The Online Studio: Cultures,Perceptions and Questions for the Future

We investigated the impact of the transition to online architectural design studios in response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The study focussed specifically on student and tutor perceptions of online design studio before the sudden transition to online delivery, and how those perceptions shifted through the initial months of online delivery. We consider the pedagogical context in which the shift to online teaching took place and the evident successes and failures in the early iterations of online studio. We discuss similar and contrasting perceptions in student and tutor groups and observe the changes in these perceptions prior to and after teaching and learning in online studios. The paper concludes with a series of questions directed to the architectural design studio teaching community regarding the apparent inevitability of a future in which both FTF and online-only studios are surpassed with hybrid design studios.     

Flexible phonics: a complementary ‘next generation’ approach for teaching early reading

We describe the rationale for- and content of- a freely available, novel, theoretically driven and evidence-based approach to improving the teaching of word reading in reception classrooms called ‘Flexible Phonics’. Flexible Phonics (FP) adds measurable value to-, rather than wholly replacing, existing synthetic phonics programmes. The rationale underpinning the FP approach concerns the need for multi-componential, maximally efficient, and truly generative approaches to allow early independence in reading for all children that apply to all words in the opaque spelling system of English. Building from these three principles, contemporary reading theory and evidence from cognitive science, linguistics and scaled educational implementation research, FP embodies a 5-element intervention differentiated to children's current attainment levels. FP augments mandated synthetic phonics through use of quality real books allowing ‘Direct Mapping’ of taught grapheme-phoneme correspondences, targeted oral vocabulary teaching, strategy-instruction on ‘Set-for-Variability’ and targeted preventative intervention for the most at-risk readers to then access wider FP content. Implications for policy and enhanced professional practice in English schools are considered.     

Seeing History: Malaika Favorite's Furious Flower Poetry Quilt Painting and Pan‐African Memory

Malaika Favorite's Furious Flower Poetry Quilt (2004) is an acrylic painting that depicts 24 portraits of leading poets of the African Diaspora. Commissioned by Dr Joanne Gabbin, English professor and director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the painting is part of a larger programme of poetry education. The painting's interweaving of the portraits with fragments from the poets’ writing functions to create an interactive visual‐textual body of poets and poetry, a collection which has been taught at all levels of education from primary school to university. Its quilt structure pays homage to the historic role of women in preserving history and memory. The painting also serves to construct a pan‐African identity and collective memory about slavery, African American history and empowerment.     

Reading fluency: The whole is more than the parts

This study examined the relative contributions of phonological awareness, orthographic pattern recognition, and rapid letter naming to fluent word and connected-text reading within a dyslexic sample of 123 children in second and third grades. Participants were assessed on a variety of fluency measures and reading subskills. Correlations and hierarchical multiple regression analyses were carried out to explore these relationships. The results demonstrate that phonological awareness, rapid letter naming, and orthographic pattern recognition contribute to word-reading skills. Furthermore, rapid naming, orthographic pattern recognition, and word reading fluency moderately predict different dimensions of connected-text reading (i.e., rate, accuracy, and comprehension) whereas phonological awareness contributes only to the comprehension dimension of connected-text reading. The findings support the multidimensional nature of fluency in which the whole is more than its parts.