Exploratory study on the role of institutional frameworks on engineering curricula evolution

Humanity’s entrance into the Anthropocene forces us to question the role of technology because of its impacts on the environment. The stake is the viability of the Earth system for humans. Engineers producing a large part of these impacting techniques are not trained in sustainable issues (environmental, social and economic ones - in a systemic way). An exploratory workshop was held at a French University of Technology to study the development of new engineering training courses on issues of strong sustainability. During this workshop, the participants were placed into the current French institutional framework and were asked to develop a new training within this specific framework. The hypothesis formulated at the end of this experiment is that current institutional frameworks can be an obstacle to the production of new training, especially training adapted to the transition phenomenon to respond to the increasing risk of socio-ecological catastrophes. This experiment was conducted as part of a heuristic approach and opens up new perspectives for the evolution of training as well as institutional frameworks in higher education and research

Unsettling information literacy: Exploring critical approaches with academic researchers for decolonising the university

In the past seven years, student-led decolonisation movements have taken root in UK universities. Decolonising the university is an intellectual project, asking critical questions about the content of curricula, disciplinary canons and pedagogical approaches. It is simultaneously a material one, challenging the colonial legacies that manifest in institutional spaces, cultures and financial decisions, students’ experience and staff labour conditions (Cotton, 2018, p. 24). Academic libraries have recognised their role in addressing how ‘coloniality survives colonialism’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243), in particular through the diversification of collections and resources. However, libraries have neglected to interrogate their educational potential for decolonisation, specifically in exercising information literacy (IL) teaching and approaches. This qualitative research examines IL through a decolonial lens with an eye to both its colonial attributes and its potential for decolonising the curriculum. Interviews with five academic researchers are used to explore the potential for critical information literacy (CIL) in decolonial work and ask what IL might look like from a decolonial perspective. The findings of the interviews are structured according to Icaza and Vázquez’s framework of three core processes for decolonising the university; they reveal that CIL might usefully facilitate positionality, practice relationality and consider transitionality. In turn, these findings lead to a set of recommendations for unsettling IL and generating the potential for decolonisation. The relationship between CIL and decolonising the curriculum is as yet unexplored and academics’ engagement with and opinions on CIL have rarely been examined. This research therefore offers some novel contributions for IL practitioners and researchers in relation to both teaching/ learning and research. It also contributes some points of departure for a more a powerful and holistic decolonial pedagogy in the university. A more fitting approach than traditional IL, critical information literacy can become a key part of scaffolding a decolonising approach to learners’ navigation of information and processes of knowing

Development of Students’ Technical Abilities during 1993-2022 in Finnish Comprehensive School

The aim of this study was to find out if there have been any changes in technical abilities among Finnish school children during the last 30 years. Technical abilities were first measured in the affective, psychomotor, and cognitive areas in the year 1993 and these results were later compared with the results from 2012 and 2022. The number of test participants was 267 in the year 1993, 317 in 2012 and 282 in 2022. The age of the student respondents was 11–13 years. The measurements were done with exactly the same research instruments in all three years. Some positive changes were found in affective area among girls’ test groups. Unfortunately, in all research groups the development was negative in the psychomotor and cognitive area. The reason for the decline could be in the reduction of craft and technology education lessons available, especially for boys. From a broader point of view, the changes can be due to the changes in society as a whole. It seems that the curriculum changes during last 30 years have not worked as they have been planned. Especially, boys underachievement is explained by the fact that, even if students work with systematic planning models and use their creativity, aesthetic design usually overshadows technological issues. It is assumed that progressive teaching and assessment favour girls and traditional methods are more congenial to boys

Intentional librarian-student interactions during COVID-19

As part of a research study to examine first-year college students’ preparation for college-level research, students at six U.S. institutions of higher education were surveyed in the spring semester of 2021. The pandemic continued to affect the delivery of information literacy (IL) instruction and library services across the United States throughout the 2020–2021 academic year. When students completed this survey in April and May of 2021, the majority of instructional services were offered in synchronous and asynchronous remote formats. The students' engagement with librarians and librarian-created instructional resources were captured via the survey and analysed to determine whether students were able to leverage these interactions and materials despite the remote contexts. Students who did not interact with an academic librarian were less likely to use library resources, had more problems accessing information, and felt more overwhelmed by the quantity of resources and services offered by the library. Results show that intentional student-librarian interactions are a bridge to the acquisition and development of knowledge practices and dispositions of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. The findings suggest considerations for moving forward when it comes to communicating with students and delivering IL support in academic libraries around the world as countries emerge from pandemic conditions

Drawing the Loss of Movement

This paper is a reflective review on the experience of drawing my father during his last years with Parkinson’s disease, as a framework to address the role of embodiment in drawing. More than a record of the body, drawing someone with Parkinson’s disease is primarily to report a paradox: making visible the loss of movement and expression, but also the erosion of language and the disappearance of the other person’s world. It is argued that drawing allows to intimate this loss as an affect and an event, an emotion and a process, as the drawing act defies telling and incites a memorialising function of the trace. As a projection of a moving body representing another body, drawing a Parkinson’s patient triggers the experience of empathy as a shared representation, which enable us to perceive the other’s experience within our own corporality. Empathy is addressed as part of the perceptual experience of drawing, but also as apperception: a co-apprehension of the other’s emotion through his movements and expressions over time, blending direct observations and recalled images. As the enactment of a relationship, drawing is a coming together with the world, an “as-if-body-loop”

Breaking down bias

What is bias? A review of the library literature reveals no attempts to define the concept. Nor does it reveal systematic attempts to develop interventions that teach the identification and evaluation of bias. Current pedagogical approaches (checklists and bias charts) tend to assume a self-evident definition that categorises bias as unquestioningly bad and disqualifying. Current approaches, however, fail to recognise the cognitive complexity of decoding bias within a source. A decoding process includes identifying the type of bias, determining an objective baseline, recognising biased features, and analysing bias’s impact. Based on work done from several fields—argumentation theory, media bias, media literacy, and history education—this paper proposes an operational definition of bias and a practical framework for conceptualising a process to identify and evaluate bias. This paper will explore the limitations of this framework, as well as existing source evaluation paradigms. If librarians want to prepare individuals to participate in a post-truth society, where disinformation weaponises bias by appealing to emotions and beliefs rather than facts, an inclusive and nuanced conception of bias is a necessary component of library instruction

In The Blink Of An Eye

The following analysis examines my drawing practice in creating the work Drowning in My Living Room. A Self-Portrait (2020), focusing specifically on a particular emotive state I reached in the process of embodied mark-making. This condition, recognised as the ‘gap’, illuminates the underlying concept of the ‘act’ of drawing as a process of ‘loss’. According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the artist experiences loss in the instant between the thought or image in the ‘mind’s eye’ and the split second the pencil or stylus touches the piece of paper or screen. ‘The genesis of the present’ (Newman 1994, 219) – that is the instant act of drawing as the origin of thinking – takes place within this Augenblick or blink-of-an-eye (Derrida 1993, 48); that momentary space or gap spawning interconnections between ‘the now and the non-now, of perception and non-perception’ (Derrida 2010, 73). Derrida deemed drawing to be an act of memory; that is, at the point of contact the image is already lost into the past (Derrida 1993, 68). The un-drawn space has no present but is simultaneously the future and the past; in other words, is a trait or trace. However, I build upon Derrida’s argument and propose that it is at this moment of blindness/loss there also exists the site of possibility, invention and originality, of wonder and astonishment. The Augenblick becomes an ecstatic temporal moment (Pasanen 2006, 221) . It is within this un-filled space that the potential of creating a cosmopoietic worlding is found. In the work, Drowning in My Living Room. A Self-Portrait, the door (half open or half closed?) becomes an analogy for Derrida’s Augenblick, which, like the door ajar, is a threshold between a serendipitous moment and the sense of the irreclaimable – of loss