Participatory Mapping to Disrupt Unjust Urban Trajectories in Lima

This chapter shares the experience of two action research projects ReMap Lima and cLIMA sin Riego, where mapping has been used with three main objectives: to make visible what is otherwise ‘invisible’; to open up dialogue between different stakeholders in the city and to arrive at concrete actions, collectively negotiated between citizens and policy makers. Two case study sites were chosen in Lima, Peru: Barrios Altos (BA) in the historic centre and José Carlos Mariátegui (JCM) at the edge of the city. The approach adopted applies a participatory action methodology based on grounded applications and advanced technologies for community-led mapping and visualisation. The chapter reflects upon three interrelated sites of the mapping process: the reading, writing and audiencing of maps and explores how these can provide opportunities to break away from the polar positions often established between Claimant/ marginalised group and the state, thus aiming to contribute to a process of spatial co-learning across typically confronted actors. The two case studies show different possibilities for interrogating the city to provide a spatially and socially grounded way of co-producing knowledge for action that can contribute to the planning of just urban futures

An Exploration of Practice Surrounding Student Writing in the Disciplines in UK Higher Education from the Perspectives of Academic Teachers

This thesis aims to contribute to our understanding of academic literacies in the UK context by exploring the practices of subject-based academic teachers around student writing through the lens of teachers’ experiences. Empirical work has yielded a great deal of insight in recent years into students’ experience of writing in higher education; less attention has been paid to student writing from the perspective of discipline-based teachers. This thesis aims to explore the complex lived realities of practice around student writing in the disciplines from teachers’ perspectives. The research on which the thesis is based involved a study of fourteen academics, teaching different subjects in six diverse UK universities, occupying a range of institutional roles. The study used an ethnographically informed methodology to explore individuals’ practice as situated within specific disciplinary and institutional contexts. Multiple sources of data were combined to develop a ‘rich picture’ of practice organised around individual case studies. In keeping with an ‘academic literacies’ approach, the thesis asks questions about how participants’ everyday practices around student writing are bound up with and/or contest institutional practices; how their work with student writers connects with issues of identity, visibility and status, and with broader questions about the nature of contemporary higher education in the UK. Data analysis points to the ways in which established understandings of language in the academy filter into the everyday practices of academic teachers, and to the shaping of these practices in contemporary institutional contexts in a marketised higher education system. The thesis contributes to our understanding of a familiar and taken-for-granted aspect of academic life, and throws light on participants’ efforts to reach beyond routine practices and carve out hospitable spaces for work with student writing. Finally, the thesis suggests some implications for academic teachers and developers and their institutions

Investigating Student Learning and Perceptions Through Concept Journaling: An Exploratory Case Study in Coordinate Algebra

In order for students to comprehend mathematics, they must be able to think and apply learned knowledge to inform skill acquisition (Schoenfeld, 2013). Written communication is a skill that enables students to prepare to learn mathematics and express thoughts. Using qualitative case study methodology within symbolic interactionism framework, this study examined the effect of concept journaling on the learning of seven students in one high school Coordinate Algebra classroom. The study further explored how these students perceived concept journaling as a tool for learning mathematics. Concept journaling is defined as a type of writing activity using prompts that incorporate graphs, charts, real-world situations, mathematical formulas, diagrams, images, symbolic text, or other appropriate resources for the student to reflect, communicate, and express mathematical ideas through writing. The students were interviewed at the beginning and end of the research. After a lesson was taught a concept journaling activity was assigned and the students were observed while engaged in a writing activity. Data was triangulated and collected using four techniques: interviews, observations, concept journals, and researcher/teacher’s journal. Data analysis focused on comparing and contrasting themes that emerged through the detailed examination of the data. The following are emerging themes regarding student learning: through concept journaling (1) students learned by building associations of ideas utilizing their prior knowledge and experiences, (2) created a space for negotiating meaningful connections using multiple resources, and (3) provided opportunities for constructing meaning in context via peer communications and exchanges of personal views and ideas. The following are emerging themes regarding student perceptions: concept journaling was (4) seen as a meaningful experience to further their understanding of mathematics using real-world applications, (5) viewed by students as a medium to develop an awareness of the self while immersed in meaning making contexts, and (6) students expressed a sense of connection to mathematics through the use of concept journaling writing activities. Moreover, the findings highlighted a need for more focus on journaling in mathematics, longitudinal studies on writing in mathematics, and the students’ voices appearing in future literature

Blogs in Language Learning Enhancing Students’ Writing Skills through Blogs

Unlike receptive skills, such as reading and listening, writing has received relatively little attention in second language learning. The reason for this lack of attention is that reading and listening are assumed to create competence in second language learning since they form the input on which learning is based. Moreover, a number of studies in several English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts have indicated that second language learners consider writing skills as the most difficult skills to master. A number of studies also promote the use of educational technologies in teaching the English language, and blogging, in particular, is considered to be one of the promising educational media that can be used as a genuine tool to teach EFL in a way that enables the learners to use English for authentic and day-to-day life situations. The use of blogging has been shown to enable the students to learn English for real-life situations and purposes which eventually will enhance the EFL learners’ English language competence in general and their writing skills in particular. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to examine the extent to which this new technology can enhance EFL Omani writing. In this study, multiple qualitative methods were used within an interpretivist approach and a case study methodology to gather the required data. Therefore, after choosing the study context and working with foundation students at the Institute of Health in Oman, the following methods were applied. First, an open-ended questionnaire was used to establish baseline perceptions and to select the six students for in-depth examination. Second, a student blog was created and implemented, in which each participant had to write three original essays plus an edited version of each one based on peers’ comments on their work. Subsequently, field notes were applied within the participants’ writing class, and finally, the participants and their teacher were interviewed. The study obtained the following findings. The use of blogging as a new medium in teaching writing skills enabled Omani students to have a new learning experience where several changes occurred: 1. A change in understanding of being a writer, 2. A change in understanding of a text, 3. A changing pedagogy for the writing classroom and 4. A changing classroom culture in the EFL writing classes. This study is characterised by its original design and approach, by its context within the Arab world and its findings are likely to influence teaching L2 writing skills while applying new educational technology. The study offers compelling evidence that blogging facilitates interaction with peers and teachers and that this interaction changes both the understanding and practice of writing

Red, white and blue highways: British travel writing and the American road trip in the late twentieth century

This study locates late-twentieth-century roadlogues (nonfiction, prose accounts of American road trips) by British writers within the tradition of the postwar American highway narrative in travel writing, novels, and film. It exposes the discursive structures and textual constraints underlying seven case studies published in the 1990s by comparing them to texts from various genres in diachronic and synchronic contexts. It contributes to scholarship on the American highway narrative, which largely overlooks British texts. It complements research on British travel writing, which tends to be biased towards pre-twentieth-century texts by travellers whose culture is in a dominant relation to that of travellees. It adds to postcolonial studies through analysis of representations of the other where otherness is reduced and complicated by a history of cultural exchange. The methodology combines several approaches including discourse theory, discourse analysis, narrative theory, feminist criticism, and theories of tourism. Three main areas are considered: identity, in relation to nationality and gender; the road writer's gaze, with regard to vehicles and roads; and intertextuality, on the margins (in maps) and inside roadlogues (in direct and indirect allusions). The study concludes that contemporary British roadlogues are in what is almost a subordinate relation to American highway narratives, evidenced by extensive influence of American texts. However, this subordination is qualified by joint ownership of western and New World myths, vestiges of imperial superiority, and selective deference by British writers. The latter is demonstrated through a consumer approach to American culture afforded by the episodic structure of the road trip and encouraged by the niche-oriented nature of the current market for travel writing. While American writers regard roadscapes with imperial eyes and experience the road trip as a rite of passage, contemporary Britons generally engage in superficial role play and remain untransformed by American highways

Teachers' narratives of professional experience: building a culture of collaborative inquiry

Objectives or purpose The symposium aims at presenting 3 case studies of teachers’ narratives of professional practice, undertaken within contexts of initial and specialized teacher education. The use of journals as reflective narratives of experience aims at promoting inquiry into professional practice by integrating teaching and research, individual reflection and cooperation. The authors will present the rationale, development, and results of the 3 case studies, as well as discuss the potential and constraints of this inquiry-oriented and collaborative approach to teacher development. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework Our aim as teacher educators is to articulate collaborative and critical teacher development strategies with the development of teacher inquiry and autonomy, seeking to study the role of teachers in the co-construction of pedagogical knowledge, through reflective dialogue on the participants’ personal theories on educational situations (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994; Clandinin, 1992). This orientation is associated with the intention of creating teacher and supervisor development situations that will allow (prospective and experienced) teachers to co-construct their professional knowledge in cooperation with significant others. In this way, the road to professional autonomy and emancipation is enhanced, for it becomes a collective endeavor, instead of an individual one (Moreira, Durães & Silva, 2006; Ribeiro, 2006; Melo, 2007; 2008, forthcoming). Using collaborative journals presupposes systematic regulation of the teaching and learning process, as well as the regulation of teacher education processes, so that problems and solutions, potentialities and constraints may be identified. Only then are we in a position to validate its benefits as a teacher development strategy on the road to professional autonomy. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry The approach to data analysis will be inductive, based on the assumptions and procedures of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We will be looking at themes that arise from data, aimed at articulating perceptions of practice and espoused theories of action. The theoretical underpinnings and methodology of CDA will be also mobilized in the task of trying to uncover historical and ideological constraints on teachers’ discourse and action (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Gee, 1999). Data sources or evidence The main data sources are teachers’ collaborative journals, undertaken within three teacher education courses: initial education of kindergarten teachers, and two Masters’ courses on Pedagogical Supervision. Results, conclusions, and/or points of view Writing a collaborative journal allows the participants to deepen their understanding of vicarious experience and of the process of knowledge production in professional contexts, for it involves writing about feelings and emotions, as well as about thoughts and actions. It allows teachers to dive into the complexities of practice, describe it, confront their perceptions with significant others’ and reconstruct their theories of practice. Besides creating a common space where the I meets the Other, raises awareness of oneself and of situational constraints and thus feels empowered, collaborative journal writing also creates a space for a conversation in which questions are asked, contradictions are exposed, and no definite solutions are reached (Carroll & Cotterall 2007; Moreira & Ribeiro, forthcoming).Research Centre in Education, University of Minho, Portuga

Summer revisions: An ethnographic study of high school teachers in the culture of a summer writing program

This dissertation uses the term culture as a metaphor to describe teachers as they participate in the three-week summer writing program at the University of New Hampshire. Using ethnographic methodology, it blends composition theory, anthropology, folkloristics, and psychology. In the voice of the participant observer, the study describes and interprets both the people and the event as a readable social institution. Teachers live inside a close collegial environment, a temporary, liminal state, away from their home and school responsibilities. They form a dialectical relationship with the culture as they write and talk inside a social environment in which other teachers read and listen. The study highlights a paradox: although teachers report feeling transformed by an external source, their experience involves their own internal processes of creativity, disciplined self-examination, and disclosure. The community sustains fellowship by telling stories, sharing artifacts, enacting rites of passage, honoring elder tradition bearers, establishing a lexicon, a set of symbols, and a system of beliefs that forms a shared identity. But this is a community of unique teachers with individual beliefs and long career histories. The study is presented in two forms: three long cases and five short intertexts. The three case studies portray teachers negotiating the program with internal oppositions: a strange coexistence of solitude and dependence. Each intertext describes a frozen moment, stopping an action or profiling a person with thick description, citing teacher-produced texts, and relevant scholarship. Other studies document change in teachers classrooms after summer programs, but none has focused on the teachers\u27 experience while they are engaged in it. New developments in writing instruction have had the least success in high schools, so this looks at high school teachers. The result is not teacher empowerment as it is traditionally defined for the purposes of external curriculum change. This study documents a personal internal shift that empowers the teacher as a reflective person independent of her school\u27s curriculum; as a reader and writer able to understand herself better as a learner and hence able to bring her own literacy, in her own way, to her classroom

“Clinic and the wider law curriculum”

The problem this paper addresses is that although there is general consensus as to the value of clinic and recognition that it has enhanced creativity and vitality in legal education, there is still a tendency to see it as something apart from the regular law curriculum. We want to explore the viability of making the key benefits of clinical education pervade the whole of the student’s time learning the law. We draw some encouragement from official reports from the US and the UK which, although not concerned primarily with the place of clinical legal education, do provide general support for an approach which combines theory and practice

Searching for Methodology: Feminist Relational Materialism and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference

Using feminist relational materialism as a theoretical map, this paper seeks to reimage traditional case study methodology through the use of diffractive methodology. Reading and writing data diffractively is to refuse to privilege teacher and student talk and to instead study how material-discursive practices intra-act as phenomenon. To do this, we developed question-sets based upon Barad’s (2007) work to interrupt our habits of thinking in regard to a teacher-student writing conference. These question sets provoke our thinking with data from fourth grade teacher-student writing conferences. We play with diffractive methodology highlighting one teacher-student writing conference as intra-activity. Experiencing the teacher-student writing conference again (and again) the question-sets diffract a response and a response diffracts the question-sets, calling us to a continuous becoming, an ethical consideration of how our research and teaching practices matter. We are left wondering if there is a methodology to search for or if methodology is an invitation to an ongoing performance, to join a dance of-the-world, in a constant making and re-making and wondering of what might be