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     

Fostering Intelligent Moderation in the Next Generation: Insights from Remida-Inspired Reuse Materials Education

ABSTRACT

Ecologically minded leaders and early childhood teacher educators offer a culturally significant shiny fish project in their community as a way to launch an environmental-material reuse project. Questioning if environmental collapse is imminent, their project investigation of developing a locally relevant Remida Reggio-inspired center serves as hope for reconceptualizing early childhood practices, offering innovations, and fostering intelligent moderation of earthly resources. Finding widening circles of influence and engaging participants are key to nurturing hope, and these educators draw implications to manifest a large and impactful vision and call to action.     

Rethinking inequalities between deindustrialisation,schools and educational research in Geelong

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to rethink the relations between inequality, deindustrialisation and schooling. Educational research is implicated in the (re)production of inequalities, as well as having the potential to be part of the production of more equitable relations.     

The Implicit Curriculum in Social Work Education: The Culture of Human Interchange

This article focuses on the culture of human interchange, which is included as a component of the implicit curriculum in the current EPAS. It presents the use of the implicit curriculum concept in teacher and medical education as a context for its application to social work education. The authors argue that professional behaviors taught in the explicit curriculum of the classroom need to be consciously reinforced in the many venues and through the ongoing interpersonal relations throughout the educational environment. The article identifies the challenges that movement in this direction would create but which the implicit curriculum standard mandates us to address.