Underdogs and superheroes: Designing for new players in public space

We are exploring methods for participatory and public involvement of new 'players' in the design space. Underdogs & Superheroes involves a game-based methodology – a series of creative activities or games – in order to engage people experientially, creatively, and personally throughout the design process. We have found that games help engage users’ imaginations by representing reality without limiting expectations to what's possible here and now; engaging experiential and personal perspectives (the 'whole' person); and opening the creative process to hands-on user participation through low/no-tech materials and a widely-understood approach. The methods are currently being applied in the project Underdogs & Superheroes, which aims to evolve technological interventions for personal and community presence in local public spaces

Re-Envisioning Contemplative Pedagogy Through Self-Study

Contemplative pedagogy focuses on creating a sense of presence within educators to effectively educate the whole person through mindfulness in teaching. As I engage in a self-study, I develop initial components for the way I employ contemplative pedagogy. I aim to understand myself as an educator in order to teach effectively. One way to enable particular kinds of understandings is through self-study methodology. The foundational framework that develops through my ongoing self-study may interest those who are unfamiliar with the terrain of contemplative pedagogy. For the purposes of this article, I place an emphasis on the philosophy and ethics classes that I taught at Middlesex County College in New Jersey, although I teach several classes on many campuses. My philosophical method requires me to engage in a self-study of my teaching practices. My project involves self-study as a philosophical research methodology that aims to inform educators and rethink the theories and praxis of teaching. As I work towards improvement- aimed pedagogy, I make myself vulnerable as I share my experiences with my Peer Scholar. My Peer Scholar, which some researchers call a “critical friend”, deliberates with me to challenge epistemological assumptions along with suspicions. The self-study dialogue with my Peer Scholar causes me to define initial components of how I engage in an improvement-aimed contemplative pedagogy. My hope is to support those who wish to implement contemplative pedagogy in higher education as I relate my working framework based on the themes that developed from the deliberation. The components in the article that convey how I engage in contemplative pedagogy are not meant to serve as a checklist or stern procedure for classroom activities. I share these components as aspects of my contemplative pedagogy, with suggestive scripts, not as a rigid structure but rather as a work in progress that is always under construction

Visualizing practical knowledge: The Haughton-Mars Project

To improve how we envision knowledge, we must improve our ability to see knowledge in everyday life. That is, visualization is concerned not only with displaying facts and theories, but also with finding ways to express and relate tacit understanding. Such knowledge, although often referred to as "common," is not necessarily shared and may be distributed socially in choreographies for working together—in the manner that a chef and a maitre d’hôtel, who obviously possess very different skills, coordinate their work. Furthermore, non-verbal concepts cannot in principle be inventoried. Reifying practical knowledge is not a process of converting the implicit into the explicit, but pointing to what we know, showing its manifestations in our everyday life. To this end, I illustrate the study and reification of practical knowledge by examining the activities of a scientific expedition in the Canadian Arctic—a group of scientists preparing for a mission to Mar

Re-envisioning Information Literacy: Critical Information Literacy, Disciplinary Discourses, and Music History

As educators, we recognize that it can be challenging to translate the research methods we learned in graduate school to our contemporary students, who are accustomed to the constantly shifting information buffet provided by sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, SoundCloud, and the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). Students can struggle with the transition from an almost exclusive reliance on Google to the complex information environment, both print and online, that the typical university library provides and can be overwhelmed by the volume and variety of information they encounter. Our students also operate in an online environment that is politicized, monetized, and surveilled and we are only just beginning to understand the implications of this new environment. In light of these changes in the information landscape, this article introduces critical information literacy, a recent movement drawing upon critical theory and critical pedagogy, as a new approach for introducing discipline-specific research skills in the music history classroom

The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine as a “Teaching Subject”: Lessons from the Medical Humanities and Simulation Pedagogy

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners

Envisioning Value-Rich Design for IoT Wearables

The mass-market fashion industry maintains complex economic structures globally. In recent years, the adverse consequences of commercialisation driven by this system have given rise to innovation in production systems, material cultures, and consumer awareness of waste. Alongside issues of long-term lifespan and ecological impact of wearables (wearable technology), focus on the values and thought processes that shape practices within the clothing sector are under-represented. The integration of emerging wireless technologies in garments heightens this problem. The potential to access, collectively experience, wear, monitor or exploit personal data is only just beginning to be understood. In this paper, the author explores the role value-sensitive design [7] plays to further embed sustainability into wearables ideation. From value-sensitive design, the Envisioning Cards toolkit [5] is employed to guide speculation in the design case of Aura:maton, an Internet of Things (IoT) connected garment with an olfactory-emitting display. With this in mind, the 'social, economic and aesthetic force' [3] of fashion is leveraged as a living network metaphor, in order to frame everyday experiences of an IoT ecosystem. Exploratory workshops trace how people perceive value-tensions of wirelessly networked garments. The author's evaluations show the potential of Envisioning Cards to connect the broader social, cultural, economic or political issues as conceptual design tactics, to avoid blind spots. This paper discusses how designers could intentionally explore value dimensions alongside the technologically possible, as they negotiate material-immaterial conditions during fashion wearables development. Interweaving values into decisions of what gets made, or not made can potentially shift the unfolding of design toward value-rich, IoT connected garments

Entrepreneurship as nexus of change: the syncretistic production of the future

This paper deals with the issue of how the future is created and the mechanisms through which it is produced and conceived. Key to this process appears to be social interaction and how it is used to bring about change. Examining the entrepreneurial context by qualitative longitudinal research techniques, the study considers the situations of three entrepreneurs. It demonstrates that the web of relationships in which individuals are engaged provide the opportunity to enact the environment in new ways, thus producing organizations for the future. It further provides empirical evidence for a Heideggerian reading of strategy-as-practice, extending this conceptualization to account for the temporal dimension

Visualizing the Convergence of Metaliteracy and the Information Literacy Framework

Displaying information in a visual manner frequently enhances clarity. Highlighting thematic elements and their interrelationships can lead to understanding, even insights, that might not otherwise happen. While words describe, well-conceived graphics illuminate in both subtle and overt ways. Synergies between word and image are especially powerful. The visualization at the heart of this chapter makes connections between two separate but related frameworks: information literacy and metaliteracy. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education acknowledges that it was influenced by metaliteracy, and in particular metacognition.1 Metaliteracy emerged prior to the development of the ACRL Framework and was similarly designed to recast information literacy for a new era. While both provide comprehensive models, this chapter will explore the relationships between particular aspects of each: metaliterate learner characteristics and Framework dispositions. Metacognition will have a leading role in this analysis

Inviting students to determine for themselves what it means to write across the disciplines

Situated in the literature on threshold concepts and transfer of prior knowledge in WAC/WID and composition studies, with particular emphasis on the scholarship of writing across difference, our article explores the possibility of re-envisioning the role of the composition classroom within the broader literacy ecology of colleges and universities largely comprised of students from socioeconomically and ethno- linguistically underrepresented communities. We recount the pilot of a composi- tion course prompting students to examine their own prior and other literacy values and practices, then transfer that growing meta-awareness to the critical acquisition of academic discourse. Our analysis of students’ self-assessment memos reveals that students apply certain threshold concepts to acquire critical agency as academic writ- ers, and in a manner consistent with Guerra’s concept of transcultural repositioning. We further consider the role collective rubric development plays as a critical incident facilitating transcultural repositioning

Possible Paths Forward for a Practice-Based Teacher Education Centered on Justice

This dissertation seeks to address limitations of Practice-Based Teacher Education (PBTE) in relation to (1) narrow conceptions of practice and teacher learning, and (2) peripheralization of equity and justice. After aiming to understand the landscape of limitations in PBTE, this study situates itself within specific manifestations of these limitations that exist in common conceptualizations of teacher learning and practice-based pedagogies. To (re)emphasize the situated nature of practice and center equity and justice in PBTE, I theorize an expanded notion of teacher learning, develop design features for contextually situated pedagogies of practice (Grossman et al., 2009), and implement the design with a group of three mathematics teacher candidates. This dissertation, as three manuscripts, represents, through theory and practice, a possible version of PBTE that attends to “issues of voice, power, context, and subjectivity” (Peercy et al., 2019, p. 1175). Within the first manuscript, I pursue questions related to understanding the conversations of critique around PBTE – specifically as it relates to the use of undertheorized notions of ‘practice’ and the peripheralization of equity and justice. Within this manuscript, through an integrative review of literature (Torraco, 2016), I synthesize the critiques and re-envisioned aspects of PBTE in order to generate possible paths forward for research and practice in the field. The second manuscript highlights work that consequently pursues one of the possible paths, theorizing an expanded framework for teacher learning that spans justice and practice-based notions. Using case-study methodology (Merriam, 2009), I investigate what is made visible and possible to understand about teacher resources by using the Critical Framework for Teacher Learning (Karr, 2021) as a lens for analysis. The final manuscript aims to answer a call to emphasize the situatedness of teaching by articulating design features for pedagogies of practice (Grossman et al., 2009) that provide “opportunities to experience the complexities of power that permeate learning of teaching practices” (Dutro & Cartun, 2016, p. 119). I then show how these pedagogies assist in making visible TCs’ resources for responding to injustices. Findings from this study highlight how PBTE might develop deep interrogative stances on subjectivities, envision pedagogies of practice centered on enactment toward justice, and leverage robust conceptual frameworks for teacher learning to include justice-based dimensions. It also illustrates how, when leveraging robust notions of teacher learning, we can view teaching practice as a contextually complex construction, which moves PBTE away from viewing practice and practices as static, universal, or ‘best.’ Furthermore, in presenting design features for practice-based pedagogies, I show that features oriented toward the contextualization of teaching help to elicit teaching practice that is contingent and responds to injustice