Challenging the tyranny of the five‐paragraph essay: teachers and students as semiotic boundary workers in classroom and digital space

This article addresses several challenges faced by educators and students in English classrooms in the US–Mexico borderlands region that will resonate with educators more broadly. I present how Ms Smith, the predominately Latino students in her high school writing class and I moved beyond what Ms Smith called the “tyranny of the five‐paragraph essay” used for standardised tests so that students were able to make personally and academically meaningful arguments in their writing. I examine how we collaboratively mobilised interests, motivations and diverse semiotic resources across out‐of‐school and in‐school contexts in the process of developing multimodal and hybrid genres and texts. First, I describe how Ms Smith and I crafted hybrid, digitally mediated classroom spaces and essay assignments informed by students' identity and literacy practices within digital networks. Next, I examine how three Latina students used semiotic resources and issues circulating in the different spaces of their lives to confidently argue their perspectives within the hybrid genres we created. From this collaborative work, I suggest that thinking of students and teachers as “semiotic boundary workers” provides a useful framework for practitioners who want to enable young people to draw on their practices and digital tools and engage their expansive, networked and creative affordances in academic contexts.     

Learning in the liminal space: a semiotic approach to threshold concepts

The threshold concepts approach to student learning and curriculum design now informs an empirical research base comprising over 170 disciplinary and professional contexts. It draws extensively on the notion of troublesomeness in a ‘liminal’ space of learning. The latter is a transformative state in the process of learning in which there is a reformulation of the learner’s meaning frame and an accompanying shift in the learner’s ontology or subjectivity. Within the extensive literature on threshold concepts, however, the notion of liminal space has remained relatively ill-defined. This paper explores this spatial metaphor to help clarify the difficulties that some teachers observe in the classroom in regard to their students’ understanding. It employs a novel and distinctive approach drawn from semiotic theory to to provide some explanatory insight into learning within the liminal space and render it more open to analysis. The paper develops its argument through four distinct phases. Firstly it explores the spatial metaphor of liminality to gain further purchase on the nature of this transformative space. The second section introduces semiotic theory and indicates how this will be used through a series of graphical and visual devices to render the liminal space more open to analysis. The third section then employs semiotic analysis to nine dimensions of pedagogical content knowledge to gain further insight into what may characterise student conceptual difficulty within the liminal state. The fourth and concluding section emphasises the role of context in conceptual discrimination before advocating a transactional curriculum inquiry approach to future research in this field.     

Transformational classroom leadership: a novel approach to evaluating classroom performance

In higher education, student evaluation of teaching is widely used as a measure of an academic’s teaching performance despite considerable disagreement as to its value. This paper begins by examining the merit of teaching evaluations with reference to the factors influencing the accuracy of the teaching evaluation process. One of the central assumptions on which student evaluation of teaching is based is that there is a relationship between student achievement and student rating of teachers. However, the findings of the majority of studies do not support this assumption. The absence of a strong link between student achievement and teaching evaluations suggests that there is scope for examining other approaches to measuring effective classroom dynamics. This paper presents such an approach based on the notion of transformational classroom leadership.     

Power,participation and decision making in the primary classroom: children as action researchers

This article discusses a project focused on children researching their role in decision making in their classrooms and schools, with a view to increasing their involvement. The action research project was carried out by children, their class teachers and university researchers in six Norfolk primary schools from 2004 to 2006. As the project aimed to introduce more participatory approaches to decision making in classrooms, this necessarily had implications for the ways in which adults worked with children as action researchers. The article explores the constraints encountered by both children and teachers in sharing decisions and in carrying out action research, and identifies two dimensions: the teachers’ thinking and action, as well as children’s research and decision making. The teachers struggled with their need to mediate the project aims in the context of the changing nature of their professional role in the current target‐driven school culture.     

Intermingling and bumpiness: Exploring meaning making in the discourse of a science classroom

In this study we capture and analyse in qualitative terms the conversational rhythm—the ebb and the flow of meaning making—in a Year 5 class in order to understand when and how teacher and students succeed in developing shared understandings, and when and how they encounter difficulties. We use the two contrasting concepts of intermingling and bumpiness to catch the phenomenological aspect of time in the science class, which is constituted by the voices of the teacher and the students as they come together to construct disciplinary knowledge. It is a collaborative action research that sheds light on the struggles and possibilities that arise in a science class as a teacher enacts a socio-cultural perspective and engages his students in collecting and analysing experimental data and reasoning through a particular model.     

Mobile response system: a novel approach to interactive and hands-on activity in the classroom

Mobile devices are being used profusely in the classrooms to improve passive learning environments and to enhance student comprehension. However, with respect to students’ active involvement in problem solving activities, the typical usage of the mobile devices in answering multiple choice and true/false questions is not adequate and the use of mobile devices need to be expanded to include dynamic and interactive problem-solving activities to better satisfy students’ learning needs. To facilitate such interactive problem solving using mobile devices, a comprehensive software environment is necessary. This paper details the design, deployment and evaluation of Mobile Response System (MRS) software that facilitates execution and assessment of multi-step in-class interactive problem-solving activities using mobile devices. MRS is an active learning tool, which engages students with the visual representation of a problem that spans on multiple screens, allows them to interact with that, and makes them realize the consequences of their actions instantly and visually. The immediate and automated grading feature of MRS enables a feedback-driven and evidence-based teaching methodology, which is important to improve the quality of classroom learning. MRS is designed to be independent of any interactive problem or its domain. Therefore, it allows easier integration of interactive activity Apps developed by others and can be used in any discipline. The results obtained from software metrics and runtime performance data verified the quality of the software. Additionally, the in-class assessment data verified that the MRS software is a helpful intervention for improving student comprehension and satisfaction.     

Education for children with a chronic health condition: an evidence‐informed approach to policy and practice decision making

Children managing chronic health conditions face many obstacles which can impede their learning during periods of hospitalisation. In one particular hospital, a team of educators deemed it necessary to take a personalised learning approach in order to maintain students’ educational progress, namely making use of individual learning plans (ILPs). This team adopted an evidence‐informed practice (EIP) approach to the issue in order to persuade administrators of the need for change. The successful implementation of the EIP approach led to the inclusion of the ILP form in patients’ medical records, which is thought to be a first for Australia. Although EIP is regarded highly by practitioners and policy makers, there can be difficulties when implementing this approach. This study aims to identify the enabling features that permit EIP to be successfully implemented and to examine the ways in which EIP can lead to improved practice.     

From a social to a cultural approach in the study of cognitive activities: The fundamental role of semiotic systems

The consideration of the semiotico-cultural dimension of cognitive development has failed to appear in most of the studies conducted in the psychosociology of cognitive constructions. The theoretical and epistemic implications which follow from it are discussed in relation to the contribution of the pragmatic and dialogical approaches of Peirce and Vygotsky. Recent research on the cognitive effects of the social signification of tasks can provide evidence of the semiotic dimension of social contexts of the knowledge insertion and thus introduce the notion of ‘virtual social reality’. A new interpretation of the effects of the performance transfers, observed in this kind of studies is proposed. The traditional explanations in terms of social experience and social marking are questioned through original research that whose results illustrate the fundamental role of the use and self-appropriation of sign systems.     

Drugs in the classroom: A historical approach to drug education

This article suggests various techniques and strategies for integrating historical research methods into the drug education classroom. While most criminal justice programs offer courses on drug education, instruction has typically concentrated on policy issues. With little historical perspective on the roots of the drug problem, students are too often left with a one-dimensional perspective: that all illegal drug use should be criminalized. Like many recent historical events, the roots of the drug problem remain a distant abstraction to the current generation of criminal justice students. A historical approach to this subject using historiographic methods can lead to a better understanding of the cyclic nature of the U. S. drug problem and policies over the past century.     

Teleology as a tacit dimension of teaching and learning evolution: A sociological approach to classroom interaction in science education

Teleology has been described as an intuitive cognitive bias and as a major type of student conception. There is controversy regarding whether teleological explanations are a central obstacle to, are legitimate in, or are even supportive of science learning. However, interaction in science classrooms has not yet been investigated with regard to teleology. Consequently, this study addresses the question of how teleological explanations emerge in science classroom interactions about evolution and how teachers and students address emerging teleology. In this article, we introduce a theoretical and methodological framework drawing from the sociology of knowledge and systems theory, suggesting that this framework may enrich the understanding of knowledge construction and of social practices in the science classroom because it enables distinguishing between explicit and tacit knowledge. We investigated seven secondary school units about evolution and present data from four grade-12 classes in Germany, a country with very few creationists, to contrast two ways in which teleology is addressed. In the first type, the teachers combine intentional and need-based teleological explanations with aspects of scientific theories in an ambiguous way. Contrastingly, in the second type, the teachers construct a duality between correct mechanistic and incorrect teleological explanations by discrediting preceding scientific theories. In the discussion, we argue that the presented sociological approach can also be valuable in other science education contexts, such as creationism, the nature of science and socio-scientific issues, because classroom interaction involves tacit communication, such as a tacit epistemology, which are essential grounds for the students' knowledge construction.     

Theoretical triangulation as an approach for revealing the complexity of a classroom discussion

In this paper we explore the value of theoretical triangulation as a methodological approach for the analysis of classroom interaction. We analyze an excerpt of a whole‐class discussion in history from three theoretical perspectives: interactivity of the discourse, conceptual level raising and historical reasoning. We conclude that using theoretical triangulation enables us to relate the perspectives of the teacher, the students and the domain to each other, which provides us with deeper insight into the complex phenomenon of classroom interaction. The analyses reveal the complexities the teacher faces when trying to elicit and promote collaborative knowledge construction and the dilemma of promoting student participation, on the one hand, and deepening the quality of reasoning, on the other.     

In practice: The multimedia CD as a new approach to first‐year reading programs

Buffalo State College's search for a text for its common reading ended not in the selection of a book but in the creation of a CD.The CD is now being used to spark conversations across the campus.     

Individual and group meaning‐making in an urban third grade classroom: Red fog,cold cans,and seeping vapor

We examined third graders' understandings of condensation using an expanded notion of the Emergent Perspective, a reflexive consideration of individual and group meaning‐making situated in the culture of the classroom. Data were collected from two small groups of students in an inquiry‐based, urban classroom during a unit on the water cycle. Measures included conceptual pre‐/posttests, interviews, written work, and discourse analyses of a science lesson. Although we identified the supportive role of the teacher's explicit assessments of children's ideas, within the small groups, the force that most potently shaped meaning‐making was students' persuasive power, which was in part influenced by the rhetorical moves employed. Specifically, students' evaluative comments (a type of rhetorical move) about contributions of other group members seemed to be particularly persuasive in these groups. Evaluative comments, apart from students' academic status, were shown to be an important influence in not only social knowledge production but also in individual internalization. Our explanation focuses on the particular discursive practices as intellectual resources of urban students, but we are also mindful of the cognitive complexity of the material and the developmental abilities of the students. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 1032–1061, 2005     

Improving classroom dynamics to support students' learning and social inclusion: a collaborative approach

In this article, Mary Doveston and Marian Keenaghan discuss their work with teachers and students in developing more effective and satisfying interpersonal relationships in the classroom. Their approach focuses on increasing the capacity of a classroom community to address and measure its progress in the social and emotional competencies which that community has identified as being important. The principles of Appreciative Inquiry and Solution Focused Thinking underpin their approach to working with students and teachers, with the researchers supporting teachers to facilitate student participation in a process which they have described as ‘Growing Talent for Inclusion’ (GTi).     

Relations of social‐emotional functioning and kindergarten academic achievement in children of immigrants

Nearly one in four students residing in the United States is from an immigrant family and these children's school readiness is related to their parent's nativity and other sociodemographic characteristics. Social‐emotional skills are an important conduit for academic development, yet these relations have not been explored for children from immigrant families. This study utilized the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011, a nationally representative sample of 13,400 students in the United States, to compare the social‐emotional development of kindergarten students from immigrant and nonimmigrant families, and to determine the relations of social‐emotional functioning to kindergarten achievement. Results indicate elevated social‐emotional functioning among children from immigrant families, particularly those who emigrated immigrated from Mexico, compared with children of U.S.‐born parents. Parent nativity predicted reading achievement, but not mathematics performance, even when controlling for sociodemographic factors and social‐emotional skills. This study suggests an immigrant advantage in early social‐emotional development. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Retracted: The application of a multi‐attribute decision‐making algorithm to learning management systems evaluation

Recently, because of the rapid increase in the popularity of the Internet, the delivery of learning programmes has gradually shifted from local desktop to online‐based applications. As more and more technological tools become available for online education, there is an increasing interest among educators and other professionals in the application of these tools with regard to online courses. In large‐scale operations, online learning management systems (LMSs) can save cost and time. LMSs are software applications that comprise a suite of tools for learning and teaching online. In conventional educational settings, online LMSs can help to improve the speed and effectiveness of the educational process, communication among learners, and also between staff and students. There are a large number of open‐source and commercially available LMSs on the marketplace, and one of the problems facing an administrator or instructor is how to choose the LMS that can meet his/her needs. This paper describes a software system developed by the author to aid in the selection of a suitable LMS. The software is a web‐based decision support system, titled Easy Way to Evaluate LMSs, and is based on using a multi‐attribute decision‐making algorithm for the effective selection of an LMS.