Field Ecology: A Modest, but Imaginable, Contestation of Neoliberal Science Education

Science education has become a valuable market tool, serving the knowledge economy and technocratic workforce that celebrates individualism, meritocracy, entrepreneurship, rational thought, and abstract knowledge. Field ecology, however, could be a modest, but imaginable contestation of market-driven neoliberal ideology. We explored diverse high school youths’ meaning making of a summer field ecology research experience. Youths’ narratives, elicited with a modified card sort and qualitative interviews, highlight the cognitive, social, emotional, and physical aspects of learning demonstrating considerably broader views of knowledge, meanings of the natural world and their place within it, and access to scientific practices than implied by neoliberalism

Navigating large foundational classes: Providing scalable infrastructure for next generation blended learning classrooms to enhance student learning outcomes, access and choice

Universities across the Province and around the world are struggling to meet the challenges of supporting a rapidly expanding, diverse, digitally literate, and time - poor student population who view education as a service for which they are paying (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004). As class sizes continue to grow and public funds available for expansion of physical campuses decline, there is an urgent need for universities to seek innovative and efficient approaches to utilisation of their existing spaces, leveraging technological and pedagogical advances to continue to provide high quality learning experiences for increasing numbers of students (Bates and Sangra, 2011; Owston, 2013).https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ctlreports/1001/thumbnail.jp

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 5, Issue 1, Winter 2016

Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl)

Language difference and expansive learning : negotiating concepts, contexts, and identities in writing-related transfer studies.

This dissertation offers a theoretical examination of current conceptualizations of writing-related transfer of learning in Rhetoric and Composition. I analyze the models presently available for understanding writing-related transfer of learning and argue that they are constrained by narrow conceptions of language use/users that do not accurately reflect the rich and varied language practices student writers perform, nor the multilingual audiences students with whom students will interact when they leave our classrooms. As a result, I argue that transfer has been difficult for writing studies scholars to pinpoint and locate. Building on theoretical models of language from applied linguistics and second language writing, I develop a theoretical orientation to the idea of transfer in terms of dispositions or attitudes toward language that can be practiced, enhanced, and potentially mobilized across rhetorical moments and spaces. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter One narrates the scholarly context for my dissertation by surveying contemporary theories of writing development in postsecondary education, and explores why the idea of ‘transfer’ has become so critical (and polarizing) for the disciplinary identity of Rhetoric and Composition. Chapter Two offers an analysis of three recent efforts to revitalize research on writing-related transfer, including the domain model of writing expertise, studies on writing-related threshold concepts and Writing about Writing curricula, and research on individual/institutional dispositions. Although the emerging perspectives purport to address the limitations of models that presume the existence of general or universal writing skills, I argue that they continue to work within the same terms of the models they propose to redefine. Chapter Three introduces the temporal-spatial framework advocated by translingual scholars to current transfer models. By locating contexts and practices in both time and space, I argue that it no longer makes sense to conceive of expansive learning as the process of transporting knowledge objects between two stable contexts. Chapter Four illustrates a set of critical reading practices that might help writing researchers and instructors identify the performance of rhetorical expertise in more nuanced and complex ways. Chapter Five concludes the project by situating my work within current fast capitalist discourses about writing across higher education

Dialogic activity : a study of learning dialogues and entanglements in a vocational tertiary setting : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Education at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

New Zealand’s economic growth continues to place major pressure on the trades sector. To meet future demand for qualified builders, plumbers, electricians, and engineers, trades education has become available at no cost to students for two years. To attract student interest further, tertiary institutions now offer courses in a range of delivery options. Blended learning (BL) is one of these delivery modes and involves a combination of traditional face-to-face and digitally mediated approaches. This research explored students’ dialogic activity in a BL environment, within a trades educational institution. The dialogues that emerged during trades training courses were examined in relation to a complex assemblage of elements, which included interactions between students and teachers, and the digital and materials artefacts in the BL environments. The research used an interdisciplinary lens, employing theories of socio-materialism and dialogism, to unpack forms of dialogic activity that emerged within the BL environment. That same lens was used to reveal the part that material and digital artefacts played in the emergent dialogic activity. Conducted as a multiple case study, the research involved observations of instructors and student participants from three Level 3 pre-apprentice trade programmes, which provided a wide range of data over the course of one semester. Datasets from Automotive Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, as the three cases involved, were analysed to explore the contextual meaning of the learning dialogues and activities in action. The findings revealed that learning dialogues occur in multiple contexts and environments. Artefacts and their properties, BL designs, open and flexible learning spaces, environmental conditions, health and safety considerations, embodiment, multiplicity, mediation, and class culture, all have a significant influence on dialogic activity. The findings offer important insights about the link between course design and learning and identify dialogic activity as an interdisciplinary phenomenon that warrants further investigation

Navigating interdisciplinarity:Negotiating discipline, embodiment, and materiality on a field methods training course

This article elucidates some of the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching, drawing on our participant observation as both instructors of anthropological methods and honorary students of marine ecology and geomorphology methods on a research training field course. We argue that interdisciplinary methods training offers educators opportunities for self-reflexivity, recognition of the taken-for-granted aspects of our knowledge, and improved communication of the value of our work to others. However, we also show how decisions about course structure can reinforce disciplinary boundaries, limiting inter-epistemic knowledge production; how one epistemological approach may overshadow others, hindering interdisciplinary learning; and how methods training involves tacit and embodied knowledge and mastery of material methods, requiring repetition and experimentation. We offer insights into how we as educators can improve our communication of the value of anthropology and its methods. First, instructors in any discipline should develop an awareness of how their tacit knowledge affects the pedagogical process. Second, instead of enskilling instructors to teach a variety of methods, it may be more beneficial for instructors to teach their own areas of expertise, in dialogue and collaboration with other disciplines. Third, interdisciplinary courses must be carefully planned to allow equal participation of different disciplines, so that anthropology is understood on its own terms and embedded in the course from the outset

Teaching to "The Good Ones"? Examining the Relationship Between Inequity and the Practice of and Preparation for Postsecondary Mathematics Instruction.

This dissertation focused on inequity in calculus instruction through a two-part study that built on the findings from an earlier exploratory study. The exploratory study, conducted in the same department, revealed connections between personal theories of mathematics intelligence that doctoral student instructors (DSIs) held for themselves and those that they held for their students. The first component of the dissertation project was a design intervention study that examined a practice-based approach to preparing DSIs to give students equitable feedback, a core instructional practice, in their postsecondary calculus instruction. The second component was a comparative investigation of teacher/student interactions across identity difference in postsecondary calculus instruction. Four of the instructors from the intervention study were observed and interviewed throughout their first semester of teaching to examine their interactions with their undergraduate students across identity difference. The three articles in this dissertation focus on the findings from this second study. The findings suggested that the DSIs, who were members of overrepresented groups (i.e., majoritized students identifying as men and Asian or White), held some common understandings about what in meant to do mathematics well, which they used as lenses for gauging their own and others’ potential to successfully navigate mathematics as a discipline. Moreover, evidence from this study indicated that when the DSIs viewed students through these lenses that they noticed different characteristics for minoritized and majoritized students, even when they exhibited similar behaviors. These impressions formed the DSIs’ opinions about the potential of their students, which systematically disadvantaged women, especially those identifying as Latina and Black. Finally, the findings suggested that the DSIs acted on their ideas about intelligence through their teaching practices, creating differentiated access to learning opportunities and marginalizing minoritized students. The resulting inequitable approaches to instructional practices may reduce domain identification and motivation, create lower expectations, and depress performance for minoritized students in mathematics classrooms as explored in the pre-calculus case presented in the third article. These findings support the need for the design of equitable approaches to mathematics instructional practices and the explicit preparation of postsecondary instructors to engage in them.PhDIndependent Interdepartmental Degree ProgramUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133413/1/estherae_1.pd

Weaving Indigenous and Western Science Knowledges Through a Land-Based Field Course at Bkejwanong Territory (Laurentian Great Lakes)

In response to a growing interest in building Indigenous-led educational experiences, we codeveloped a land-based field course that wove Indigenous ways of knowing together with Western ecological concepts. The spirit of the course was the one rooted in varied ways of knowing nature, on the land, the water, and the culture—to see the Great Lakes from an Anishinaabe perspective. Situated in the heart of the Laurentian Great Lakes Basin at Bkejwanong Territory (Walpole Island First Nation), in the Traditional Territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) on Turtle Island (North America), this inaugural undergraduate university course was led by an Indigenous instructor with contributions from non-Indigenous science faculty from the university and local community knowledge keepers. Here, we describe our journey in cocreating land-based teaching modules with Indigenous scholars and scholars at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. We focused on experiences that exposed students to traditional ways of knowing nature, and reflections were used as the main teaching pedagogy. The course offered daily perspectives and activities across land and water and examined dimensions of biodiversity as sacred beings and medicine. Outcomes and indicators of success were driven by the individual’s reflection and evaluation on their own growth, as expressed through a final project aimed at bridging knowledges, supporting community initiatives or both. This case is designed to offer an example that has potential for application to many other contexts where community-faculty partnerships and land-based learning opportunities are availabl