The Search for Pedagogical Dynamism - Design Patterns and the Unselfconscious Process

An apparent paradigm shift has created increased impetus to offer higher education across multiple delivery platforms. Utilising technology can support design and delivery for enhanced learning, albeit with additional pressures on academic workloads, affecting the ability to deliver quality formal education that meets the needs of individuals and society. The issue is exacerbated when technology, not pedagogy, drives decision-making, and further intensified by the formalisation of education. Using Mishra and Koehler's TPACK framework, we argue that pedagogical dynamism is both necessary to maintain equilibrium of content-knowledge-pedagogy and a natural outcome. Further we suggest it is possible using Alexandrian design patterns and a return to the "unselfconscious process." We critique existing design pattern work in education, and contribute a meta theoretical exploration of alexander's principles and patterns to designing good-fitting forms impacting education. A scenario of designing for "online," "on-campus" and "multi-mode" delivery of education is woven throughout to highlight implications for teaching practice

On the Creation of Sustainable Design Patterns of ICT Integration in the Classroom

The paper focuses on the methodology of making observations that account for the actual use of ICT infrastructure and tools in the classroom. The observational study is part of a project that focuses on scenario feasibility as an enabler of ICT usage. In particular, the observations provide input on pattern mining with the aim to help teachers and other stakeholders in the decision-making process of selecting suitable ICT facilities

Designing for student-facing learning analytics

Despite a narrative that sees learning analytics (LA) as a field that aims to enhance student learning, few student-facing solutions have emerged. This can make it difficult for educators to imagine how data can be used in the classroom, and in turn diminishes the promise of LA as an enabler for encouraging important skills such as sense-making, metacognition, and reflection. We propose two learning design patterns that will help educators to incorporate LA into their teaching protocols: do-analyse-change-reflect, and active learning squared. We discuss these patterns with reference to a case study utilising the Connected Learning Analytics (CLA) toolkit, in three trials run over a period of 18 months. The results demonstrate that student-facing learning analytics is not just a future possibility, but an area that is ripe for further development

Romanticism Reconsidered: The Implications of Organicism in Educational Reform.

The purpose of this study was to reconsider what has historically been called Romantic in American education. What I discovered was the ubiquity of organicism--an organicism which, when applied to education, promises to heal divisions with connection and integration. A reading of Romanticism as organicism is a traditional interpretation which fails to acknowledge the revisionist work of critics like de Man, Hartman, Bloom, and McFarland, who regard the Romantic recognition of language and self-consciousness as providing alienation, not unity. However, education continues to regard the Romantics as organicists and to provide organic remedies, such as the organic reforms proposed in the work of John Dewey, Harold Rugg, Caroline Pratt, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, and John Willinsky. These educators adopt mechanistic metaphors in describing traditions they wish to see replaced and organic metaphors in urging their proposals for integration and connection. In chapters four and five, I focus on organic theories of writing and reading suggested by Dewey\u27s aesthetics and by Willinsky\u27s theories of language arts. Emerson\u27s influence on American education is pervasive, but educators read him in a traditional way--as an organicist--disregarding his recognition of language and self-consciousness as creating the division between humankind and nature. This organicist interpretation of Emerson has especially dominated the process rhetoric endorsed by Willinsky. Regarding language and the imagination as implements of mediation, both Dewey and Willinsky assume a symbolic theory of language, and they argue, metaphysically, that reading and writing result in communication and shared meaning. Assuming an autonomous, centered subject, they see writing and reading as vehicles for connecting self with self and self with a community of others. In chapter five I propose an interpretive model inspired by Shoshana Felman\u27s reading of Lacan, one recognizing an asymmetrical triadic configuration of student, teacher, and Otherness--a triad which questions the mirrored narcissism of the organic model by suggesting the introduction of the unconscious as a source of new knowledge, a model which seeks the return not of a confirming sameness but of difference. In straining to effect connection, organicist educators have ignored Otherness, language, and difference

An Ecology of Place in Composition Studies

Wallin, Jonathan Scott, Ph.D, Purdue University, December 2016. An Ecology of Place in Composition Studies. Major Professor: Patricia Sullivan

Mapping the pedagogic practice of grade ten English teachers: a qualitative multi-lensed study.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.This study addresses the issue of how to track the classroom talk of subject English teachers in Grade Ten classrooms in KwaZulu-Natal. Subject English, as a horizontal knowledge structure, presents particular challenges of content and methodological specification: what may be included, and the means of teaching and assessment, are contested, wide-ranging, and frequently opaque. English teachers are central to the construal of the subject in the classroom and their classroom talk is central to their construal of the subject to their learners. Classroom observations were conducted in four purposively selected KwaZulu- Natal state high schools, spanning the socio-economic spectrum, across the period 2005-2009. Twenty-six lessons were analysed using code theory’s concepts of classification and framing. This analysis presented broadly similar categorisations of strong classification and framing for most of the lessons, apart from some framing differences with respect to evaluation. However, my field observations had identified differences between the teachers’ classroom talk that were not captured. This led to the quest of finding pedagogically well theorised languages of description of teacher talk capable of capturing the range of variation and flow with greater nuance. Application of the lenses of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Jacklin’s tripartite typology extending code theory (2004), Brodie’s expansion of classic classroom discourse analysis (2008, 2010), Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (2014), and conceptual integration theory (2015), were successful in describing and discriminating more fully the range of pedagogy. Detailed analysis of four literature lessons (two teaching novels, two teaching poetry) from the two schools at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum, are presented as exemplars of these lenses’ capacity as languages of description for subject English teacher classroom talk. The multi-lensed descriptions highlighted variations such as: o the degree of use of nominalised discourse (SFL); o more dominantly discursive pedagogy or more dominantly conventional pedagogy (Jacklin); o more overt or more implicit evaluations, greater use of insert moves versus greater use of elicit moves (Brodie); and o cultivation of a cognitively associative literary gaze versus cultivation of a decoding of the text gaze and intricate movements by the teachers between relatively stronger and weaker epistemic and social relations; more frequent and deeper versus less frequent and flatter semantic waving (LCT). A fifth lesson, focused on learner oral performances of infomercials, is analysed using conceptual integration theory, as the sole example in the data set, of pedagogic conceptual integration. These analyses highlight the potential of these lenses as tools for the unpacking and specification of teachers’ pedagogic practice, particularly their pedagogic content knowledge, an undertaking which has been protractedly difficult to achieve beyond localised, intuitive description. They also illuminated the intricate complexity of pedagogy, and the propensity for pedagogic meaning to disintegrate when the level of analysis shifts down to too small a micro-focus. This highlights the ongoing need for research to pinpoint the ‘sweet spot’ of the optimally smallest unit of a pedagogic act. Key components of the pedagogic process emerged that we need more refined understanding of in relation to what teachers do and the impact of this on the epistemic access of learners: teacher pedagogic mobility, pedagogic coherence and pedagogic flow. The study points to the Jacklinian and LCT lenses as offering the most potential for the ongoing investigation of these dimensions

Social action for landscape character conservation: The role of community initiatives and practices in the conservation of Colombian cultural landscapes

The participation of local communities is a fundamental aspect in the conservation of cultural landscapes, mainly because it contributes to sustainable and inclusive management of natural and human-made valuable resources. However, in practice, conservation planning frameworks largely favour activities aligned to cultural and institutional elites while overlooking relevant community activities of the process. This research evaluates the influence of community social action on landscape character conservation and shows its potential to overcome current integration deficiencies. It aims to understand how and to what extent community initiatives – CIs – and community practices – CPs – contribute to the management of landscape change, how they exemplify community participation and social action, and what factors enabling their implementation. The methodology adopted is a multiple-case study approach of two world heritage Colombian landscapes, offering a rich ground in geographic, ecologic, and spatial characteristics unique in landscape studies. The cases are Zone A of the Coffee Cultural Landscape in the Andean mountains and the historic town of Santa Cruz de Mompox in Caribbean floodplain lakes. This research finds that social action, as CIs and CPs, benefits landscape character conservation because it involves a direct engagement of communities in activities, integrating place attachment, solidarity, sovereignty, and mutual help for implementation. Local communities demonstrated agency in purposeful actions and employed negotiation skills to work in partnership with external agents. Social values for conserving the common good were at the core of activities, and, occasionally, economic stimuli and other incentives influenced their execution. By demonstrating how social action operates and the mechanisms employed in associations, action boards, and cooperation networks, this research provides novel information to help to articulate activities at the local level with current planning conservation frameworks

Bend de tree when-e young: cultural relevance in reading books

This study emanates from the continued presence of institutional racism (Gillborn et al, 2016). It is specifically relevant to the cultural relevance of reading books, and fixes its gaze on the Biff, Chip and Kipper series, developed by the Oxford Reading Tree (ORT) reading scheme. By detailing a critical content analysis of a small sample of books within this reading scheme, this study highlights the importance of cultural relevance (Ladson-Billings, 1993). This is with special regard to the nurturing of children, who have historically and contemporarily not seen sufficient positive and normalising portrayals of themselves, in the media and in print. This study is conducted on the premise that such portrayals could lead to increased personal reconciliation and consequently, encourage unity in families, communities and nations. Critical Race Theory (CRT) informs the methodology used to conduct the analysis, which includes a high regard for the use of activist principles. This study therefore adds to the literature that uses CRT within education. The analysis revealed that the ORT books studied cannot claim cultural relevance, with regards to two out of the three identified tenets of LadsonBillings’ definition of the term. These tenets are firstly, that children should be enabled to learn to be culturally competent especially with regards to their own identified culture; and secondly, that children should be taught how to challenge institutions that maintain unfair inequalities. Further research would need to be conducted in order to determine the outcome with regards to the third tenet, which is that children ought to achieve academic success. This study foregrounds an agentic approach to the issue of under or misrepresentation, and in so doing, proposes the continuation of the development of a literacy programme, which is being published using a strategic essentialist conception of black British cultural capital

Evolving communities : adapting theories of Robert Kegan and Bernard Lonergan to intentional groups

It has been long known that groups of adults learn and enact their learning in certain ways; what is little known is how groups learn and how they develop in cognitive complexity. This dissertation proposes a theory of group cognitive development by arguing that intentional adult groups are complex and dynamic, and that they have the potential to evolve over time. Groups are complex in that they are made up of individuals within different orders of consciousness (Kegan), and they are dynamic in that different orders of consciousness interact and conflict (Lonergan) during the formation and enactment of group vision, values, and procedures. Dynamic complexity theory of group development as it is referred to in this study is grounded in Robert Kegan’s constructive developmental theory and in Bernard Lonergan’s transcendental method. While both Kegan and Lonergan attend to the growth of individuals, their theories are adapted to groups in order to understand the cognitive complexity of groups, intragroup and intergroup conflict, and the mental complexity of leader curriculum. This theory is applied to two case studies, one from antiquity in the case of the first century Corinthian community engaged in conflict with its founder, St. Paul, and in one contemporary study of American Catholic parishioners engaged in contentious dialogue with diocesan leaders from 1994 to 2004. The parish groups experienced a series of dialogues during a ten year period over the issues of parish restructuring and the priest sexual abuse crisis yielding cumulative and progressive changes in perspective-taking, responsibility-taking, and in group capacity to respond to and engage local and institutional authority figures. Group development is observed against a pedagogical backdrop that represents a mismatch between group complexity and leader expectations. In Corinth, Paul’s curriculum was significantly beyond the mental capacity of the community. In the case of Catholic parishioners the curriculum of diocesan leaders was beneath the mental capacities of most of the groups studied. It is proposed that individuals sharing the same order of consciousness, understood as cognitive constituencies, are in a dynamic relationship with other cognitive constituencies in the group that interact within an object-subject dialectic and an agency-communion dialectic. The first describes and explains the evolving cognitive complexity of group knowing, how the group does its knowing, and what it knows when it is doing it (the epistemologies of the group). This dialectic has implications for how intentional groups might be the critical factor for understanding individual growth. The second dialectic describes and explains the changing relationship between group agency, which is enacted either instrumentally or ideologically; and group communion, which is enacted ideationally. The agency-communion dialectic is held in an unstable balance in the knowing, identity, and mission of groups. With implications for the fields of adult education and learning organizations, dynamic complexity theory of group development notes predictable stages of group evolution as each cognitive constituency evolves, and notes the significance of internal and external conflict for exposing the presence of different ways of knowing and for challenging the group toward cognitive growth.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry