Alternatives to PPPs: positive action for in-house services

The paper reviews empirical examples of policies and approaches for developing public services through public sector provision and direct employment, in the context of EU law

Fighting fire with fire: target audience responses to online anti-violence campaigns

With the Syrian civil war entering its third year, drawing an increasing number of young Westerners into the fray, this report sought to discover how audiences respond to government-sponsored and community-generated online efforts to counter violent extremism. Overview Prepared by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute under contract to New South Wales Police Force and funded by Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee (ANZCTC). As the Syrian civil war entered its third year, drawing an increasing number of young Westerners into the fray, ASPI spoke with young Muslim Sydneysiders about Australia’s online efforts in countering violent extremism (CVE). This report sought to discover how such audiences respond to government-sponsored and community-generated anti-violence campaigns. The summary report outlines the main findings and recommendations from the full report. On the whole this report challenges approaches that only discuss Muslim youth as being highly vulnerable and in dire need of empowerment to resist violent propaganda. Instead, it shows that some have taken a lead role in challenging violent narratives and are empowering themselves. This report is intended for use by government agencies and communities to inform their future work in this area. Appendix 2 in the full report, by Kristy Bryden, considers international approaches to countering violent narratives online, particularly those developed by the UK, the US, Denmark, Canada and the Netherlands

Opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education

The aim of this interpretative, qualitative research study is to investigate affordances and constraints of dialogic pedagogy in the museums, as well as its broader contribution to society today.  The background is my involvement in a Danish development project called ‘Museums and Cultural Institutions as Spaces for Citizenship,’ initiated by seven art museum educators in Copenhagen and supported by the Ministry of Culture. Denmark has a strong dialogic tradition dating back to Grundtvig’s belief in the power of ´the oral word’ to foster democratic ‘Bildung.’ Museum education, on the other hand, has a long tradition of monologic transmission. Still, a more participatory pedagogy has been gaining ground over many years. This study is based on the observations of three-hour-long teaching sessions in seven museums and has a Bakhtinian framework. While the overall analysis builds on the whole project, two cases are discussed in more detail. The overarching research question is how central aspects of dialogic pedagogy played out in an art museum context and its opportunities and challenges. The subquestions focus on three central Bakhtinian concepts: How did the educators facilitate multivoicedness during the short museum visits? What role did difference and disagreement play? What opportunities emerged for students to develop internally persuasive discourse? I have chosen these concepts because they are central in dialogism and combined them because they are closely connected in Bakhtin’s work. The final reflections open a wider perspective of how dialogic museum education may contribute to overarching functions of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Key findings were that the museum educators’ transition from traditional to dialogic pedagogy was enhanced by their genuine interest in hearing students’ voices. They succeeded in engaging students in multivoiced dialogues but with a tendency towards harmonization rather than the exploration of diversity and difference. The practical aesthetic workshops offered unique opportunities for students to develop their internally persuasive word, i.e., by replacing authoritative interpretations of artworks with their own. Challenges experienced by the educators were, e.g., the dilemmas between preplanning and student choice and between disseminating their professional art knowledge and facilitating students’ meaning making and creativity. In contrast, students found the lack of workshop follow-up problematic. The article provides deeper insight into museums as an alternative pedagogical arena. Museum educators and non-museum classroom teachers may find it useful for cultivating greater dialogic interactions in respective learning contexts

Design & Learner-Centric Analytics. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Designs for Learning. 23-25 May, 2018, Bergen Norway

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Implications of Assessing Student-Driven Projects:A Case Study of Possible Challenges and an Argument for Reflexivity

Employing student-driven project work in a higher education setting challenges not only the way in which we understand students’ learning and how we define the expected learning outcomes, it also challenges our ways of assessing students’ learning. This paper will address this question specifically and illustrate with a case that highlights some of the challenges that may arise in practice when assessing student-driven, problem-based projects. The case involved an assessment situation in which a discrepancy arose between the internal and external examiner in relation to what was valued. The discrepancy had consequences not only for the concrete assessment of students’ work, but also for the validity of the problem-based university pedagogy in general, and it raised the question of how to assess students’ work adequately. The research focus of this study was to explore the implications of assessing student-driven projects within a progressive approach to higher education teaching, along with the potential underlying issues. We found a need for clear assessment criteria while insisting on a space for students’ creativity and reflexivity as essential parts of a learning process. The paper thus makes a case for the notion of reflexivity as an assessment criterion to be integrated into learning objectives

Dialogic possibilities of online supervision

When schools locked down owing to the spread of COVID-19, Danish upper secondary school students worked on the major written assignment that completes their studies. This assignment is interdisciplinary, and students receive up to twenty hours of supervision from two teachers. This year, supervision was reorganised into a virtual format. This article explores how and in what ways students benefited from this reorganisation. This article is based on a mixed-methods design that includes quantitative and qualitative data and investigates how various online supervision formats support dialogic interaction. This article focuses on the student’s experience of supervision. It finds that all the formats we investigated offer the opportunity for dialogue during supervision, but their potential varies significantly. Some formats seem to have great potential for supporting students’ academic development, whereas others support their psychosocial development. We conclude by addressing the importance of choosing the online format suited to a given purpose and recommend that supervisors be aware of the didactic purposes of the various formats