‘If this was real … ’: researching student meaning making in a digital rolling role drama

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interplay of the ‘live’ experience of drama learning in the classroom and curated digital content on learner meaning making, collaborative creation and subjectivities. It examines a case study conducted in an inner-city secondary school in Sydney, Australia, as part of a larger innovative international collaborative drama exercise entitled ‘The Water Reckoning Project’ (http://www.water-reckoning.net) which focussed on sustainability education. Data collected and analysed included ethnographic observations, video documentation and digital curation of students’ creative work, focus groups, and pre- and post-surveys. Findings of this study reveal the importance of the aesthetically charged, embodied experience of drama as the key driver of learning when integrating drama with digital technologies. This unique project enabled students to critically and creatively engage with significant real and fictional contexts, as well as issues of local and global relevance.     

Making links: on situating a new web site

Visual ethnographers increasingly use hypermedia for research, representation and teaching and learning. This article discusses these uses by reflecting on Visualising ethnography, a teaching and learning ‘gateway’ web site about the visual in the ethnographic process housing interviews, authored works, exhibitions, introductory texts and links. Here I situate the web site in relation to other visual anthropology web sites, discuss key characteristics of hypermedia for teaching and learning and representation and analyze both how authors, the web developed and I constructed our contributions, and users' responses. Finally I discuss the role and potential of such web sites for contemporary representation, teaching and learning in visual ethnography. Many new web sites are developing; how might they ‘live together’ and interrelate online? And what are the implications for the sorts of teaching and learning sites that might be developed in the future?     

“I think it fits in”: using process drama to promote agentic writing with primary school children

Set against the backdrop of children being ‘alienated’ from their writing, this paper is taken from a United Kingdom Literacy Association sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here, we use discourse analysis to think about the children's historical creative writing in relation to the drama lessons which are differently framed by the teachers. Building upon a theoretical model of process drama as involving ‘embodied experience’ and writing as problem‐solving, a case is made that process drama can lead to what we term ‘agentic writing’. Agentic writing, we demonstrate, involves children actively translating their embodied experience of process drama into writing by making a range of intertextual borrowings. These borrowings serve both to capture and transform their embodied experience as the children gain agency by standing outside language to achieve ‘double voicedness’ and in doing so write sophisticated texts. Seeing the relationship between process drama and writing in this light, we argue, provides a means of reconnecting children to the act of writing.     

Speculative method in digital education research

The question of ‘what works’ is currently dominating educational research, often to the exclusion of other kinds of inquiries and without enough recognition of its limitations. At the same time, digital education practice, policy and research over-emphasises control, efficiency and enhancement, neglecting the ‘not-yetness’ of technologies and practices which are uncertain and risky. As a result, digital education researchers require many more kinds of questions, and methods, in order to engage appropriately with the rapidly shifting terrain of digital education, to aim beyond determining ‘what works’ and to participate in ‘intelligent problem solving’ [Biesta, G. J. J. 2010, “Why ‘What Works’ Still Won’t Work: From Evidence-Based Education to Value-Based Education.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 29 (5): 491–503] and ‘inventive problem-making’ [Michael, M. 2012, “‘What Are We Busy Doing?’ Engaging the Idiot.” Science, Technology &; Human Values 37 (5): 528–554]. This paper introduces speculative methods as they are currently used in a range of social science and art and design disciplines, and argues for the relevance of these approaches to digital education. It synthesises critiques of education’s over-reliance on evidence-based research, and explores speculative methods in terms of epistemology, temporality and audience. Practice-based examples of the ‘teacherbot’, ‘artcasting’ and the ‘tweeting book’ illustrate speculative method in action, and highlight some of the tensions such approaches can generate, as well as their value and importance in the current educational research climate.     

Pink ... with shades of grey: mediating moments of diversity in urban secondary classrooms

In this paper, the authors trace the policy documents and legislation in Canada that have set, over the last twenty years, the context for ‘inclusion’ in Ontario's public schools. The authors then enliven this historical account of multicultural policy innovation by turning to a particular critical episode in a secondary classroom wherein they consider the pedagogical strategies of a teacher in a drama classroom who deftly navigates the unsettled terrain of race and power. Using a provocative monologue set in South Africa's apartheid, the teacher opens up a space for dialogue and whole‐group interaction with her class of Grade 11 (16‐ 17‐year‐old) students. Serving as an illustrative episode from a larger ethnographic study of four school sites (2 Canadian, 2 American), the analysis here, of one teacher's interactions with her students, and the students’ engagement with one another, points to many of the features of drama pedagogy that elucidate the study's broader interests in understanding the problems of social cohesion in richly diverse urban schools. In this discussion, the aims of inclusion and the possibilities of interactive pedagogy are clear, as are their limits, in the charged public space of an urban classroom.     

TEACHER TRAINING AND SCHOOL PRACTICE

In their previous article (Educational Research, 13, 1) the authors discussed the attitudes of 1,000 pupils in selective secondary schools towards literature generally and towards GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations. In that article they explored pupils’ expressed likes and dislikes of texts prescribed by GCE examining boards; they now consider these same pupils’ preferences in their leisure reading, and conclude that present methods of teaching English often fail to take into account ‘consumer’ response, particularly in poetry and drama reading.     

Reading videogames as (authorless) literature

This article presents the outcomes of research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England and informed by work in the fields of new literacy research, gaming studies and the socio‐cultural framing of education, for which the videogame L. A. Noire was studied within the orthodox framing of the English literature curriculum at A level (pre‐university) and undergraduate (degree level) in the United Kingdom. A mixed methods approach was adopted. Firstly, students contributed to a gameplay blog requiring them to discuss their in‐game experience through the ‘language game’ of English literature, culminating in answering a question constructed with the idioms of the subject's set text ‘final examination’. Secondly, students taught their teachers to play L. A. Noire, with free choice over the context for this collaboration. Thirdly, participants returned to traditional roles to work through a set of study materials, designed to reproduce the conventions of the ‘study guide’ for literature education. Fourthly, interviews were conducted after each phase. The interviews informed a redrafting of the study materials, which are now available online for teachers. In the act of inserting the study of L. A. Noire into the English literature curriculum as currently framed, this research raises epistemological questions about ‘subject identity’, and the implications for digital transformations of texts for ideas about cultural value in schooled literacy and also the politics of ‘expertise’ in pedagogic relations.     

Global-local divides and ontological politics: feminist STS perspectives on mobile learning for community health workers in Kenya

ABSTRACT

This theoretical paper argues that Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) can help advance the emancipatory project in critical Ed Tech research. To support this claim, we deploy Tsing’s concept of ‘scale-making projects’ (2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) to connect ‘global’ narratives to ‘local’ users in a mobile learning project for Kenyan health workers. Drawing from this exemplar case, we discuss more broadly how FSTS provides useful theory and methods for tracing the trans-national power relations of digital technologies ‘on the ground’. The paper concludes by advocating for new forms of emancipatory Ed Tech research – ones framed not only within oppositional pairings such as ‘global’ versus ‘local’, but which elucidate how binaries themselves are constituted through far-flung trans-national arrays of sociomaterial practice.     

Conflicts,competition and social support in female-dominated vocational education – breaking or reaffirming stereotypical femininity?

One in four upper secondary school students in Norway experience nearly single-sex classrooms, an unintended consequence of choosing certain vocational study programmes, such as Health care, childhood and youth development or Building and construction. This raises a question about how female students describe their experiences of social relationships and classroom culture within the context of a gender-segregated vocational education setting. Analyses of educational biography interviews reveal that stories of conflict, competition and cultural differences dominate and are often described using derogative or gendered language, such as ‘bitching’, ‘gossip’ and ‘drama’. These stories demonstrate a break with gender stereotypes but, at the same time, accentuate femininity by aligning the behaviour to stereotypical discourses of ‘girl’ behaviour. In their stories, gender loses its importance as a basis for solidarity and commonality when students share the same gender; instead, hierarchies and other differences become highlighted.     

Transformational professional development: (re)claiming agency and change (in the margins)

With performativity and evidence-based teaching, the development of action research (AR) by teachers brings tensions and challenges as teachers move outside their comfort zones and question their practice. This article draws on a small-scale research study developed with teachers. It was funded as part of a professional development initiative by a Teaching School Alliance to support partner schools with university support to build teacher-led systematic research into everyday practice. The dataset combined interviews with teachers about their motivations and experiences, field notes from the sessions, the teachers’ final written reports and their evaluation surveys about the project. This article offers a unique perspective on teachers as researchers in a new age of work-based AR with the risk of research by teachers in schools being regarded as part of an uncritical ‘tick box’ performative and celebratory culture. However, the authors argue that teacher research can contribute to a transformational approach to professional development working as an antidote and a source of (re)professionalization based on the outcomes of collaboration, reflection and attention to the singularity of their ‘contexts-for action’ and specific pupils’ needs.     

Ethnographic locations: the geographies of feminist post-structural ethnography

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.     

Challenging the knowledge‐transfer orthodoxy: Knowledge co‐construction in technology‐enhanced learning for children with autism

Experimental intervention studies constitute the current dominant research designs in the autism education field. Such designs are based on a ‘knowledge‐transfer’ model of evidence‐based practice in which research is conducted by researchers, and is then ‘transferred’ to practitioners to enable them to implement evidence‐based interventions. While these research designs contribute important knowledge, they lead to a gap between what the research evidence may prescribe and what happens in practice, with a concomitant disparity between the priorities of researchers and practitioners. This paper discusses findings from the ESRC‐funded ‘SHAPE’ project, which adopted a different model of evidence‐based practice, focusing on knowledge co‐construction. Pupils (N = 8), teachers (N = 10), a speech and language therapist and a parent in three different school communities investigated creative ways in which children's social communication skills could be enhanced through technology use. Through a participatory methodology, digital stories were used as a method to enable engagement with the practical realities of the classroom and empower practitioners to construct and share their own authentic narratives. Participants articulated precise knowledge about the learning opportunities afforded to them and their pupils through quality interactions that were mediated by the technologies, as evidenced through digital stories. The SHAPE project shows that it is feasible to develop methodologies that enable genuine knowledge co‐construction with school practitioners, parents and pupils. Such co‐construction could offer realistic opportunities for pedagogical emancipation and innovation in evidence‐based practice as an alternative to the currently dominant and narrow model of knowledge transfer.     

“Just like us”: Increasing awareness,prompting action and combating ageism through a critical intergenerational service learning project

In the Through their Eyes Project health sciences students are partnered with older adults to explore and assess the age-friendliness of their neighborhood. Using an innovative data collection tool – ‘moving interviews’ – these intergenerational research teams learn about the community and each other by traveling, observing, and discussing these landscapes together. The research project culminates in a community forum where findings are presented to government officials, the housing association and aging organizations. In addition to completing the research project, students are required to keep a journal to reflect on their experience.

The purpose of this study was to explore students experience participating in a critical intergenerational service learning project. Two research questions guided this inquiry: What was the experience for students and, what elements of the project are important to that experience?

Student journals collected over 5 years from 191 students comprised the data for this study. Data were analyzed using a 6-phase thematic analysis process.

Two key findings related to student experience emerged from the study: increased awareness and prompted to action. Elements of the course found significant to this experience included an aging simulation activity and the specific design of the project.

The paper concludes with suggestions for developing and integrating critical service-learning pedagogy into gerontological education.     

Policy mobilities and methodology: a proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies

ABSTRACT

The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’, we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as ‘inventive methods’.     

Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms

This article makes a connection between narrative ethnography, childhood studies and new materialist theories in studying children's perspective on school. It presents ‘children writing ethnography’ as an approach based on complexity and involving participatory research. The question of ‘what is happening in the classroom’ is explored through writings produced in class by 10-year olds. The ‘messy’ ethnographic data are examined within the framework of narrative ethnography using the idea of ‘small stories’ that capture everyday interaction. Furthermore, both material and embodied meanings in the writings are discussed. New materialist theories and the idea of nomadic make it possible to account for the connectivity between the writings, the classroom reality, the child-ethnographers and the research, which are seen as mutually producing one another. The author suggests that engaging with children's free-flowing ethnographic writing serves as a productive way to conduct participatory ethnographic research, as well as to investigate contemporary childhoods in all their complexity.     

Beyond workforce preparation: contested visions of ‘twenty-first century’ education reform

ABSTRACT

Contrary to educational policy and research assumptions about an immanent ‘twenty-first century’ future, this article uses the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ to trace how nonprofit actors in California invented and materialized distinctive visions of educational progress. Drawing on interview and ethnographic fieldnote data, I illustrate two contrasting sociotechnical visions: A Silicon Valley vision that aimed to reduce inequalities in test-based outcomes by disseminating ‘achievement technologies’; and an Oakland vision that aspired to address systemic environmental, economic and educational inequities using ‘civic technologies’. The diversity of these futures, and the distinctive kinds of digital technologies that co-produced these visions, trouble assumptions about ‘technology’ as an unquestioned good and problematize constructions of the ‘twenty-first century’ as an ostensibly shared, democratic future. I conclude by encouraging educational researchers to clarify a politics of the ‘twenty-first century’ and explore how ‘bounded imaginaries’, like those evident in the Oakland case, offer a potentially fruitful basis for reframing global education technology policies.     

‘It gets narrower’: creative strategies for re-broadening queer peer education

Using collaborative performance ethnography in community- and school-based settings, sex education has the potential to challenge at-risk narratives for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) youth. This paper problematises the youth-led drama project Epic Queer to test the ‘queer’ potential of youth-driven initiatives at the school and community level, and to reject the singularity of victimised and ‘at-risk’ narratives so pervasive in sex education internationally about queer youth. By drawing on the It Gets Better Project as an example of widespread but narrowing social media texts encouraging normativity, deferred pleasure and a happiness narrative, this paper argues for the potential of performance-based arts engagement for re-expanding queer youth subjectivities.     

Effective or affective schools? Technological and emotional discourses of educational change

British schools have been positioned by recent educational policy discourses as sites of innovation and transformation in new technological contexts, but more recent concerns about well-being suggest a more ‘affective turn’ in educational policy-making. This article provides an analysis of a project which has explored the ways in which schools are being re-imagined as spaces of effective technology-centredness, as well as sites for more emotional or affective child-centredness. I argue that far from being mutually exclusive categories, these technology-centred and child-centred orientations are conjoined in what I call ‘high-touch-tech’ discourse where the effective and the affective are mutually constitutive. Finally, I situate these changes as consequent upon ‘emotion management’ in work and social life, and suggest that an implication of the new policy focus on well-being for schools will be their requirement to perform ‘affect management’.     

The problem of large classes in science: An experiment in co‐operative learning

After reviewing the uses made of concept maps in research, as an aid to instruction and as a form of assessment, the problems of scoring maps objectively are discussed. Maps created de novo by 15‐16 year‐old pupils, before and after their introduction to Mendelian genetics, are used to investigate the properties of a scoring system based on that developed by Novak et al. (1983). The maps have been scored separately for a number of features ('branching’, ‘general to specific’, ‘closed units’, ‘terminology’, ‘relationships’ and ‘ hierarchy ‘) and compared with performance on genetics examination‐type questions. The components are not all independent, and do not have strong relationships with performance. The limitations of analytic methods of scoring concept maps are discussed.