Perspectives on pedagogical change: instructor and student experiences of a newly implemented undergraduate engineering dynamics curriculum*

Engineering education has been slow to adopt research-based educational innovations. Few prior works on such adoption have investigated the combined classroom experiences of instructors and students when such innovations are being implemented. Therefore, this work focuses on the lived experiences of an instructor and her students when adopting an active, blended, and collaborative learning environment, known as Freeform, in a second-year dynamics course. Weekly reflections from the instructor were processed alongside student interviews using Thematic Analysis to discern prominent themes in their perspectives for comparison and discussion. The results indicate that the instructor navigated internal tensions between her previous instructional preferences and the philosophy and resources of Freeform. Similarly, students had to adapt to this new philosophy and suite of resources that were uncommon for their institution. Ultimately, this work highlights the contextual natures of teaching and learning, and how situational factors can influence educational innovation.     

Simulation in Higher Education: A sociomaterial view

This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many disciplines as a means to bring the two closer together. However, the theoretical underpinnings of simulation pedagogy are limited. This paper extends the wider work of applying sociomaterial approaches to educational phenomena, taking up Schatzki’s practice theory as a distinctive basis for doing so. The question ‘What is being simulated?’ is posed, prompting discussion of multiple bodies, performances and experiences. The potential of adopting such a framework for understanding simulation as a pedagogic practice that brings the classroom and workplace together is illustrated with reference to clinical education in nursing.     

The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework: what's academic practice got to do with it?

National Qualifications Frameworks (NQF) are a globally established and expanding phenomenon. They are increasingly merging and being mapped onto meta-qualifications frameworks. One key NQF in both these roles is the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF). Much research categorises the different types of NQF, details their success and failure, and there is a steadily expanding body of critical research into NQF. Despite this, little research has focused on how NQF are used in day to day academic practice in the very institutions whose qualifications they frame. This article begins to redress this by focusing on the SCQF as an exemplar. It presents a synthesis between contemporary literature, a documentary analysis of SCQF literature and the data from interviews with 15 stakeholders in different educational roles. The findings show that, despite the claims of the SCQF literature and contemporary literature regarding the success of the SCQF, its diffusion and the extent of its use amongst these stakeholders are limited. Instead, it is used more as a symbolic tick box exercise and largely ignored. We discuss the implications of this and posit questions that challenge the focus of existing research into NQF and argue for a shift in the criteria by which they are judged from educational to market based ones.     

The rhythms of pedagogy: an ethnographic study of parenting education practices

Educational research is increasingly turning to conceptual frameworks from a range of disciplines in order to enrich understandings of education, pedagogy and learning. This paper draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre, specifically rhythmanalysis, to explore the nature and the function of pedagogy. The context is an ethnographic study of parenting education and pedagogic practices in a child and family service in Sydney. Three features of rhythmanalysis are discussed: kinds of rhythm, rhythms and bodies, and oppositions such as repetition and difference, fast and slow and secret and public. Through these concepts, intricate connections between rhythm and pedagogy are identified, including rhythms as providing a pedagogic imperative, rhythms as content and mechanisms at the heart of pedagogy and rhythms as outcomes of learning. The paper argues that rhythmanalysis opens up possibilities for new questions, different kinds of empirical sensibilities and distinctive accounts of pedagogy and learning in continuing education.     

Cop talk,police stories,and the social construction of organizational drama

This essay examines how police officers socially construct a sense of organizational drama when they label, valorize, and narrate their work experience. This social construction of organizational drama is illustrated with data collected from a four month observational study of a small police force, fictitiously named the “Valley View Police Department.”     

Liveness, “Reality,” and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone

Television's liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that “liveness” is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheim's sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social “realities.” This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuer's early work) is then extended in two ways: first, to consider two new forms of “liveness” that do not involve television (online liveness via the Internet and “group liveness” via the mobile phone); and second, by connecting liveness with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and thereby linking “liveness” (including in its extended senses) with other parts of the materialized system of classification through which we make sense of the everyday world.     

A study of the quality of practitioner research in secondary education: impact on teacher and school development

This study provides insight into the quality of practitioner research and the impact of this on the professional development of the individual teacher and the school as a whole. We examined the quality of practitioner research in relation to the goals of the research. We operationalized the quality of the research in terms of the validities outlined by Anderson and Herr. In our study we apply this way of thinking to 11 cases of teacher research in secondary education. We found at least some evidence of outcome validity and catalytic validity for the teachers’ practitioner research. However, evidence of process validity and democratic validity was only found in some of the projects. We conclude that the approach adopted in this study can be more generally used to increase the quality and thereby the impact of practitioner research.     

Educating and Training the Workforce to Work with People with Dementia: Two Projects from the United Kingdom

Educating and training the dementia workforce is a global challenge, given the expected increasing number of people living with dementia across the world as the population ages. Two projects from the UK (one regionally and one locality based) investigated courses available to the workforce and mapped the content of identified courses against a locally developed dementia care pathway. The locality project included a survey of what percentage of staff time was spent with people living with dementia, and what percentage of staff caseloads were devoted to people living with dementia. There was a great variation in the extent of education and training available, with some stages of the dementia care pathway poorly addressed. An educational strategy for the dementia workforce in the UK might include four categories of education and training: basic dementia awareness, intermediate level, advanced level, and dementia awareness for managers. Staff requiring education and training might be divided into three groups: those employed to work specifically with people living with dementia and their families; those working with people who have other conditions but some of whom will have a coincidental dementia; those working with other conditions but in settings where a high proportion of their patients have a comorbid dementia. To improve workforce skills in dementia care will require actions across the whole of education and training for professionals and untrained workers who provide services to this group.