Motivations for older adults’ participation in distance education: A study at the National Open University of Taiwan

The paper presents an enabling framework for experiential learning that connects with reflexive modernity. This framework places an emphasis on learning with others and on the role of theory, practice and reflection. A sociological argument is constructed for an alternative framework for experiential learning that derives from social theory. It is argued that reflection in learning connects with the concept of reflexivity in contemporary social theory. The arguments are developed through discussion of the following themes: (a) How does reflective learning in post compulsory education align with the needs of learners and reflexive modernity? (b) How can experiential learning provide a framework for more reflexive learning in education?     

Theorising a model for teaching and assessing reflective learning in higher education

The importance of reflection in higher education and across disciplinary fields is widely recognised and it is generally included in university graduate attributes, professional standards and programme objectives. Furthermore, reflection is commonly embedded into assessment requirements in higher education subjects, often without necessary scaffolding or clear expectations for students. Despite the rhetoric around the importance of reflection for ongoing learning, there is scant literature on any systematic, developmental approach to teaching reflective learning across higher education programmes/courses. Given that professional or academic reflection is not intuitive, and requires specific pedagogic intervention to do well, a programme/course-wide approach is essential. This paper draws on current literature to theorise a new, transferable and customisable model for teaching and assessing reflective learning across higher education, which foregrounds and explains the pedagogic field of higher education as a multi-dimensional space. We argue that explicit and strategic pedagogic intervention, supported by dynamic resources, is necessary for successful, broad-scale approaches to reflection in higher education.     

Lifelong learning: a national trade union strategy in a global economy

The paper considers the role of trade unions in lifelong learning, their strategic approach to lifelong learning, and the opportunities and limitations set by the current stage of globalized capitalist development. The paper has four sections, the first of which considers the relationship between ‘modernization’ as a trade union project and concepts such as reflexive modernity and risk society which have structured much debate in the social sciences in recent years. Secondly, there is a discussion of the exact nature of the role of trade unions in education and training. While it will be suggested that recent developments have greatly increased the scope of trade union involvement in education and training, the third section of the paper will argue that these developments do not represent a coherent strategy on the part of unions, but more a series of responses to the complexity of the contemporary workplace. Based on a theoretical interrogation of data from a number of empirical and policy document sources,¹ the paper will argue that there is a need for conceptual clarity in this field. In the final section, the context of globalization will move to the foreground, in the context of a discussion on the relationship between national trade union policies and global capitalist development.     

From labour to learn 1 : the limits of labour society and the possibilities of learning society

This article presents sociologically and historically oriented reconceptualizations of the changing relationship between labour and learning in the reflexive modern era. First it claims that the whole modern division of labour does not merely reveal the nature by which we define morality but also it is a crucial condition for the whole solidarity of human kind. It creates between people the holistic system of rights and duties, which bonds them together permanently. Then the article comes to the conclusion that the first modern period, and the Keynesian welfare state policy with its homogenous workforce and policies of full employment, has come to its historical end. Consequently, the steady progress of the population along educational pathways into secure full‐time working lives can no longer be taken for granted. The process of the redivision of labour is liable to generate many problems for society and individual citizens since so many of our societal institutions and expectations have been constructed on parameters defined by the labour market, wage earning and promotions. The article then puts forward the scenario of the risk society where confidence coexists with fear, security with threat, credibility with ambivalence, and conflict over the distribution of goods turn out to be conflicts over distribution of bads. The author sees that education has always been seen as a major component in the great Enlightenment project, which has been connected and incorporated by the national state. Lifelong learning on the contrary has been less incorporated, less an early modern, but more a marginal and informal position, waving the flag for both individuals and groups from below. The article claims that the new era of reflexive modernization may see the rise of lifelong learning and perhaps also the partial collapse of the old pre‐modern educational system.

It may be that some of what we regard as European trends in adult education research are at the moment more programmes or wishes than facts, but an understanding of such trends can be helpful for future developments in our research. (Jarvis and Poggeler 1994: 10)     

Flexibility,reflexivity and reflection in the contemporary workplace

Within contemporary changes there is an increased reflexivity wherein social formations, organizations and individuals are required to change, to learn to change, and change to learn. Lifelong learning has become central to education and economic policy, with an increased emphasis on individuals, workplaces and providers of learning opportunities becoming more flexible. This article explores some of the evidence for the emergence of different workplace practices and identities in response to and as part of the development of reflexive modernization and the significance of pedagogies of reflection in these changes. It suggests that pedagogies of reflection are integral to reflexive modernization, flexible lifelong learners and changes in the workplace.     

Adult literacy,learning identities and pedagogic practice

This article discusses the relationship between persistence in adult literacy and numeracy programs, changes in the participants’ attitudes to engaging in learning and pedagogic practices using data from eight Scottish literacy education organizations. It argues that literacy learning can act as a resource that enables vulnerable adults to change their dispositions to learning, achieve their goals and make a transition towards their imagined futures. Pedagogic practices that operate from an approach that emphasized learners’ strengths, rather than their deficits, and critically interrogated learners’ experiences used as a resource for learning were the most successful in enabling this transition. Holistic provision that creates a supportive community of practice was found to be the most effective in bringing about the positive changes that learners identified they wished to make in their lives.     

Designing pedagogic strategies for dialogic learning in higher education

This article focuses on the pedagogic value of dialogue to strengthen pre-service teachers’ reflective practices and improve their knowledge about the power of talk for learning. Dialogic learning was introduced to a unit of study taken by a final-year cohort of students in an initial teacher education degree at an urban university in Australia. Various opportunities for dialogue were designed into the unit through blended learning such as face-to-face tutorials, social networks and Viva Voce contexts. In the face of mixed opinion on their efficacy, the author profiles the use of social networks as a means of incorporating more interactive discourse through Web 2.0 platforms in higher education. The mixed-methods study reports on data collected from focus group interviews run at the end of the semester. An analytical framework based on Alexander’s principles of dialogic learning is used to interrogate the data set. The results illustrate the positive impact that dialogue employed as a pedagogic tool had on the value students perceived of their learning experience. It is recommended that designs for learning in higher education incorporate iterative exchanges across a variety of blended learning contexts to encourage productive interactions between students, peers and tutors.     

Integrated teacher education programme for open distance learning: a model for development and implementation

Teacher education in India, including that offered by the open distance learning (ODL) system to thousands every year, imparts mainly pedagogic knowledge, although the need for integrated teacher education programmes has been underscored. As the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), an ODL institution, will develop an integrated Bachelor of Education programme for secondary-level teachers, a model based on the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework has been proposed for developing and implementing it. The model takes cognisance of the systemic challenges to TPACK-based teacher education, but it does not envision radical changes in IGNOU’s teacher education framework for addressing these challenges. It includes propositions with theoretical underpinnings for redesigning the major components of the framework while retaining its basic structure. The model has been described in terms of its rationale, its structure and the way it envisages the progress of teacher trainees from a phase of learning with the help of self-learning material designed for imparting integrated theoretical knowledge to one whereby they apply such knowledge in simulated situations, and finally moving on to a phase of situated learning during internship.     

Performativity and enjoyable learning

This paper takes critical lenses to interpret what students find enjoyable in their learning in specific ‘subject’ environments within the prevailing socio-economic climate in higher education. It considers student dispositions that emerged from dialogues with two groups of students attending a non-traditional university and taking vocational degrees within England, UK. We argue that although each higher education institute can become its own destiny, it can only do so within the boundaries of state policy and its technologies. Higher education, when affected by cultures of ‘performativity’, is arguably focused less on knowledge for ‘emancipation’ and its own sake and more on the ‘use value’ of its products. This paper argues that what is valued by these particular students in their learning and what gives them positive feelings as they engage with this process of learning is not altogether independent of the current governances shaping higher education.     

Problematizing science subject matter knowledge as a legitimate enterprise in primary teacher education

This paper is concerned with the process of how subject and pedagogic knowledge emerge through teachers' learning in science. It suggests that problematizing subject knowledge through direct experience of learning in science, particularly in those areas that are known to be difficult, constitutes a productive way of turning a deficit model of teacher subject knowledge into a positive experience with considerable potential for the development of pedagogy. The paper draws on exemplification of student learning to contextualize the discussion within current debate in science education concerned with conceptual change and metacognition. It is argued that the act of addressing what are problematic science concepts in their own learning, affords an opportunity for students to focus on the nature of the concepts being explored and how understanding of them might be developed. It is implied that a notion of ‘learning practice’ in university taught sessions, in addition to the embedded model of generating pedagogic insight through teaching experience in school placements, would constitute a productive mechanism for the synthesis of subject and pedagogic knowledge.     

Conceptualizing identity,learning and social justice in community-based learning

This paper explores the process of learning to become a social justice teacher, drawing in particular on Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue in order to theorize pre-service teachers’ identity negotiations. Interpretations of learning and identity are based on the content of pre-service teachers’ narratives about community-based learning. Supported by theoretically-sensitive ways of conceptualizing identity and social justice, the author develops an understanding of the ways pre-service teachers shape their identities through participating in community events. Implications for teacher education, in terms of the design and pedagogic practices, are presented with the intent of enabling the realization of social justice teacher education.     

Pedagogic practice in company learning: the relevance of discourse

In discussions of work-based learning in anglophone countries, a relatively new question concerns different learning opportunities for differentially positioned novices in the workplace. Basil Bernstein relates learners’ positioning with respect to knowledge and within a community of knowers to variations in a discourse underlying and regulating the transmission. This article describes modalities of pedagogic practice in companies that give rise to such specific positionings of learners and discusses their relationship to a pedagogic discourse for company learning. It does so using the case of German company vocational education in the ‘dual system’, where a distinct macro-social pedagogic discourse underlies and regulates the transmission in companies. The data are drawn from problem-centred interviews with dual system graduates and analysed from a social-realist stance in relation to Bernstein’s ‘framing’. Although for Bernstein, who draws predominantly on school-based research, the control over ‘framing’ is always with the transmitters, this article points to instances of acquirers taking control in the data and traces them to the particular pedagogic discourse underlying German vocational education. The article points to further research possibilities with the goal of reconstructing, in a rule-directed way, an implicit discourse underlying company learning that lacks explicit macro-social discursive regulations.     

Adoption of flipped learning in social humanities education: the FIBER experience in secondary schools

ABSTRACT

FIBER (Flipped Issue-Based Enquiry Ride) is a teacher-facilitated interactive pedagogic framework that the authors propose to integrate flipped learning into social humanities education. This paper reports a quasi-experimental study (with mixed methods) which examined the pedagogic effectiveness of FIBER in the authentic setting of formal curriculum learning and teaching. The study involved totally 611 Secondary-4 students from academically top, middle and bottom schools in Hong Kong. In comparison with the conventional issue-based enquiry learning approach, FIBER had different intensity of positive effects on the high, moderate, and low academic-achieving student participants. This paper provides researchers and educational practitioners with empirical evidence for supporting wider adoption of FIBER in social humanities education, as well as harnessing flipped learning in formal schooling. Apart from discussing the benefits, the authors also underline the challenges of FIBER and suggest future work.     

Innovative learning environments and new materialism: A conjunctural analysis of pedagogic spaces

Abstract

An Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development research priority, innovative learning environments (ILEs) have been translated into policy and practice in 25 countries around the world. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, learning spaces are being reconceptualised in relation to this policy work by school leaders who are confronted by an impetus to lead pedagogic change. The article contributes a conjunctural analysis of the milieu around the redesign of these education facilities. Recognising that bodies and objects entwine in pedagogic spaces, we contribute a new materialism reading of ILEs as these are instantiated in New Zealand. New materialism recognises the agential nature of matter and questions the anthropocentric narrative that frames the post-enlightenment conception of what it means to be human. The decentring of human subjects through a materialist ontology facilitates a consideration of the power of objects to affect the spatial politics of learning environments. The article traces a relationship between the New Zealand strategic plan for Education 2015–2021 and principal conceptions of ILE as the lived spaces of this policy actualisation and the disciplinary/control society conjuncture. Informed by theories of spatial practice, we argue that principals’ understandings of ‘space’ are integral to pedagogic approaches within open-plan spaces. A conjunctural analysis can expand the capacity to act politically. By examining the complex conditions of a political intervention, in this case ILEs, we trace the displacements and condensations of different sorts of contradictions, and thus open up possibilities for action.     

Preparing work-ready nurses: reflexive learning for diverse students in the Australian vocational education and training sector

This paper highlights a disjuncture between training frameworks designed to meet work-based competencies, and educational flexibility desirable to prepare diverse learners for fluid workplaces and roles. We describe a pilot study that explored teaching and learning practices in a vocational education and training Diploma of Nursing program. The study used qualitative approaches framed by a social view of learning as a reflexive process. Frictions emerged in how teaching and learning was fostered and how knowledge and skills were contextualised through nursing-accredited training packages. A case is made to enhance critical thinking and reflexive approaches to prepare work-ready nurse graduates.     

Lesson study: A collaborative approach to scholarship for teaching and learning in higher education

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has become an important field of inquiry, focusing on the development of new and critical pedagogic approaches in higher education. It is a broad field leading to the emergence of a number of contrasting perspectives concerning the development of insights into teaching and learning. In this article, we explore the potential for Lesson Study to act as a framework for reflecting on and developing pedagogic practice in the university sector. Originating in Japan over a century ago, Lesson Study is a collaborative tool for analysing and developing understanding of student learning. This makes it an ideal tool for capturing and interrogating new and critical insights into teaching and learning. An outline framework is suggested for developing the use of Lesson Study in higher education and we discuss how it can form a positive methodology for extending the work of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.     

Adult learning for citizenship: towards a reconstruction of the social purpose tradition

This paper seeks to review and re-frame the idea of social purpose adult education in the context of a contemporary Risk Society and the interface between modernist and postmodernist influences on learning. After interrogating and critiquing the social purpose tradition in adult education, it relates this to the changing nature and widening scope of adult learning within a developing Learning Society. The paper puts forward the idea of Adult Learning for Citizenship as a way of maintaining and reconstructing social purpose learning within a Risk Society and as a necessary challenge and counter-focus to the dominant discourse of Lifelong Learning shaped by the economic imperative and framed very much in terms of human capital. In developing this argument, the paper proposes a new framework for Adult Learning for Citizenship which consists of four different but overlapping dimensions of social purpose learning: learning for inclusive citizenship, for pluralistic citizenship, for reflexive citizenship and for active citizenship. Within this framework, it develops new rationales for social purpose adult learning linked to instructive examples of practice from a range of international contexts. In conclusion, it examines the implications of such a framework for the praxis of adult educators.     

Reflexive Teaching,Reflexive Learning

Abstract

This paper examines the way mismatches occur between what lecturers believe students understand when technical concepts are used and what the students actually make of those concepts. A hard look is given at certain ‘academic myths’ which block educational exchange, among them the notion shared by many that learning entails mainly the verbal regurgitation of what has been taught. How can lecturers achieve the empathy requisite for genuine teaching and how can students adopt attitudes that make genuine learning more possible? The paper answers these questions by sketching a notion of higher education as a willingness to modify what one thinks by an openness before the challenges of other values and beliefs; and by suggesting that an approach more self‐critically aware of the pedagogic process, utilizing methods such as the keeping of reflexive notebooks, can facilitate a more effective mode of learning.     

The rhythms of pedagogy: an ethnographic study of parenting education practices

Educational research is increasingly turning to conceptual frameworks from a range of disciplines in order to enrich understandings of education, pedagogy and learning. This paper draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre, specifically rhythmanalysis, to explore the nature and the function of pedagogy. The context is an ethnographic study of parenting education and pedagogic practices in a child and family service in Sydney. Three features of rhythmanalysis are discussed: kinds of rhythm, rhythms and bodies, and oppositions such as repetition and difference, fast and slow and secret and public. Through these concepts, intricate connections between rhythm and pedagogy are identified, including rhythms as providing a pedagogic imperative, rhythms as content and mechanisms at the heart of pedagogy and rhythms as outcomes of learning. The paper argues that rhythmanalysis opens up possibilities for new questions, different kinds of empirical sensibilities and distinctive accounts of pedagogy and learning in continuing education.     

Child-centred education and the promise of democratic learning: Pedagogic messages in rural Indian primary schools

Global and national agendas to achieve universal primary education and improve the ‘quality’ of school provision in developing countries have identified the need to reform classroom pedagogy. Since the 1990s, child-centred ideas in particular have been utilised in teacher-training programmes and school reforms across many parts of Africa and Asia with the intention of creating more child-friendly, democratic learning environments. Analysing episodes from classroom observations conducted in a rural Indian primary school, this paper reveals the tensions experienced by one teacher in handing over greater classroom control to pupils. It provides insight into the complex processes of pedagogic interaction, and sheds light on some of the possibilities and conditions for achieving child-centred pedagogic change in such development contexts.