Socialising Epistemic Cognition

We draw on recent accounts of social epistemology to present a novel account of epistemic cognition that is ‘socialised’. In developing this account we foreground the: normative and pragmatic nature of knowledge claims; functional role that ‘to know’ plays when agents say they ‘know x’; the social context in which such claims occur at a macro level, including disciplinary and cultural context; and the communicative context in which such claims occur, the ways in which individuals and small groups express and construct (or co-construct) their knowledge claims. We frame prior research in terms of this new approach to provide an exemplification of its application. Practical implications for research and learning contexts are highlighted, suggesting a re-focussing of analysis on the collective level, and the ways knowledge-standards emerge from group-activity, as a communicative property of that activity

Teaching Women's Studies: Exploring Student Engagement in Technology-Rich Classroom Learning Communities

Although university students are key participants in knowledge-making processes, their insights about learning are sparsely documented, and too rarely considered in contemporary conversations in higher education. In centering the insights and experiences of students enrolled in two women's studies courses at the University of Maryland, this dissertation produces a substantive intervention that both democratizes and disrupts existing academic discourse. The research utilizes empirical data collected from students enrolled in three sections of Women's Studies 250: Women, Art and Culture, and from students enrolled in an online course, Women's Health and Well-Being, Transnational Perspectives, which was taught cross-institutionally at four universities in Africa, Israel and the United States. Qualitative analysis of empirical data facilitated the description of processes by which women's studies students were engaged in classroom knowledge-making. Student texts, interpretively stitched together within a crystallized presentation format, produce a poly-vocal narrative illuminating the robustly material and multi-sensory nature of processes in, through, and by which participants transacted their learning. Collectively, their shared stories affirm the value of a technology-rich classroom praxis, one that facilitated dialogic and peer-centered learning processes, to students' active and productive engagement in collaborative knowledge-making endeavors. Research findings also illuminate how such a praxis, scaffolded on dialogic engagement, and on the deployment of socio-constructivist pedagogies in a technology-rich learning environment, deepened participants' collaborations with one another as equally knowledgeable peers across difference, which simultaneously and materially facilitated their capabilities to critically and reflexively engage relevant knowledge frameworks. The strength of these findings attest to the benefits of focusing qualitative research on the nature of the transactional processes by and through which students are engaged in classroom learning. In explicitly asserting the value to learners of these material processes above others in facilitating collaborative knowledge-making transactions, this dissertation documents shared ownership in processes of classroom knowledge-making as an enabling factor in participants' abilities to capitalize on vital resources of peer diversity that, when mobilized, have the capacity to support potentially trangressive and tangibly transformative social justice outcomes for individuals and for the classroom learning community as a whole

Learning about Chinese-speaking cultures at a distance

This chapter focuses on the challenges posed by curriculum choices and pedagogical frameworks to the study of Languages of the Wider World in the UK. These languages reflect complex linguistic and cultural realities that do not fit into the traditional constraints of language education, which raises questions about the extent to which we can address the global and local dimensions of the target languages and cultures. I examine in particular the case of Chinese – a language family with multiple varieties and spoken by many communities in Asia and other parts of the globe – in the context of distance education. Issues surrounding language learning at a distance are discussed, as well as the role that teachers and technology play in supporting the development of language learners’ cultural awareness. While teachers can, in a face-to-face situation, exploit, expand and discuss cultural information, this possibility is very limited in distance learning. We will see how, at present, technology has taken on a major role in both formal and informal education, facilitating contact between learners and between learners and teachers (however distant they might be). For example, the Open University’s beginners’ Chinese course discussed here makes use of online forums to enable cultural interaction; initial examinations of these forums reveal the students to be diverse and mobile, and they also give us a sense of their cultural stances, and of the shapes of the beliefs, values and attitudes supported by their individual cultural backgrounds

Metafora: A Web-based Platform for Learning to Learn Together in Science and Mathematics

This paper presents Metafora, both a platform for integrated tools as well as an emerging pedagogy for supporting Learning to Learn Together in science and mathematics education. Our goal is to design technology that brings education to a higher level; a level where students not only learn a subject matter, but also gain a set of critical skills needed to engage in and self-regulate collaborative learning experiences in science and math education. We first discuss the core skills we hope students will gain as they learn to learn together. We then present our design and implementation that can achieve this goal; a platform and pedagogy we have developed to support the learning of these skills. Finally, we present an example use of our system based on results from pilot studies that demonstrates interaction with the platform, and potential benefits and limitations of the tools in promoting the associated skills

Improving outcomes for hairdressing students in pre-apprenticeship training: A collaborative account of three stages in an action research project

In this article, we report on how we collaborated, as a research team whose members were drawn from Foundation Studies and the hairdressing vocation, to describe how we had used a multi-method approach to plan, implement and make sense of a module improvement project for pre-apprenticeship students in a tertiary institute in New Zealand. The project was initiated by three of the authors who are hairdressing tutors in the tertiary sector. They invited the literacy-embedding team (i.e. the two remaining authors) at the institute to participate in the project as critical friends and co-researchers. We report on the three stages the Action Research inquiry, which included a constructs-elicitation phase to raise the vocational educators’ awareness of their personally held pedagogical constructs informing their pedagogical actions

Thinking, Interthinking, and Technological Tools

Language use is widely regarded as an important indicator of high quality learning and reasoning ability. Yet this masks an irony: language is fundamentally a social, collaborative tool, yet despite the widespread recognition of its importance in relation to learning, the role of dialogue is undervalued in learning contexts. In this chapter we argue that to see language as only a tool for individual thought presents a limited view of its transformative power. This power, we argue, lies in the ways in which dialogue is used to interthink – that is, to think together, to build knowledge co-constructively through our shared understanding. Technology can play an important role in resourcing thinking through the provision of information, and support to provide a space to think alone. It can moreover provide significant support for learners to build shared representations together, particularly through giving learners access to a wealth of ‘given’ inter-related texts which resource the co-construction of knowledge

Using Video Clips to Implement Multicultural Topics of Science and Nature of Science into a Biological Content Course for Pre-Service Teachers- An Action Research Project

This action research project describes the methods an African-American female instructor used when introducing biology-related video clips with a multicultural component to predominantly white pre-service elementary students. Studies show that introducing multiculturalism into classrooms is crucial for students and teachers. Multicultural theoretical frameworks that focus on social change arises out of an acknowledgement of achievement disparities prevalent around the world. Students viewed video clips and answered questions regarding their thoughts and views on the information in the clip; including issues relating to race, diversity, and social injustice, nature of science (NOS) and nature of science inquiry (NOSI). Data collection included assessing students’ responses in the worksheets, observations and reflective journaling on the part of the first author. Data analysis involved noting general themes as presented by Creswell (2003). Results showed that students demonstrated an appreciation of diversity and acknowledgment of racial injustice. Students also showed a general understanding of NOS/NOSI concepts with some exceptions. Moral and ethical questions added later in the project showed that students were able to connect information in the clips to their own beliefs effectively. Students also demonstrated knowledge of material presented in the unit lessons by relating them to information in the video clips. Implications for further research involve video clips that discuss physical/mental disabilities, gender issues, and students that use English as a second language