Criticality and connoisseurship in arts education: pedagogy,practice and ‘Pinterest©’

ABSTRACT

In time-poor and pressured teaching environments, some classroom teachers look for immediate and simple solutions to resourcing their arts teaching. Online platforms, such as Pinterest, seem to offer ready-made answers for these teachers, however, a lack of criticality can underscore the unexamined ‘advantages’ of such accessible resources. Accessibility and lack of confidence for time poor teachers are two key issues in understanding why teachers prefer online platforms for the sourcing of arts teaching resources rather than curriculum documents written for them by ‘curriculum experts’. Critically competent curriculum decisions require informed knowing about value and how the decision impacts on practice and student learning and in this way criticality and connoisseurship are important capabilities that constantly need to be strengthened in a digitally mediated world. Combined in an arts context and drawing on interviews with 16 classroom teachers, criticality and connoisseurship are two key concepts used to highlight the systemic issues of context, value and pedagogy that impact on teacher’s practice. Suggestions for increasing teachers’ criticality and connoisseurship are explored as important pathways for improving arts learning for young people.     

Action Learning Circles: action learning in theory and practice

ABSTRACT

This paper is a commentary on how action learning circles can be effectively used (to offer experiential and emancipatory learning for students. The focus is on the preparation of students for health care education, and its value in the context of professional client‐based teaching and learning. The concept of action learning is described, and its role in promoting learning from practice explored using student and teacher evaluation evidence. An outline of the use of action learning circles in practice and the subsequent learning is analysed using evaluation data to inform our discussion, which gives the perspective of both learner and teacher.     

Exercise and working memory: an individual differences investigation

In the current work we asked whether executive function, as measured by tests of working memory capacity, might benefit from an acute bout of exercise and, more specifically, whether individuals who are lower or higher in working memory to begin with would be more or less affected by an exercise manipulation. Healthy adults completed working memory measures in a nonexercise (baseline) session and immediately following a 30-min self-paced bout of exercise on a treadmill (exercise session). Sessions were conducted 1 week apart and session order was counterbalanced across participants. A significant Session x Working Memory interaction was obtained such that only those individuals lowest in working memory benefited from the exercise manipulation. This work suggests that acute bouts of exercise may be most beneficial for healthy adults whose cognitive performance is generally the lowest, and it demonstrates that the impact of exercise on cognition is not uniform across all individuals.     

Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students

This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of ‘the university’, in the context of the rise of distance education within a traditional, ‘elite’ institution. Aiming to provide insight into how students translate into distance the space of a university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional on-campus education, it locates itself within the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm (Urry in Mobilities. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007), drawing on four different kinds of social space delineated by Mol and Law (Soc Stud Sci 24(4):641–741, 1994) and Law and Mol (Environ Plan D 19:609–621, 2001) in order to analyse narrative and visual data generated with distance students at the University of Edinburgh. The paper shows that the material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant for a group of students who may never physically attend that campus. Distance students, we find, need their own version of the ‘spatial certainties’ of bounded, campus space. Yet, in exploring the ‘new proximities’ of online distance education, we also argue that to define institutional and academic authenticity solely in terms of this bounded, ‘regional’ space is inadequate in the face of the other topologies which also come into play throughout distance students’ accounts of what it means to be ‘at’ university.     

Teaching early reading skills to non-vocal students with severe learning disabilities using Headsprout Early Reading©

Many students with learning disabilities find it difficult to acquire basic reading skills. This is even more of a challenge for students who are non-vocal. The purpose of the present study was to pilot the use of Headsprout Early Reading© (HER©), an online reading programme, with four non-vocal students with a severe learning disability (SLD), over the course of a nine-week period. Additional table-top activities were designed and implemented to augment the online instruction. None of the students completed the programme. Three students improved their early reading skills over the course of the intervention. Staff members indicated positive experiences of using HER©, especially mentioning how motivated the students were to engage with the programme. HER© for students with SLD requires one-to-one support and a longer implementation period to achieve completion; these have implications for resourcing in special schools. However, HER© shows promise with non-vocal students with learning disabilities and evidence supports the need for larger-scale evaluation research.     

Community,culture and identity: geography,the National Curriculum and Wales

ABSTRACT

The 1988 Education Reform Act legislated for a National Curriculum not for one nation but for two, Wales and England. This article reviews the way in which attempts to develop a distinctive curriculum in Wales for one subject, geography, were thwarted by the dominance among key policy‐makers in England of views about the study of place which were unsympathetic to the idea of the school curriculum being a vehicle for the development of a sense of community and national identity. Drawing on evidence from a survey of secondary school geography teachers in Wales, it considers the extent to which the teaching of geography is seen by teachers as a means of achieving such educational goals.     

University Students’ Conceptualization and Interpretation of Topographic Maps

This study investigates the strategies and assumptions that college students entering an introductory physical geology laboratory use to interpret topographic maps, and follows the progress of the students during the laboratory to analyze changes in those strategies and assumptions. To elicit students’ strategies and assumptions, we created and refined a topographic visualization test that was administered before and after instruction to 26 students during the first semester of the study and to 92 students during the second semester. To more deeply understand how students think about and conceptualize topographic maps, we focused on eight individual students who were interviewed about their pretest and posttest answers as well as videotaped during three laboratory sessions. We found that even students who claim never to have worked with topographic maps often perform impressively on their pretests by making useful assumptions about symbolic topographic information. Some students, however, begin with less productive assumptions that may be unfamiliar to some instructors (e.g., thinking that the spacing of contour lines indicates elevation instead of slope). Initial success should not be misinterpreted, however, as an integrated understanding of topographic maps. Only in posttest interviews do most students express explanations integrating multiple normative assumptions. In addition to highlighting the strategies and assumptions that college students use to interpret topographic maps, we outline the implications of these findings for the design of learning objectives, curricular activities, and assessments for topographic lessons in introductory college geology courses and the training of future geoscientists.