Preparing Teacher Candidates to Serve Students From Diverse Backgrounds: Triggering Transformative Learning Through Short-Term Cultural Immersion

This study followed 24 teacher candidates in a short-term cultural immersion field experience designed to help them reflect on their assumptions and perspectives in order to better understand the culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students they will teach. Qualitative methods were informed by a phenomenological research approach to examine candidates’ transformative learning experiences in a cultural immersion context. The findings are discussed within a three-stage framework of transformative learning: triggering experiences, frame of reference examination, and transformative change

“Let's go round the circle:” How verbal facilitation can function as a means of direct instruction

In this chapter, the term facilitation refers to the act of conducting a verbal discussion prior to, or after an activity, with the aim of encouraging students to reflect on what will, or has been, learned from experiences. An overview of the role of the leader/facilitator, as advocated in some widely available adventure education texts, is discussed. This is followed by an outline of the methodological approach that guided the research project. The analysis section highlights how the leader was observed directing and orchestrating the direction of talk through the "common sense" and everyday ways of conducting verbal facilitation sessions. The primary focus of analysis is on the structure of the interaction in these sessions (i.e., a leader-initiated topic for discussion, a student reply, and leader evaluation of this response). Short excerpts of data are used to support and illustrate the claims that are made in regard to the nature of the interaction that is observed in these settings

The Politics of Recitation: Ideology, Interpellation, and Hegemony

In this article, David I. Backer introduces the politics of recitation as a third realm for research on recitation pedagogy, in addition to process and product. Recitation is the pattern of classroom talk where a teacher asks a question, a student responds to the question, and the teacher evaluates the response. Research on classroom talk shows that this pattern is the dominant script in classrooms in the United States. Revisiting debates among critical theorists of schooling, particularly around the concept of hegemony, Backer argues that the politics of recitation is best understood in terms of interpellation, the concrete occurrence of ideological reproduction. He also maintains that recitation does not interpellate students into a particular category but instead teaches students to become interpellatable to any social category, independent of historical context. The article opens new possibilities for research into the connection between recitation and ideology and describes what liberatory pedagogy can look like

The Critique of Deliberative Discussion. A Response to “Education for Deliberative Democracy: A Typology of Classroom Discussions

My response to Samuelsson’s (2016) recent essay offers a different paradigm with which to think about education, deliberative discussion and democracy. I call this paradigm the critique of deliberative discussion. Following Ruitenberg’s application of Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative democracy to education, the critique of deliberative discussion focuses on what Jameson called the “political unconscious” of deliberative discussions like those presented by Samuelsson. There is literature that critique traditionally moderate-liberal notions of deliberative discussion, which Samuelsson defines his typology: reason, willingness to listen, and consensus. While others, like Ruitenberg, have developed this critique of deliberative-democratic citizenship education, the critique of deliberative discussion takes a left-of-liberal view of each of Samuelsson’s requirements for deliberative discussion listed above and describes practical-pedagogical techniques, which teachers and facilitators can use to practice critical discussions. This response’s contribution to the debate is therefore not only to critique deliberative discussion but also—following Samuelsson—to offer techniques that translate the critique into classroom practice

Drama, Desire and Schooling. Drives to learning in creative and expressive school subjects

Desire is an unfamiliar and neglected concept in education and schooling. This paper makes an argument for the need to consider desire as a drive to learning in schools. In parallel with both Freud and Piaget, Vygotsky draws connections between play in children, fantasy and imagination in adolescence and, in adulthood, the making and enjoyment of the arts. In each case, the force, or drive towards creativity is seen as an expression of desire. With the emergence of arts-oriented subjects in the curricula of mass schooling, adolescents are encouraged to draw resources from the internalised worlds of fantasy and imagination and to materialise these in the social production of various cultural forms, where the resources of production are held as much between the group of students as within their individual and internal worlds of fantasy and imagination. This paper focuses particularly on the secondary school curriculum, taking a piece of improvised drama as evidence and analysing it from a Vygotskian perspective. Firstly, how, in these kinds of activity, might educationalists gain insights into the individual and social drives towards learning and development and, secondly, what resources from the socio-cultural environment are utilised and transformed? Major themes to emerge will be the productive and dynamic set of tensions which are exposed between the desire of the individual and the processes of social production, between the drive of desire and structuring principles of particular cultural forms and, finally, between the force of desire and the institutional constraints of schooling

Primary mathematics in-service teaching development: elaborating 'in-the-moment'

A thesis submitted to the Wits School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May, 2016This study investigates how primary school mathematics in-service teachers respond to learners’ offers, over time, during classroom interactions. The study was a follow-up to a one-year long in-service ‘maths for teaching’ professional development course in which 33 teachers participated in 2012. Four teachers from that course were tracked in this follow-up study. Data sources within this study consisted of two cycles of observations of lessons taught by the four teachers in 2013 and 2014, and an interim video-stimulated recall (VSR) interview with each teacher, with reflections guided by the structure of Rowland et al.’s ‘knowledge quartet’. A total of 18 lessons from the four teachers were video-recorded across the 2013 and 2014 observations. The notion of ‘elaboration’ was used in this study as an interpretive lens to examine and characterise responsive teaching actions in the South African context, with the focus narrowing over the course of the PhD to contingency situations within the knowledge quartet framework, focused on responses to learner offers. In the South African literature, the terrain of elaboration is characterised by extensive gaps in teachers’ mathematical knowledge, incoherent talk, and frequent lack of evaluation of learners’ offers in the classroom. Using a grounded theory approach, I propose an ‘elaboration’ framework with three situations of responsive teaching (breakdown, sophistication and individuation/ collectivisation), which can be used as a tool to support the development of more responsive teaching in the South African context (and perhaps in other contexts where similar problems prevail). In this way, the study has contributed in terms of identifying some important ‘stages of implementation’ (Schweisfurth, 2011) that might be required to move towards the ideals of more responsive teaching that are described in the international literature, and yet remain distant from the realities of South African schooling. Using the three markers of shifts (extent, breadth and quality) in elaboration recruited in this study, drawn from the ways in which the dimensions of responsive teaching were conceptualised, I report on the different patterns of shifts in elaboration by the four teachers. The results of this analysis indicated that all four teachers made shifts in their responses to learners’ offers from 2013 to 2014 lessons in at least one or more dimensions of responsive teaching, in relation to extent, breadth and quality of elaborations. Findings from VSR interviews indicated associations between shifts in teachers’ reflective awareness, and shifts in responsive teaching actions. Theoretically, the study contributes through characterising responsive teaching actions in contexts of evidence of limited evaluation within the elaboration framework, with a language of description for identifying and developing more responsive teaching actions in a resource constrained contex

Do Metacognitive Strategies Improve Student Achievement in Secondary Science Classrooms?

Increasing prevalence of high-stakes testing calls for focus on value-added teaching and learning practices. Following is an inquiry regarding metacognitive teaching and learning practices as it pertains to secondary science classrooms. Research shows that the orchestration and inclusion of metacognitive strategies in the science classroom improve achievement under the following preconditions: (1) are pervasively embedded in the educational structure; (2) are part of appropriately rigorous and relevant curriculum; (3) are supported by ‘metacognitive friendly’ teaching strategies; (4) are explicitly practiced by students and teachers; and (5) enable students to take responsibility for their own learning

The Proceedings of the National Māori Graduates of Psychology Symposium 2002: Making a difference

This document contains the full conference proceedings.This is the full proceedings of the National Māori Graduates of Psychology Symposium 2002. The proceeding include the following themes: Kia matāra - negotiating the challenges in Māori development, kia mau – recruitment and retention, Tuhia mai, whiua atu – research and methodology, tinia mai – interventions and treatment, taitaia i te ahi manuka – pride upon the skin

Education Is Life Itself: Biological Evolution as a Model for Human Learning

Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill development, and creativity. By drawing on the often under-recognized parallels between biological evolution and human learning, this essay argues that formal education needs and ought not to forego the unconscious exploratory processes of informal learning. Rather than posit as natural the cultural story that formal schooling must prepare students to integrate with given cultures and foreknowable futures, the evolutionary perspective shows that education is better thought of as preparing students to create cultures and to change, and foster change, in relation to unknown futures. The properties that distinguish formal from informal learning—conscious reflection and a degree of collective consensus about what constitutes knowledge at any given time—are, we argue, useful not as ends in themselves, but as tools for maximizing, sharing, and extending unconscious, evolutionary learning. Working with them as such offers a way out of some of education’s persistent problems. Two autobiographical case studies provide examples of these evolutionary changes and indicate pathways of inquiry by which to pursue them