Playing with Moon Sand: a narrative inquiry into a teacher’s experiences teaching alongside a student with a chronic illness

This paper inquires into the experiences of an early childhood educator named Claire who taught a young girl with a chronic illness at East Willows Elementary School, a western Canadian elementary school. Using narrative inquiry as the methodology, Claire’s experiences in her curriculum making alongside Madeline a young girl with Turner syndrome were explored and analyzed. In navigating through this curriculum around chronic illness, Claire negotiated liminal spaces between health and unhealth, sickness and wellness, capability and desire using stories of playful curriculum making. Through these liminal spaces, Claire created forward-looking stories of a new curriculum; a curriculum defined by playfulness, counterstories of play, the lived and planned curriculum, and the sharing of authority. This playful curriculum, this curriculum of play, became the negotiated story to live by for Claire and Madeline at East Willows Elementary School.     

Where there is no hope: a teacher’s experience with homelessness

Stereotypical notions of who experiences homelessness frame how educational institutions approach policy and program development. This life history of a teacher challenges assumptions by providing an in-depth look at a mother’s struggle to find stability.     

Young children’s embodied interactions with a social robot

Educational technology research and development - This study examined the affordances of an embodied humanoid robot to engage children in play and learning from the perspective of embodied...     

Takayasu’s arteritis associated with Crohn’s disease

Takayasu’s arteritis (TA), also known as the “pulseless disease,” is a chronic vasculitis of the aorta and aortic branches. TA with Crohn’s disease is rare and has not been documented in China before. In this paper we report on a case of Takayasu’s arteritis associated with concurrent Crohn’s disease. A 17-year-old Chinese male developed upper limb sourness and a sensation of fatigue, and his upper limb pulses were absent. He was diagnosed with TA and underwent an axillary artery bypass with autologous great saphenous vein on the left subclavian artery. After the surgery, he regained the normal blood pressure. This patient also had years of diarrhea and developed an anal canal ulcer, and was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease and ulcerative colitis before. Five months after the TA surgery, he was hospitalized for severe stomachache and diarrhea and was finally diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. The possible pathophysiological mechanisms responsible for concurrent existence of TA and Crohn’s disease may be associated with immune disorders, especially autoimmunity.      

Tracing a developer’s development: a self-study in teaching

Abstract

In this article, I trace how my teaching has changed as I have become increasingly involved in educational development. I divide my career into three phases (pre-educational development, part-time educational development, and full-time educational development) and analyze qualitative and quantitative data from multiple sources of evidence in each phase: teaching statements, syllabi, and student evaluations of teaching. This self-study reveals specific, primarily positive ways my teaching has changed. The results suggest that educational development may not only improve the teaching of its intended recipients, but also those responsible for supporting them. Implications for the field of educational development are explored.     

Enacting President Trump’s leadership contract with educators: toward a communal leadership perspective

This article proposes the communal leadership framework as a leverage for reciprocal educational policy in uncertain and turbulent times. It is argued that leadership at the policy level should abandon the seductive dance with the ‘self’ where knowledge resides at a specific location in the system (policy-makers’ perceptions and agendas) for a more holistic, integrated, and collaborative framework – that of communal leadership – in order to develop effective policies suitable for today's fast-changing educational world. This article presents the epistemological premises postulated as upholding the communal nature of leadership, while raising conceptual as well as practical questions in this context.     

Analyzing children’s computational thinking through embodied interaction with technology: a multimodal perspective

Educational technology research and development - The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first present a methodological framework for the analysis of embodied interaction with technology captured...     

Understanding student engagement with peer feedback on master’s theses: a Macau study

While research on peer feedback in second language (L2) writing at university/college level has proliferated, scholars have conducted less research on peer feedback in L2 academic and scholarly writing. Drawing upon multiple sources of data including semi-structured interviews, stimulated recalls, online interviews via WeChat, first and revised drafts of master’s theses, peer written feedback, audio-recordings of oral peer feedback conferences and the finalised master’s theses, this case study examines how three master’s students affectively, behaviourally and cognitively engaged with peer feedback on drafts of their thesis in a Master of Education programme at a Macau university. The findings show that the relationship between sub-constructs within each dimension and the relationships between the three dimensions of student engagement were interconnected in a dynamic and complex way. While there were individual differences among the three students’ engagement, their affective engagement could promote or negatively influence their behavioural and cognitive engagement. This study builds our understanding of the multifaceted nature of master’s students’ engagement with peer feedback. It provides pedagogical implications about how peer feedback can enhance the quality of master’s students’ academic writing and sheds light on how to guide students to establish scholarly learning communities in higher education.     

Media’s moral messages: assessing perceptions of moral content in television programming

This study extends the examination of moral content in the media by exploring moral messages in television programming and viewer characteristics predictive of the ability to perceive such messages. Generalisability analyses confirmed the reliability of the Media’s Moral Messages (MMM) rating form for analysing programme content and the existence of 10 moral themes prevalent in television media. Standard regression analyses yielded evidence indicating viewers’ moral expertise, as measured by the Defining Issues Test (DIT), familiarity with the programme and level of education predicted their ability to perceive moral messages in a television drama popular in the USA at the time of data collection. Identification of patterns in moral content represented in television programming, as well as knowledge of how viewer characteristics relate to their ability to perceive such content, can provide parents and educators with a means for better comprehending messages regarding human interaction to which they or their children are exposed.     

Life’s Span, Global Warming and Ethics: Do Counsellors Have a Part to Play in Averting a Potential Catastrophe?

In this paper I take the position that global warming is the most serious threat to the well-being, including the psychological health, of all peoples in all parts of the world. It is of particular significance to indigenous peoples: for example, those from small island states, those who inhabit low-lying deltas, and those who do not have access to economic resources that might afford protection or escape. It becomes a moral issue in that our actions today stand to impact negatively on others in the immediate and foreseeable future. Taking a critical discursive view, the paper asks, is there a connection between counselling and climate change, and do counsellors have a role to play in addressing this challenge? The paper concludes that counsellors do, at the very least, have a mandate to consider the implications of global warming and that there are professional, ethical and theoretical possibilities for useful interventions. The paper, therefore, aims to stimulate further debate, discussion and appropriate action.     

Relaxing Design Students’ Sketch Inhibition: Experiences with Theoretical Grounding and Impermanent Media

This article reports about a study developed to understand the effectiveness of instructional strategies to manage sketch inhibition in design students through studio-based pedagogy. Sketch inhibition among students and recent graduates of design programs is a prominent aspect of the prevailing digitization of the design industry and education. While traditional and digital media are ideally complementary tools to facilitate the complex process of designing, studio instructors struggle to effectively integrate both into their students’ conceptions and practices. Primary data sources were ethnographic fieldnotes, semi-structured interviews, and students’ responses to open-ended survey questions. Whiteboards used as an impermanent medium, requests for quantity of sketches, and gentle enforcement of time limits were incorporated into studio practices on the foundation of theoretical grounding. Students understood the purpose and advantages of using hand sketches at strategic moments during the design process. Inhibited students responded to this combination of interventions by relaxing enough to focus on engaging with the relevant design tasks rather than focusing on how best to avoid them. Production of rich records, documenting their projects’ progression, served as supporting evidence that sketching had become a more normal and accepted part of the design process than for previous studio cohorts. The authors suggest more experimentation with these strategies and propose that sketching instructors prioritize and nurture ‘thinking sketches’ over ‘persuasive sketches’ to transfer attention from the representation of design solutions toward the design process and the development of mature design solutions.     

Exploring a Science Teacher’s Uncertainty with Integrating Engineering Design: An Action Research Study

This study examines a fifth grade science teacher’s attempts at integrating engineering design using the construct of uncertainty. Collaborative action research served as a supportive mechanism to uncover and confront the teacher’s uncertainties. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews, reflections, classroom observations, lesson plans, and student work. Data analysis entailed the use of grounded theory. Findings from this study revealed that teaching science through engineering design is both challenging and problematic. Underpinning the teacher’s pedagogical experiences was the constant force of uncertainty, in various forms, and how her sense of doubt was beneficial rather than problematic.     

On other people’s terms: schools’ encounters with disabled students

According to Swedish legislation as well as laws pertaining to disabled citizens, Swedish schools are to be accessible for all children and adolescents. This implies that disabilities of any type must not be allowed to prevent students from completing their schooling on their own terms. The purpose of this research was to study the degree to which the Swedish school is accessible for all students. A total 200 professionals and politicians were interviewed alongside more than 30 upper secondary school students. The results show that the ambition level is high with regard to adapting educational programmes for the disabled student group, especially in the rhetoric of politicians and civil servants. However, in practice, teachers and head teachers have considerably more difficulty in delivering to students satisfactory schooling. This is often due to conflict between the striving for inclusion and the difficulty adapting learning environments during everyday classroom instruction. By use of institutional theory the study demonstrates that intentions as described of responsible politicians are altered in the system when confronted with the institutional reality. Schools’ meeting the natural variation of difference in the student group causes complications in educational work in which various solutions are attempted. When educational differentiation is found wanting in attempts to meet students’ various needs, various types of special solutions are sought, which have the objective of reducing heterogeneity among the students. This type of organisational differentiation seems accepted and legitimised where it concerns students having various kinds of school‐related difficulties, while seeming to create a disadvantage for some other students. One should understand this as thought coercion, where pressure from professionals in schools leaves little room for other strategies and in which the concept of the inclusive school is challenged.