Toward a More Loving Assessment Practice

One distinguishing mark of the Christ-follower is meant to be love - for God and for neighbor. What does this mean in the context of our everyday work as teachers or teacher educators? This paper specifically explores the relevance of loving heart attitudes for assessing student work. This paper first provides a conceptual foundation to justify taking up a lens of love while looking at student work and then reports on findings from a self-study of my own assessment practice. This paper highlights the importance of moment by moment disciplined choice to look away from self and self-interest towards the good of others

Day-in-a-life microethnographies and favourite things interviews

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Organizational Probes:Exploring Playful Interactions in Work Environment

Playfulness, with non-intrusive elements, can be considered a useful resource for enhancing social awareness and community building within work organizations. Taking inspirations from the cultural probes approach, we developed organizational probes as a set of investigation tools that could provide useful information about employees’ everyday playful experiences within their work organizations. In an academic work environment, we applied our organizational probes over a period of three weeks. Based on the collected data we developed two design concepts for playful technologies in work environments

An international survey of mature students' uses of mobile devices in life and learning

The paper presents research concerned with learner-driven innovative practice with mobile technologies and the interface between formal and informal learning. We build on our previous work investigating student use of personal devices for learning, work, social interaction and entertainment. A recent phase of the research included an international survey focusing on students registered on selected Masters and doctoral programmes in the UK, Sweden, Portugal, Hong Kong and Australia. The research gives an account of everyday uses and more unusual deployments of personal technologies by students from departments of education and technology. It illuminates learner choices and preferences, attitudes towards work–life boundaries, evolving social and cultural practices, and the impacts of technological change

We make the road by walking: challenging conceptualisations of leisure time for children in poverty

In this article, we discuss a research project focusing on the ways in which children in poverty spend and experience their leisure time. We argue that the dominant conceptualisation of leisure time participation reduces poverty to a lack of social and cultural capital, marginalising poor children as passive objects of socialisation. Inspired by the interpretative paradigm of lifeworld orientation, three insights are identified throughout poor children’s experiences, which include the following: (1) challenging taken-for-granted divisions of time; (2) giving meaning to regimes of time as an on-going learning process; and (3) imagining a socially just future

The colour of life: novel visualisations of population Lifestyles

Colour permeates our daily lives, yet we rarely take notice of it. In this work we utilise the SenseCam (a visual lifelogging tool), to investigte the predominant colours in one million minutes of human life that a group of 20 individuals encounter throughout their normal daily activities. We also compare the colours that different groups of people are exposed to in their typical days. This information is presented in using a novel colour-wheel visualisation which is a new means of illustrating that people are exposed to bright colours over longer durations of time during summer months, and more dark colours during winter months

An Understanding of Religious Doing: A Photovoice Study

The ability to participate in everyday activities that hold meaning and value is a determinant of health and wellbeing. Occupational therapists work with people when health and social barriers limit this valued participation. However a challenge persists in including religious practice or ‘doing’ within therapy, with many occupational therapists feeling ill-equipped and reluctant to address religious doing. The study reported here examines religious doing within the lives of participants from a number of faith traditions. A photovoice method is used, with participants discussing photographs that they have taken to describe their religious doing. Data are analyzed using a phenomenological reflective lifeworld approach. Findings are grouped into six themes and are explored using both verbatim quotes from transcripts and some of the photographs taken by participants. A reflective description of the core aspects of participants’ practical religious doing is constructed from the data, with the intention of providing occupational therapists with a basis from which to begin to consider practical religious doing within the lives of their clients. It is proposed that occupational therapists do not need an in-depth knowledge of theology and doctrine but rather an understanding of key and familiar occupational principles such as person-centred habits and routines, and community connectedness

Sustainable development projects: explicit and acroamatic story telling as part of a new ‘project ethnography’

This paper constitutes an attempt to find a means to represent multiple stories in the strong narrative of conventional sustainable development (SD) projects. The author’s experience of such projects in various parts of the world indicates that they have a tendency to arise from and reflect a dominant mindset, placing the SD project in what can be a working environment which is inimical to the very ideals which SD is supposed to represent. Short termism and value for money drive project formats and objectives whilst counter narratives and alternative stories arising from stakeholders in such projects are often ignored. Yet these alternative threads often contain strong SD messages of their own and could, if effectively utilised, enhance the SD project process. This paper sets out the case for a new field – ‘project ethnography’ – allied with the growing use of meta analysis to compare project ‘stories’. The paper presents preliminary findings using an analytical framework to facilitate an ethnographic analysis and draw out the stories that those working in such projects can tell. The analysis focuses on some SD projects in the Mediterranean which reinforces the view of the authors that the conventional model of SD project organisation and delivery often contains within itself alternative understandings – understandings which the authors regard as stories in collision with the presenting and accepted project narrative, but at the same time valuable in richness of experience and perspective which can be drawn upon for informing SD project design and implementation