SUPPORTING TEACHER-WRITERS ENGAGEMENT WITH TROUBLESOME KNOWLEDGE: EVIDENCE OF TRANSFER IN WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Writing Across the Curriculum has typically been discussed in terms of curricular or pedagogical transformation. While it helped to transform teaching from lecture-centered classrooms into more student-centered pedagogies, less is known about how those transformations happen and what impact those transformations have on teachers. More recently, teaching for transfer and threshold concepts have become pervasive WAC pedagogies that aim for transformation. But what does it take to truly change how we think about something? Through two detailed case studies, this project explores the experiences of two faculty participants in two WAC-focused professional development programs that aim to impact how faculty think about teaching, writing, and teaching writing. ECU's WAC Academy and Advanced WAC Academy were created with ideas from the National Writing Project and teaching for transfer. Using multiple rounds of coding in conjunction with rhetorical analysis, I examine various textual artifacts from Pearl (nursing) and Conor (criminal justice), two earlycareer instructors who participated in the same professional development events in different years. I follow them as they engage new ideas through thinking activities that were intended to disrupt entrenched ways of knowing that come with disciplinary expertise, to see how their doing, thinking, and writing in this particular WAC PD impacted how they approach the teaching of writing. After offering threshold concepts for WAC that emerged from the cases, I argue that WAC PD may benefit from a more networked approach, and that WAC PD, overall, should engage faculty with more troublesome constructs in order to promote more meaningful learning experiences

Designing for the Dissonance: Community-engaged Field Experiences for Challenging Curricular Misconceptions of Place toward Localizing and Indigenizing Curricula within Elementary Teacher Education.

Harmful oversights remain in elementary social studies curricula which overlook or misrepresent minoritized communities. This dissertation explores designs for teacher education which address these oversights through community collaborations. This multi-manuscript dissertation is an empirical-conceptual inquiry design (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), as it is not purely empirical or conceptual research. This design allows for an independent discussion of each study, while interpreting phenomena across the three chapters. Acknowledging my positionality as a white female, in a predominantly white, female profession, I look to Indigenous and Black scholars, both locally and broadly, to inform my perspective and project design. Using a phenomenological lens and ethnographic approaches, I conducted two empirical studies within two different community-based field experiences through an elementary social studies methods course. Sociocultural considerations of space, socioecological considerations of place, and critical culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogy (McCarty & Lee, 2014) provide the theoretical frame for this series of investigations. Guidance from Decolonizing Methodologies (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2021), methods from the fields of S-STEP, Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, and reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021), necessitated attention to self-reflexivity, improvement, and relationships. Researching from the positionality of a traditionally defined teacher educator, I hope to build upon collaborative research scholarship which expands who is considered a teacher educator. These studies investigate teaching practices through community and preservice teacher narratives, which critically explore places as a means of overcoming curricular misconceptions. Findings describe curricular possibilities and limitations, and the implications when these two phenomena clash, what I am conceptualizing as curricular dissonance. I provide evidence of this phenomena in the first two empirical chapters. In my third chapter, I conceptualize this phenomenon as a site for learning through field experiences which confront the tensions inherent in teacher education and curriculum studies, to engage scholars across both fields of research

Cultural ways of constructing knowledge:the role of identities in online group discussions

Learning scientists and the CSCL community have argued that knowledge construction is a process of collective thinking; a process that is simultaneously personal and social that requires group cognition. However, while CSCL researchers have investigated situated knowledge in the process of collective thinking, little work has been done to fully understand how different identification categories play a role in sense-making and knowledge construction. This research, therefore, explores in detail how individuals operationalize identification categories when they engage in group discussions in online learning environments. Results demonstrate that individuals do not experience online learning through only one aspect of their identity. Rather, learning experiences evoke different elements of their identities that are used continuously and simultaneously when they collaborate with each other in the phases of knowledge construction

Analyzing Social Construction of Knowledge and Social Networks in Online Discussion Forums in Spanish

This mixed methods research project examined social construction of knowledge and social networks in three non-structured student centered online discussion forums, which were part of a graduate online course on web conferencing in Spanish within the Mexican sociocultural context. The purpose of the study was to identify interaction patterns among twenty-one graduate students by analyzing discussion forum posts, measuring student centrality, and generating social network diagrams in order to explain the characteristics of posts and social networks that may contribute to social construction of knowledge. The researcher used a sequential approach, starting with the application of an interaction analysis model and social network analysis, followed by a combination of both analyses to shed light on interaction in online discussion forums carried out in Spanish. The researcher found evidence of interaction patterns that suggest a possible relationship between the centrality measure in-degree and high levels of social construction of knowledge, furthermore results suggest dissonance or disagreement in student-to-student interaction may also contribute to the achievement of more complex phases of social construction of knowledge

Towards Transdisciplinarity: Liminality and the Transitions Inherent in Pluridisciplinary Collaborative Work

Although the value of cross-disciplinary teams is widely accepted, relatively little attention has been given to the work that precedes addressing a team’s objective or stated problem, that is, the work required to negotiate their various disciplinary perspectives. This article considers how the notion of liminality, a cultural and social state of “betweenness,” might be used to conceptualize transitory stages in the development of pluridisciplinary groups and teams that are comprised of individuals from many diverse disciplines. It suggests how anthropologists can play a role in guiding and facilitating this particular domain of invisible work

Orchestral-Dialogues: Accepting Self, Accepting Others -- Translating Deep Listening Skills to Transformative Dialogue Skills

Orchestral Dialogues: Accepting Self, Accepting Others (Orchestral Dialogues) was a pilot project with BuildaBridge International (BaB), an arts-intervention organization based in Philadelphia, PA. Fourteen children, ages 9 - 14 years, participated during the program's pilot year, 2016-2017. The Orchestral Dialogues project was a community music therapy (CoMT) endeavor that sought to teach both deep listening and transformative dialogue skills through participation in private lessons, rehearsals and dialogue workshops. This study asked the question, how do deep listening skills developed through the orchestral process relate to transformative dialogue skills in children? Ethnographic methods were employed to answer the research question including participant observations, facilitation of a focus group, ongoing informal conversations with participants, their families and staff, and a review of archival data. Data analysis incorporated artistic responses to theme development for the purposes of clarification. The themes identified were 1) adult modeling, 2) role playing, 3) orchestra as analogy for components of dialogue, and 4) community building through collaboration The findings showed that the children, though only in the initial five months of their learning process, understood the basic concepts of deep listening skills (awareness of self, awareness of others, awareness of music) and could translate these to transformative dialogue skills (self-reflexivity, self-expression, responsibility, affirmation, co-creation of a new reality). The findings showed the children described the skills of deep listening and transformative dialogue using musical language and concepts. Although they demonstrated an understanding of the skills, it was evident they required more time to implement the skills in their daily lives. The results of this study contributed to interdisciplinary research in CoMT and conflict transformation literature.Ph.D., Creative Arts in Therapy -- Drexel University, 201

Development, implementation and evaluation of a programme to facilitate critical thinking in nursing education

D.Cur. (Nursing Education)Abstract: The purpose of the study is to describe the development, implementation and evaluation of a programme to facilitate critical thinking in nursing education. The researcher departed deductively from the recommendation of a Delphi study by exponents of critical thinking that researchers are to develop programmes and assessment tools of critical thinking. They came up with a consensus definition resulting from a concept analysis and defined critical thinking as a purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results into interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference including explanation of the critical thinking process of contextual, conceptual, methodological, evidential and criteriological considerations on which the judgment is based. The researcher made use of the critical thinking framework that included contextual, conceptual, methodological, evidential and criteriological dimensions of critical thinking to develop a conceptual framework to facilitate critical thinking. The study is a qualitative, explorative and descriptive design for programme development that is contextual in nature

Reframing professional development through understanding authentic professional learning

Continuing to learn is universally accepted and expected by professionals and other stakeholders across all professions. However, despite changes in response to research findings about how professionals learn, many professional development practices still focus on delivering content rather than enhancing learning. In exploring reasons for the continuation of didactic practices in professional development, this article critiques the usual conceptualization of professional development through a review of recent literature across professions. An alternative conceptualization is proposed, based on philosophical assumptions congruent with evidence about professional learning from seminal educational research of the past two decades. An argument is presented for a shift in discourse and focus from delivering and evaluating professional development programs to understanding and supporting authentic professional learning

One Team Where Worlds Collide: The Development of Transcoherence for Tackling Wicked Problems

This thesis is concerned with teams. In particular, multidisciplinary teams that are exploring complex public policy development in relation to problems identified as wicked; in that they resist existing solutions. The mix of expertise in these teams frequently leads to collisions of conceptual worlds among the team members. In addition, these conflicts may also occur along social faultlines that reflect an individual's membership in other collectives outside the team. The result can be an increase in discordance between team members and a fragmentation of effort, leading to poor team performance. This has been recognised in the literature as a major cause of project failure when addressing wicked problems. I address this phenomenon through the study of the lived experience of a specific heterogeneous team that were working on the wicked problem of reconceptualising access to justice for all Australians. I combined this data with theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines. The findings contribute to the existing body of knowledge in the following ways: Increased understanding of a multidimensional problem My exploration of the rich and entangled nature of the lived experience in heterogeneous teams found a larger mix of conflicts than is usually described in any of the individual streams of literature. In addition, there seemed to be no single term in the literature that adequately described the complexity of the collisions that I observed. In response, I propose an umbrella term, incoherence, to incorporate the multiple terms used to describe the reaction to and result of these collisions. Whereas the disciplinary literature tends to identify social groupings that align with a discipline's academic history, data from my field work uncovers multiple groupings that should all be included as the basis for social faultlines. I therefore propose an umbrella term and concept which can incorporate any of the underlying social groups found in heterogeneous teams: collective coherence. Understanding of a potential desired future state There is agreement in the literature that team conflict should be resolved, but not on how this should be achieved. Instead, proposed solutions are fragmented and often contradictory. My thesis aligns these fragments through the introduction of a third umbrella term, transcoherence, defined in this study as: an individual's ability to consciously straddle different intellectual worlds, and a multidisciplinary group's capacity to reduce social faultlines and develop synergies. Understanding the changes required for heterogeneous teams to move from the current fragmentation to a coherent future state For a team to build a transcoherence capability requires a means of dealing with the sense of incoherence that comes from collisions of worlds. Incorporating learning theory from multiple disciplines, I developed a version of a triple loop learning model as a heuristic to demonstrate the multiple ways in which people respond to and manage incoherence. Each loop of steps starts from and returns to 'coherence in equilibrium', the state of rest in the system. The use of action research I designed the research to be interactive, multilayered, iterative, qualitative, and transdisciplinary. I chose an overarching bricolage methodology, combining multiple methods of data collection, both formal and informal. This was possible as I was embedded in the team for a year as the person tasked with the role of facilitating collaboration. This gave me an opportunity to assess the opportunities and limits of catalytic facilitation in participatory action research. By this I mean that processes in the project were not controlled solely by the head of the project, nor did they function spontaneously. Rather, I was asked to join the team as facilitator of the collaborative process, to act as a catalyst, increasing the potential of the interactions of the various experts connected to the research