Re-conceptualizing Emotion and Motivation to Learn in Classroom Contexts

To better inform and improve classroom teaching and learning, now more than ever before, educational researchers need to effectively and efficiently describe essential components of positive learning environments. In this article, we discuss how our research findings about motivation in classrooms have led to a closer examination of emotions. We describe how motivation theories such as Academic Risk Taking, Flow Theory, and Goal Theory have helped us better understand emotions in our classroom research. Our findings suggest that engaging students in learning requires consistently positive emotional experiences, which contribute to a classroom climate that forms the foundation for teacher–student relationships and interactions necessary for motivation to learn. We conclude that we need to integrate emotion, motivation, and cognition theoretically and methodologically to move our research forward. New theories and methods, even new forms of intellectual discourse, are required. Therefore, we end this article by beginning a discussion of new directions for conceptualizing and researching classrooms in ways that will involve examining the emotions of students and teachers.

Achievement goals,efficacy beliefs and coping strategies in mathematics: The roles of perceived parent and teacher goal emphases

This study examines children’s perceptions of the achievement goals parents and teachers emphasize for them in mathematics, and the relation of these goals to children’s personal achievement goals, self-efficacy beliefs, and coping strategies. Results indicated that children’s perceptions of both parent and teacher mastery and performance goal emphases predicted children’s personal goals. Further, children’s personal goals mediated the relation between perceived parent and teacher goal emphases and children’s efficacy beliefs and coping strategies. Children’s perceptions of parent and teacher emphasis on performance goals varied slightly by gender but not ethnic background, whereas variance across groups in perceptions of mastery emphases did not reach practical significance. Relations between goal perceptions, personal goals, efficacy and coping strategies also did not vary by gender or ethnic background. Implications for future research regarding the goals children perceive to be emphasized in home and school contexts, and their importance for children’s adaptive beliefs and behaviors in mathematics, are discussed.     

Is feminism trending? Pedagogical approaches to countering (Sl)activism

As they say in social media, feminism is ‘trending’; feminist conversations, grassroots movements, and activism mark a fourth wave of feminist practice and theory defined by digital spaces. This article considers the effectiveness of using social media as both a course assignment and as a conduit for civic engagement. I analyse survey results of college students who used the blogging platform Tumblr in their Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses. Data collected from the participant sample indicate that Tumblr users are connected to viewpoints different from their own and are instilled with a sense of activism they wish to incorporate in their offline lives. In conclusion, social media is a promising tool for social justice, feminist, and/or leadership-focused praxis.     

Community-based environmental monitoring goes to school: translations,detours and escapes

Community-school partnerships are an established practice within environmental science education, where a focus on how local phenomena articulate with broader environmental issues and concerns brings potential benefits for schools, community organisations and local communities. This paper contributes to our understanding of such educational practices by tracing the diverse socio-material flows that constitute a community environmental monitoring project, where Australian school students became investigators of and advocates for particular sites in their neighbourhood. The theoretical resources of actor-network theory are drawn upon to describe how the project – as conceptualised by its initiators – was enacted as both human and non-human actors sought to progress their own agendas thus translating the concept-project into multiple project realities. We conclude by identifying implications for sustaining educational innovations of this kind.     

Enabling international student families: new empiricisms and posthumanist entanglements in higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper presents research on movements involved in the lives of international university students and their accompanying family members. Located in the framing of new empiricisms and new materialisms, a posthumanist approach is offered as a way to move beyond the limitations of a focus on the educational mobilities of individualised self-contained student subjects. The research this paper draws on engages a diffractive visual methodology involving interview encounters with women who each moved from Iran to Australia together with their partner and children. A materialist feminist approach enables the consideration of how a variety of entangled movements and animated affects shape the lives of international student families. The utility of this approach becomes the inspiration for thinking through the concept of ‘intra-active becoming in movement’. This brings a refreshed set of practices for designing higher education experiences for international students that resists the divisiveness of binary oppositions in Western thought.     

Revising the Online Classroom: Usability Testing for Training Online Technical Communication Instructors

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an effort by the authors to use usability testing as a component of online teacher training for their multimajor technical communication course. The article further explains the ways in which program administrators at other institutions can create their own usability testing protocols for formative online teacher training in course design and in principles of user-centered design.     

Understanding visual and intertextual approaches in pedagogical and curriculum research: a pretext

In our globalised and hypertexual world, representations of curriculum reform are highly visual. The material world of these practices can be analysed through visual research methods. This paper is a pretext developed to explain the elements of the visual and intertextual approaches that can be applied in researching inclusive education through a curriculum focus. The pretext selectively situates recent developments in educational research that use visual methods as a part of the overall quest for ongoing conceptual and professional improvement of understanding a curriculum for all through practitioner and small‐scale research.     

Evaluating Evidence‐Based Practice Behaviors in Team Contexts

The article explores the application of the Hall and Hord (2010) levels of use model to the context of interprofessional teams in health care settings. The discussion provides a framework for evaluating the progression of evidence‐based practice behaviors over time. Although several forms of guidance exist for measuring the strength and characteristics of health care teams, there do not appear to be frameworks in place for assessing the evolution of evidence‐based practices in a team context.     

A perspective on due process in teacher evaluation

A perspective on due process in teacher evaluation