Faculty peer networks: role and relevance in advancing agency and gender equity

Organisational efforts to alter gender asymmetries are relatively rare, yet they are taking place in a number of universities. In the USA, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, ADVANCE programmes implement a number of interventions to improve the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women faculty. This study focused on one common intervention, faculty peer networks, and the role they play in gender equity reform. Longitudinal and cross-sectional qualitative data indicate that such peer networks function as catalysts for women's career agency, and challenge gendered organisational practices. Two key features of the peer networks, their structure and internal dynamics, facilitate these outcomes. At the same time, peer networks are limited by design in promoting structural change and must be implemented in concert with other forms of policy and structural change to be effective mechanisms for gender equity reform.     

On personal and collective dimensions of agency in doctoral training: medicine and natural science programs

The purpose of the present study was to investigate knowledge-creating agency by examining doctoral students' accounts of their pursuits, using structured interviews. We examined all of the talk apparently related to agency of 13 doctoral students taking part in collective doctoral training in two, highly regarded Finnish research communities (natural science and medicine). The doctoral process involved the participants pursuing article-based theses based on collectively shared research problems and journal articles co-authored with the supervisor and other senior researchers. Based on the qualitative analysis of the interviews, three categories of agentic talk were identified, respectively, for three proposed types of knowledge-creating agency: personal, distributed, and ‘object-related’. Personal agency involved participants' reflection on their academic competence, self-efficacy, and personal strengths and weaknesses. Distributed agency played an important role in assisting these participants overcoming challenges; this includes sharing of expertise, receiving social support, and having a sense of collective efficacy. Object-related agency, in turn, represented integration of a doctoral student's efforts with those of her immediate research community while pursuing shared research objects (e.g., co-authored articles). Apart from issues of agency which, the authors propose, are raised in the interviews, the data provide content-rich accounts of the collective nature of doctoral experiences.     

Computing for all?: Examining critical biases in computational tools for learning

Given the increased need for broadening participation in computing, there must be a focus not just on providing culturally relevant content but also on building accessible and inclusive computational tools. Most efforts to design culturally responsive computational tools redesign surface features, often through making nominal changes to add cultural meaning, yet the deeper structural design remains largely intact. We take a critical perspective towards novice programming environments to elucidate how the underlying structure privileges particular epistemologies and cultures. In this paper, we examine how the cultural practice of storytelling is supported and/or inhibited within novice programming tools. We draw upon the experiences of 38 Native American youth, who worked in teams to create place-based, interactive stories and games for their community. Findings offer insights to the embedded cultural biases that exist in the structures of computational tools. We discuss insights for how to address cultural biases and promote deeper integration of cultural practices in future designs of culturally responsive computational tools.

Practitioner Notes

What is already known about this topic?

• Culturally responsive computing connects computing content heritage and vernacular cultural practices.
• “Black boxing,” or lack of transparency in how it works, in computational tools makes it difficult for novices to enter computing cultures.
• Design tools are embedded with particular ways of being, knowing, valuing and doing.

What this paper adds?

• Thirty-eight novice learners’ computational designs were shaped by the ways in which a computational tool privileged particular knowledge systems.
• Storytelling, as a critical cultural practice, especially in Indigenous cultures, is heavily constrained by the design structure of computational tools.
• Computational tools are cultural artifacts with deeply embedded epistemological, ontological and axiological biases, which directly frame what learners can do with these tools.

Implications for practice

• Collaborative, community-based design processes could mitigate the cultural biases that persist in computational tools.
• Transparency in computation tools in critical to broadening participation in computing cultures.
• Culturally responsive design of computational tools at the structural level is required to build inclusive computing cultures.

     

A social realist perspective on student learning in higher education: the morphogenesis of agency

Contemporary critiques of student learning research call for new theoretical and methodological approaches. This article proposes a social realist approach to this research, using the morphogenetic theory of sociologist Margaret Archer. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated by reference to an empirical study of engineering students at a South African university, using narrative analysis. In the article itself, two narratives are given in some detail, illustrating the key outlines of the analysis. Students’ emerging personal identities are shown to be highly dependent on their social backgrounds, yet when in the university the possibilities for the morphogenesis of student agency are very constrained. A critical interrogation of these findings proposes that a true higher education should facilitate the development of an enlarged sense of agency for students.     

Measuring equity in educational effectiveness research: the properties and possibilities of quantitative indicators

There has never been a published discursive review of equity measurement methodology in educational effectiveness research, though the literature on equity is growing. This paper sets out several indices that have the potential to measure it in terms of pupil attainment or in terms of how far a school (or group of schools) is from having a ‘fair’ proportion of its success attributable to a ‘fair’ proportion of its student population. The paper explores the principles and properties of three relatively simple metrics (the Range Ratio family of measures, the Coefficient of Variation and McLoone's Index) leading to two complex measures (Theil's T and finally to the Gini-based Attainment Equity Index). The paper investigates the warrant that the measures have (or do not have) for measuring equity by exploring them in a theoretical way so that their strengths, provenances and presumptions reveal themselves, and concludes with a discussion – the first of its kind in educational effectiveness research – on their desirable characteristics and properties. Worked examples from 2009 to 2011 UK pupil attainment data are presented in the Notes by way of worked illustrations, as are another two indices: the Variance of the Logs and the Atkinson Index.     

Reconciling rigour and impact by collaborative research design: study of teacher agency

This paper illustrates a new way of working collaboratively on the development of a methodology for studying teacher agency for social justice. Increasing emphasis of impact on change as a purpose of social research raises questions about appropriate research designs. Large-scale quantitative research framed within externally set parameters has often been criticised for its limited potential for capturing the contexts and impacting change, while smaller, locally embedded, mostly qualitative inquiries have been questioned on the grounds of their limited generalizability and sometimes compromising research rigour. New ways of working collaboratively are increasingly explored as a way of reconciling research rigour and impact. The paper presents the procedures for designing a study that is both methodologically rigorous and potentially impactful. Twelve researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in Scotland were extensively involved in designing a mixed-method study of teacher agency for social justice. The Critical Communicative Methodology was employed to establish egalitarian dialogue between researchers and practitioners. The procedures and the resulting research tools can be used in future studies, including large-scale quantitative analysis. The paper discusses the challenges of ownership, choice of methods, and knowledge transfer, that need to be addressed in these ways of working.     

Teacher facilitating of group learning in science with digital technology and insights into students’ agency in learning to learn

ABSTRACT

The study provides an insight into how teachers may facilitate students’ group learning in science with digital technology, which was examined when Norwegian lower secondary school students engaged in learning concepts of mitosis and meiosis. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the teacher’s assistance draw on Galperin’s conceptualisation of learning.

Findings reveal patterns in the teacher’s guidance: the teacher fulfilled the orienting, executive and controlling functions while assisting students in identifying the key features of mitosis and meiosis and solving the compare and contrast task. The teacher relied on and interplayed with the available mediational resources: compare and contrast task, digital animations, and collaborating peers. However, it was the compare and contrast task that demonstrated an approach to study scientific concepts which may have contributed to the development of learners’ understanding about to engage in learning in science. By adopting such an approach, learning activity has the potential to not only help students to achieve learning outcomes but it acquires a functional significance, becoming a tool in the learning process aimed at the development of students’ as learners. The digital animations, in turn, demonstrated scientific processes that were otherwise invisible for students and triggered group discussions. The study, therefore, raises questions about the need for practitioners’ awareness of the type of support the technology and other resources provide to assist both conceptual learning and enhancing students’ agency in learning to learn.     

Identity in science learning: exploring the attention given to agency and structure in studies of identity

This paper explores the ways in which the concept of identity has been conceptualised and studied within science education. The Personality and Social Structure Perspective is used to examine the attention paid by researchers to three levels of identity analysis: personality, interaction and social structure. Tracing the development of science identity studies and the resulting body of literature reveals that most authors have focused their attention on aspects of identity related to individual agency to the exclusion of issues of social structure. This paper argues that this attention is related to the position of communities of practice as the dominant theoretical framework for identity studies and argues that researchers need to consider broader frameworks that encourage the integration of ideas at all three levels of analysis. Broadened methodological approaches, including mixed methods, are also advocated as a way to increase consideration of the level of social structure.     

The critical, relational practice of instructional design in higher education: an emerging model of change agency

This paper offers an emerging interpretive framework for understanding the active role instructional designers play in the transformation of learning systems in higher education. A 3-year study of instructional designers in Canadian universities revealed how, through reflexive critical practice, designers are active, moral, political, and influential in activating change at interpersonal, professional, institutional and societal levels. Through narrative inquiry the voices of designers reflect the scope of agency, community and relational practice in which they regularly engage with faculty in institutions of higher learning.

Learner agency in language learning: the story of a distance learner of EFL in China

Learner agency plays a key role in self-regulated learning. Yet, there is a paucity of research into its role in the distance learning context. Using reflective narratives written by a distance learner of English in China, this longitudinal case study aims to investigate the ways in which learner agency mediates the language learning in the distance mode. Findings from the study suggest that agency has a major impact on learners’ self-efficacy, identity, motivation, and metacognition—four constructs which are instrumental in determining language learning success, in particular in the distance learning context. Analysis of the data indicates that positive changes in these four constructs, in turn, lead to further agentic engagement, hence forming a virtuous circle of mutual enhancement. Implications are discussed in relation to fostering distance learners’ goal awareness, enhancing their self-efficacy, maintaining their motivation, and encouraging metacognitive efforts.     

Structure and agency in learning: a critical realist theory of the development of capacity to reflect on academic practice

Theories of learning typically downplay the interplay between social structure and student agency. In this article, we adapt a causal hypothesis from realist social theory and draw on wider perspectives from critical realism to account for the development of capacity to engage in reflection on professional practice in academic roles. We thereby offer a theory of professional learning that explores how social and cultural structures and personal emergent powers combine to ensure variation in the emergence of such reflective capacity. The influence of these factors on professional learning is mediated through reflexive deliberation and social interaction, with the exercise of one's personal powers specifically identified as a stratum of social reality. We consider further the role of concerns, intention and attention in professional learning, drawing together issues that are rarely considered within the same theory. We thus offer a comprehensive account of professional learning, showing how a focus on structure and agency increases the explanatory power of learning theory.     

Teacher agency in the Canadian context: linking the how and the what

Even though there is no common conceptual basis guiding teacher education in Canada, over the past two decades teacher educators both in Canada and around the world have called for teacher candidates to become agents of change. While researchers across Canada strive to demonstrate how to prepare pre- and in-service teachers to be agents of change, few scholars have examined in detail what teacher agency might mean in the Canadian context. This paper reviews the conceptualisation of agency from five theoretical perspectives (psychology, sociology, critical theory, historical studies, and post-structuralism) and examines how empirical studies in the Canadian contexts align with these perspectives. This paper makes explicit the connections between the how and the what of agency, and as such informs current approaches to preparing pre- and in-service teachers and their potential role as agents of change, and maps out how the notion of agency is taken up in a particular jurisdiction.     

专业学习共同体视角下我国高校教研室建设策略

高校教研室是承担大学功能的重要载体,在执行教学计划、开展教学改革、提高教师素质等方面发挥着重要作用。当前,教研室在高校管理中逐步被边缘化,出现了过于行政化和"去教研室"的倾向,使得教师合作文化、教学研究功能和教师职业认同感缺失。具有生态特点和思维方式的专业学习共同体,不仅能为教研室转型发展和组织创新提供一个新的启示,也能为教师专业发展提供实践平台。为此,应从构建平等的参与机制、确立共同的愿景、培育教师合作文化、构建个人实践性知识的共享机制、完善支持性体系等方面入手,着力将教研室建设成为一个专业学习共同体。     

Spaces for Change: Gender and Technology Access in Collaborative Software Design

Equitable computer collaborations in mixed-gender teams have been a pressing issue for many years. While some have argued for creating single-gender teams or girls-only computer activities, our approach was different. The current study examines a three-month software design activity in which mixed teams of girls and boys (10–12 year olds) designed and implemented multimedia astronomy resources for younger students. In this context we assessed gender differences in students' levels of access to technology and how these participation patterns changed throughout the project duration. We found through our qualitative analyses that the configuration of social, physical and cognitive spaces in the project environment contributed to a positive change in girls' levels of access. We discuss the implications of these results in regard to issues surrounding the development and maintenance of gender equity in computer use and further research.     

The application of the microgenetic method to studies of learning in science education: characteristics of published studies,methodological issues and recommendations for future research

This paper examines the role of the microgenetic method in science education. The microgenetic method is a technique for exploring the progression of learning in detail through repeated, high-frequency observations of a learner’s ‘performance’ in some activity. Existing microgenetic studies in science education are analysed. This leads to an examination of five significant methodological issues in microgenetic research. Firstly, qualitative and/or quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis within the microgenetic approach are considered and a case is made for the appropriateness of qualitative microgenetic research. Secondly, it is argued that researchers may define static intervals, periods within which (for methodological purposes) change is assumed not to occur, when reporting microgenetic studies. Thirdly, researchers should consider providing justifications for their choice of sampling rate with reference to the rate of change of the phenomenon they are studying. Fourthly, the difficulty of distinguishing conceptual change from the existence of multiple understandings is highlighted. Finally, the nature of sequences of repeated measures in microgenetic studies is considered. It is argued that different methodological approaches are suitable for microgenetic studies of different phenomena and a list of guidelines for the use of the microgenetic method in small-scale, qualitatively analysed studies in science education is proposed.