Re-imagining sustainable tourism futures with others : A critical introduction and exploration of sustainable tourism co-design as a multifaceted innovation endeavour for better worldmaking

With less than a decade left to Transform Our World (United Nations, 2016), the world has yet to transition to sustainable development. A key challenge for research and practice is to facilitate collaboration beyond silos of public, private and civic organisations, groups and individuals. Design and co-design are possible ways to involve others in order to better speak to the wickedness of sustainable development transitions including the sustainable development goals. This is an article-based dissertation that seeks to critically introduce and explore how it may be possible to collaboratively design tourism (tourism co-design) to enable sustainable development transitions and to identify latent opportunities that may help to enhance the values of locals, tourists and nature. Tourism co-design is framed as a process of inquiry that can be informed by action research. In this pursuit, the dissertation brings together various philosophical and theoretical perspectives with lessons learned from co-designing tourism in Norway and Denmark to advance an abstract, yet highly concrete, understanding of collaboration for sustainable tourism development as sustainable tourism co-design. In designing tourism with, not for, others, the dissertation advances an understanding of sustainable tourism co-design as a multifaceted innovation endeavour for better worldmaking, whereby it simultaneously reveals and challenges some of the underlying assumptions on which extant approaches to sustainable tourism development often rest. By doing so, the dissertation addresses the widening gap between the principles and theory of sustainable development and actual change and operationalisation in tourism practice and research. Bridging theory and practice through co-design, the main contribution of this dissertation is enriched understandings of collaboration for sustainable tourism development. It is my hope that, by inviting readers into the reflexive realms of sustainable tourism co-design, it may be possible to re-imagine and restore a sense of ethical, emphatic and respectful awareness about our values in relation to others’ and nature’s values in the becoming of sustainable tourism futures

MountainRise, Volume 5, Number 2

Volume 5, Number 2 (2009). MountainRise, an open, peer-reviewed, international electronic journal, was published by the Coulter Faculty Commons for Excellence in Teaching & Learning at Western Carolina University. Originating in the ancient mountains of western North Carolina, MountainRise served as an international vehicle for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL). MountainRise applied insightful scholarly methodologies to the processes of teaching and learning. The aim of the journal was to foster a higher education culture that embraced innovation in teaching and learning

“The Lord Speaks Through Me”: Moving Beyond Conventional Law School Pedagogy and the Reasons for Doing So

Maintenance of status quo law school curricular design and delivery, along with the continued marginalization of live client clinic programs, and the discordant objectives of law schools as compared to the expectations of Bar passage, serve to stifle the role of juridic practitioners in the service of justice. Decades of careful scholarship regarding the problems associated with the quality of legal education have repeatedly called for curricular revisions that should enhance the knowledge and skill base of graduates, develop their level of preparedness to actually serve in the profession, and demonstrate care for students. And while there has been a commitment on behalf of law schools to establish experiential educational opportunities through participation in live client clinics, far too often these clinics appear as appendages to the core curriculum and are marginalized as a result. This essay has two objectives – to address the serious and well-known shortcomings associated with law school pedagogy, and to stimulate consideration of alternate pedagogical methods that draw upon student development theory to enhance what education scholars know about cognition

A Nexus of Literate Activity: The Design of Writing Assignments in the Disciplines

Writing plays a critical role in higher education as students are inducted into disciplinary practices through different genres, methodological repertoires and argumentation strategies. In Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives, the instructor serves as an embodied reservoir of disciplinary knowledge and an arbiter of literate practices but most crucially employs the mediating capacities of the writing assignment as a potent pedagogical nexus. In this practice space, the instructor acts as designer of the pedagogical experience—the course as a whole and writing assignments in particular. This study used interviews, survey, and the collection of syllabi and other instructional artifacts to examine the design thinking by instructors of upper division writing-emphasis courses at one private institution. Coding and close analysis of interview data compared with the survey and instructional artifacts demonstrated that disciplinary influences, absorbed from the instructor’s own disciplinary socialization and reinforced by professional interactions, strongly influenced writing assignments while institutional and personal factors also played a role in enabling and constraining design. The data also informed a model of how time may shape design practices, using concepts that owe some debt to practice theory, rhetorical genre theory, mediated discourse analysis, writing across the lifespan, and new materialism. For instructors at the target institution, time shaped design thinking in at least two ways, first, in generating a reservoir of experience at the personal and institutional level, and second, through the operation of intersecting time cycles on multiple scales that shaped both personal and institutional life

In the School, Not of the School : Co-Performing Critical Literacies with English Amped

The purpose of this study was to explore the possibilities and limitations of “amplifying” critical literacy practices within an urban high school English and creative writing class. This action research project defamiliarized English education and created conditions for participants to imagine and perform alternative possibilities by bringing together critical research, community involvement, creative writing and performance in an extended class with high school, university, and community-based collaborators. Participants were high school juniors, partnering teachers, university-based student teachers, and community members who collaborated to form the English Amped program in the 2014-2015 academic year. Ethnographic methods were used to collect data through field notes, semi-structured interviews, photographs, writing samples, questionnaires, and audio recordings. Findings demonstrated that the socially structured and habituated alienation of working-class students of color in urban schools delimited the ways that participants imagined and enacted critical literacy in school. Historically-based and persistent experiences of school as it is limited the legibility of school as it could be. The de-familiarization of traditional schooling provoked both euphoria and anxiety for participants. English Amped produced thresholds of contact between differently positioned people, institutions, ways of knowing, and forms of experience. Over time, these thresholds helped English Amped participants to experience performances of possibility that generated new repertoires of critically grounded knowledge and forms of relationality. Participants could later draw on these repertoires to produce more sustained forms of solidarity, agency, and well-being. Performances of possibilities helped students, teachers, and teacher candidates to experience increased agency and connection, which in turn helped participants to navigate the anxieties of critical literacies in school. This study points to the humanizing and emancipatory possibilities of critical literacy projects that construct collaborative, cross-institutional networks embedded deeply within urban high schools. Ultimately, English Amped demonstrated that the proliferation of critical literacy in urban public high schools may grow from concrete sites of practice and networks of relationality that enable people to create alternative repertoires over time, and thus co-perform transformative possibilities of school as it could be

The impact of mathematics teaching efficacy on teachers’ pedagogical practices

This study explores the pedagogical practices of 167 Year 4 and 160 Year 8 New Zealand mathematics teachers who have different levels of mathematics teaching efficacy. Using data from the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement 2013, the teacher questionnaire items believed to be the indicators of mathematics teaching efficacy were selected, represented by six items such as “I feel confident about teaching maths”. Then, low, mid, and high efficacious teachers were identified and compared to see how they differed with respect to their teaching profile and the frequency they used effective pedagogies when teaching mathematics (italicised below) (Anthony & Walshaw, 2007). Twenty eight percent of Year 4 and 41% of Year 8 teachers had high mathematics teaching efficacy. Compared with the other teachers, teachers with high mathematics teaching efficacy were better able to provide an ethic of care in their classroom, they more frequently arranged their classrooms for learning to enable students to collaborate, and more frequently expected their students to communicate their thinking and debate ideas with others. They more frequently provided students with worthwhile mathematical tasks, they more frequently provided opportunities for their students to build on their own thinking, and to explore how new learning linked to or changed what they already knew. They more frequently expected their students to make mathematical connections by reflecting on their learning, to use multiple representations, and use ideas and skills from different curriculum areas

Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing

The creative writing workshop has existed since the early part of the 20th century, but does it adequately serve the students who come to it today? While the workshop is often thought of as a form of student-centered pedagogy, it turns out that workshop conversations serve to marginalize a range of aesthetic orientations and the cultural histories to which they belong. Given the shifting demographics of higher education, it is time to re-evaluate the creative writing curriculum and move literary writing pedagogy toward a more inclusive, equitable model. Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing makes the argument that creative writing stands upon problematic assumptions about what counts as valid artistic production, and these implicit beliefs result in exclusionary pedagogical practices. To counter this tendency of creative writing, this book proposes a revised curriculum that rests upon 12 threshold concepts that can serve to transform the teaching of literary writing craft. The book also has a companion website www.criticalcreativewriting.org offering supplemental materials such as lesson plans and course materials

Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research

In an effort to challenge the ways in which colonial power relations and Eurocentric knowledges are reproduced in participatory research, this book explores whether and how it is possible to use arts-based methods for creating more horizontal and democratic research practices. In discussing both the transformative potential and limitations of arts-based methods, the book asks: What can arts-based methods contribute to decolonising participatory research and its processes and practices? The book takes part in ongoing debates related to the need to decolonise research, and investigates practical contributions of arts-based methods in the practice-led research domain. Further, it discusses the role of artistic research in depth, locating it in a decolonising context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design, fine arts, service design, social sciences and development studies