted in social space. These arguments will be woven through our responses to what Atkinson calls the three fatal flaws of institutional and familial habitus: namely, homogenisation, anthropomorphism, and substantialism.     

Civic education curriculum reform in Hong Kong: What should be the direction under Chinese sovereignty?

This article uses results from a cross-national analysis of the impact of varying approaches to civic education curriculum delivery on three learning outcomes, to draw conclusions about the value of a government-mandated compulsory, independent subject of civic education in the school curriculum. It starts from the context of Hong Kong, where there have been repeated calls for the government to reform civic education, and compares this context with that of England, where citizenship education was made a statutory subject in 2002. The article then examines from the cases of 25 societies whether a compulsory approach to and/or independent subject of civic education is associated with better learning of civic knowledge, knowledge of democracy, and patriotism. Finding that the impact of curricular approaches is somewhat negligible taking other factors into consideration, the article concludes that civic education reformers should consider the costs of limiting school autonomy in curriculum delivery.