Incorporating funds of knowledge in school gardens

Master's Project (M.Ed.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017Incorporating "funds of knowledge" with schoolyard gardening enriches a child's experience by interacting with their families, local community organizations, school faculty, and other children. A garden community is a social setting and the relationships established by working together cultivate a long-lasting commitment to education. Children are excited to learn, willing to participate, and take ownership of acquiring life skills that are fundamental to pass on from generation to generation. Incorporating "funds of knowledge" provides a venue for those inherited skill sets to be incorporated into the mainstream curriculum of the classroom. The small, yet emblematic, group of children that participated in this project at Leupp Public School were able to gain an appreciation for planting and growing a garden by being Youth Participant Action Researchers. Conducting home visits to some of the family homes also brought an invitation for increased participation in the school garden. The children incorporated their culture of gardening by learning from elders, community gardeners and their families

Appreciative semiotic and hermeneutic practices in the analysis of ethnic minorities

Socio-cultural research of ethnic minorities, is a hermeneutical process involving simultaneously the analysis of discursive strategies available to communities (ethnic),and the meta-narrative material. The type of discourse research dominant in the community, produces changes in the social pragmatics of that community. Action research study presents the discursive strategy of socio-cultural action. It emphasizes on quality characteristics of the method, which can be interpreted as a semiotic analysis of communication practices in the community, with effects in changing behavior patterns. Community development resulting from changes to the rhetoric used by the community. Understood in the manner proposed by Gergen constructionism, community is the space where there is a process of constant renegotiation of the meaning of social reality. A specific way of social pragmatics which can be used in transforming the social rhetoric of ethnic and multi-ethnic communities is the appreciative inquiry, transformative method aimed at harnessing the resources within the community by exploring the discourse level of positive experiences.Cultural minorities, ethnic communities, socio-cultural action, con- structionism, social pragmatic, appreciative inquiry, social rhetoric, meta-naratives

Open Science Happens Somewhere: Exploring the use of Science OER in Schools

This paper concerns a pilot exploring the use of openly licensed content in secondary schools. Specifically it looks at the use of the Open University’s (OU) OpenScienceLab (OSL) in two remote rural schools in the West Highlands of Scotland. OSL is a series of online experiments openly licensed for anyone to use, they are about learning through experimentation, and are part of a wider OU interest in how to support and develop inquiry based learning at a distance (Scanlon 2012). This area is of particular relevance to Scottish schools, as the underlying pedagogy of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) promotes interdisciplinary thinking and learning through inquiry (Macintyre 2014). The idea of the pilot was to work on how “open content” might be used in schools to understand what openness might mean in and for educational practice. While our initial intention was simply to run these in schools after the first workshops it became apparent while the technical and licences were open and it was relatively clear how to do the experiments, people were uncertain how to use them in their educational practice. Emphasising the need to attend to Educational Practice as well as Openness in OEP. The pilot took a participatory design approach (Sanders and Westerlund 2011; Mor et.al 2012), to developing and support practices around the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in classroom. Through a series of workshops and schools visits we looked to solve these problems from the classroom out, using the teachers experience to develop learning journeys that worked for teachers and pupils. With teachers we created a learning journey using the OU’s free platform OpenLearnWorks to wrap the experiments in a mixture of existing and newly developed OER. Two journeys were created, these will be run in two locations with with two sets of teachers in December 2014. The paper will report on the outcomes for pupils and teachers of this final stage. In doing so it will reflect on the participatory design process, highlighting the practices developed to support the use of open content, drawing out broader conclusions might support the use open materials in the classroom

Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field

Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe

The role of the user and the society in new product development

Within the knowledge-based economy several institutions are involved in product innovation processes. Literature study has shown that the most researched and cited are the industry-universitygovernment relations, presented in the Triple Helix model of institutional relations within new product development (NPD). Based on a case study of the Academic Virtual Enterprise, we have put the sole input of these institutions in NPD into question. We have tested and supported the claim that the user and the society are equal partners in the product innovation process. We have put forward the Fourfold Helix model that features a new formation of institutional relations where special focus is placed on the involvement of the user and the society in NPD

Soft systems methodology: a context within a 50-year retrospective of OR/MS

Soft systems methodology (SSM) has been used in the practice of operations research and management science OR/MS) since the early 1970s. In the 1990s, it emerged as a viable academic discipline. Unfortunately, its proponents consider SSM and traditional systems thinking to be mutually exclusive. Despite the differences claimed by SSM proponents between the two, they have been complementary. An extensive sampling of the OR/MS literature over its entire lifetime demonstrates the richness with which the non-SSM literature has been addressing the very same issues as does SSM

Making A Difference: Year Two Report of the Pennsylvania High School Coaching Initiative

This report examines the implementation of the second year of three for the Pennsylvania High School Coaching Initiative (PAHSCI). Funded by the Annenberg Foundation, this initiative focuses on literacy and math coaches providing support to teachers from across the major subject areas to create literacy-rich classrooms in which students actively engage in learning tasks that deepen their content knowledge and strengthen their abilities to think critically and communicate well. This report presents findings from the first two years of research. It includes survey research as well as in-depth qualitative research in participating schools and districts and provides recommendations for PAHSCI stakeholders as they refine the program and for other education reformers as they consider the benefits of instructional coaching as a strategy for improving high schools and student achievement

Counselors\u27 Social Class and Socioeconomic Status Understanding and Awareness

Nine licensed professional counselors participated in semi-structured interviews designed to reveal their awareness and understanding about social class and socioeconomic status (SES). Findings suggest that participants\u27 descriptions of social class and SES often are in-congruent with how they use the terms, and their awareness and understanding may be limited because of developmental factors, indicating potential clinical liabilities. The authors suggest that counselors should develop stronger social class consciousness to provide affirming counseling services and that further research on such strategies is needed