Make learning personal: Recommendations for classroom practice

Structuring the curriculum and the classroom experience in ways that promote community building and develop an appreciation for diversity is a powerful way to deepen and personalize a student's learning experience.     

United in gender,divided by race: Reconstruction of issue and identity by the association of southern women for the prevention of lynching

This essay begins to investigate the relationship between race and gender in communication through study of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (1930‐1942). Organized by and composed exclusively of white women, this campaign managed to reconstruct lynching from a race issue to a gender issue. In doing so, the leader of the ASWPL, Jessie Daniel Ames, was successful at empowering white Southern women and uniting black and white women. However, due to failure to understand issues of the relationship between race and gender, the ASWPL perpetuated the very racism that was the cause for lynching.     

Learning from analogy-enhanced science text

The present study examined the role that an elaborate analogy can play when middle school students learn a major concept from a science text. The elaborate analogy had both graphic and text components that integrated and mapped key features from an analog (a factory) to the target concept (an animal cell). The target features were the functions of the cell parts. In Experiment 1, eighth graders who studied an analogy-enhanced text had greater immediate and 2-week recall of cell-part functions than students who studied a control text. In Experiment 2, sixth graders who studied an analogy-enhanced text considered the target concept to be more understandable than students who studied a control text. The sixth graders who studied the analogy-enhanced text also had greater immediate and 2-week retention, as measured by both recall and recognition. In both experiments, the analogy was interpreted as acting as a mediator between the students' existing knowledge and the new knowledge in the text. The analogy mapped a familiar, concrete schema onto that of the target concept, making the target concept more understandable and memorable. Implications for the meaningful learning of science text are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 1129–1149, 1998.     

Uncomfortable curricula? A survey of academic practices and attitudes to delivering Indigenous content in health professional degrees

Unacceptable inequity in health status between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians remains despite much work in the area. The imperative for graduating health professionals capable and ready to work with urban and rural Indigenous communities has led to a focus on curriculum development, but less focus has thus far been applied to academic staff capability to deliver the content. We surveyed academic staff at a large multi-campus Australian university on their practices and attitudes towards teaching Indigenous content in health professional programs. Indigenous and non-Indigenous academic staff were surveyed online about whether Indigenous content was included in the curricula they taught; whether they felt confident and capable of delivering curricula related to Indigenous issues; what challenges they found in including Indigenous content; and what, if any, supports and resources they felt were needed. Sixty-three per cent of respondents said that they included Indigenous content in their curricula, but 43% said that they did not access Indigenous resources; 60% reported feeling awkward, unsure or avoided teaching Indigenous content; most (74%) were comfortable teaching discipline-specific content to Indigenous students but only 26% felt comfortable teaching Indigenous content to Indigenous students. The findings reflect a level of discomfort experienced by some academic staff when teaching Indigenous content in health professional degrees. Reasons for this include being worried they would make mistakes, not knowing what to teach and finding it ‘too hard’. We suggest that three levels of action are required within universities to address this discomfort in academic staff: (i) provide a rationale (‘why’ teach Indigenous content); (ii) develop a plan (‘where’ and ‘what’ Indigenous content to teach) and (iii) develop capability in academic staff regarding ‘how’ to teach Indigenous content.     

Developing a Pedagogy of “Making” through Collaborative Self-Study

We believe that the ideas associated with the Maker Movement have profound implications for teacher education. We have isolated the pedagogical principles of hack, adapt, design, and create as central to exploring how they work with teacher candidate participants in a maker pedagogy lab. We frame these ideas as Maker Pedagogy, which is the enactment of the principles inspired by the maker movement in the classroom to foster learners who operate as innovators, creators, sharers and givers of knowledge, tools and technologies. The purpose of our self-study research is to describe, interpret and analyze how our pedagogies of teacher education and our critical friendship have changed and developed as a result of providing experiences for teacher candidates in our maker pedagogy lab. In this project we use self-study methodology to investigate our teaching and practices, and we dialogue about our tacit and personal knowledge as it contributes to the knowledge and understanding of our teaching through Maker Pedagogy. In particular, the emphasis is on critical collaborative inquiry through critical friends and on dialogue as a valued component of our research. Of particular interest were data in the video recordings of each lab that indicated that one or both of us had reframed our understanding of maker pedagogy. The findings are framed as three themes that document what we are learning about Maker Pedagogy through teaching teacher candidates. These are (1) the value of self-study methodology, (2) Maker Pedagogy as distinct and (3) deepening our pedagogies of teacher education.