Getting in touch with our feelings: the emotional geographies of gender relations in PETE

This paper attempts to illustrate how embodied ways of knowing may enhance our theoretical understanding within the field of physical education teacher education (PETE). It seeks to illustrate how teacher educators’ viewpoints and understanding of gender relations are inevitably linked to socially constructed webs of emotions, as much as to intellectual rationales. Indeed, the paper argues for the need for PETE research to transcend the dualistic divide of reason/emotion.

It builds upon interview data from an investigation interested in illuminating the ways in which teacher educators develop their professional identities, using the lenses of gender equal opportunities and equity to examine the degree to which identities reflect ‘managerial’ or ‘democratic’ professional projects. In particular it analyses the way in which ‘gender talk’ seems to evoke strong emotional reactions, often ‘negative’ feelings, while at the same time, gender equity concerns remain on the periphery of the discipline, despite increasing research evidence which reveals damaging discriminatory learning environments. By using Hargreaves (2000) concept of ‘emotional geographies’ the paper contends that ‘negative emotions’ about gender issues are currently hegemonic on account of today's configurations of human relations in PETE, because the discipline's feeling rules construct ‘negative feelings’ as being reasonable. Acknowledging that professional identities are on-going projects, and that feeling rules can be re-configured, the paper also seeks to illustrate how competing emotions may in the future lead to gender equality assuming a new role in PETE's ‘regimes of truths’.     

Impact of School-Based Interventions for Building School Belonging in Adolescence: a Systematic Review

Educational Psychology Review - A student’s sense of school belonging is critical to school success, yet internationally, a large proportion of secondary students do not feel that they belong...     

Visualising COVID-19: Implications for Design Education

This paper reports on the findings of a visual text analysis of selected infographics and data visualisations used in  news websites during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sydney, Australia. Infographics and data visualisations used in news website articles disseminated and communicated local and national information to the public about the COVID-19 pandemic and related social implications. For the first time live data, animation and interaction were used in reporting health and societal information to a general news readership, contributing to the knowledge base and visual literacy of the public. The information presented was not only clear but also aesthetically appealing. This paper examines the styles of news digital infographics and data visualisation of three longitudinal studies using lessons learned from Grainger et al. (2016), Dick (2020) and Tufte (2001) and contextualises the context, narrative, aesthetics, communication, data, functionality and examines the collaboration between communication designers, journalists and the development team. The implications for communication design education are explored in the context of skills, tools and teamwork needed for future communication design students.     

Skills training to avoid inadvertent plagiarism: results from a randomised control study

Plagiarism continues to be a concern within academic institutions. The current study utilised a randomised control trial of 137 new entry tertiary students to assess the efficacy of a scalable short training session on paraphrasing, patch writing and plagiarism. The results indicate that the training significantly enhanced students' overall knowledge about in-text referencing protocols. Importantly, this knowledge was found to translate into applied skills, with the intervention group performing significantly better in a practical skills application task. Moreover, the findings suggest that it is confidence in writing in English, not language background per se, which plays a significant role in students' practical skills in referencing and their confidence in performing assignment preparation tasks that can help them avoid claims of inadvertent plagiarism.     

Streaming Scholarship: Using Fan Vids to Teach Harry Potter

This article argues that Harry Potter fan vids can be used in the classroom as works of secondary criticism about J. K. Rowling’s primary text. It makes two claims: the first is that vids can be read as criticism of a particular text (in this case Harry Potter) alongside other critical essays on that text; the second is that the practice of doing so, for teachers of literature in general, and children’s literature in particular, is a valid one. The article first provides readings of four vids, showing how each can be used to complement traditional scholarly sources as interpretations of the text; and then situates issues arising from the pedagogical possibilities of vids within the larger field of fandom studies.     

Institutional Diversity in Higher Education: a Cross-National and Longitudinal Analysis

This paper contributes to the debate on institutional diversity in higher education systems by looking at the phenomenon from a comparative (cross‐national) and longitudinal perspective. Despite the attention to diversity in policy debates, surprisingly, only a limited amount of studies address methodological issues. In addition, the number of empirical studies on institutional diversity is low as well. Data on various Western higher education systems are used to illustrate developments in systems' diversity. Furthermore, these data are put in the context of current national (and supranational) policy debates, particularly the role of governments and markets, on maintaining or increasing diversity.     

How research informs educational technology decision-making in higher education: the role of external research versus internal research

Educational technology research and development - Research use in educational decision-making has been encouraged and well documented at the K-12 education level in the United States but not in...     

Judging quality in peer research: a comparison of adult- and peer-led focus groups in a Kenyan context

Peer research has been recognized as an important strategy. As with other qualitative approaches, one issue that is often raised is how do we judge the quality of such methods? This paper argues that one of the ways we can do this is by comparing the data collected through participatory methods with that collected with other research strategies within the same research context. This was done through a qualitative study which investigated student's attitudes towards ethnicity and politics in two secondary schools in Kenya. A research design was developed using focus-group discussions where half of the focus groups were led by an adult researcher and the other half by a student researcher. The paper will compare the data collected from these two kinds of focus groups using the framework method in order to illustrate that peer research produces high-quality data comparable to that collected using other means. Moreover, the paper will use reflections from the process to show that one other way that we can judge the quality of peer research is through the benefits that accrue not only to the peer researchers such as skills development but also to the adult researchers, for example greater reflexivity.