Using the Inquiry-based Learning Approach to Enhance Student Innovativeness: A Conceptual Model

Individual innovativeness has become one of the most important employability skills for university graduates. In this paper, we focus on how students could be better prepared to be innovative in the workplace, and we argue that inquiry-based learning (IBL) – a pedagogical approach in which students follow the inquiry-based processes used by scientists to construct knowledge – can be effective for this purpose. Drawing on research which examines the social and cognitive micro-foundations of innovative behaviour, we develop a conceptual model that links IBL and student innovativeness, and introduce three teacher-controlled design elements that can influence the strength of this relationship, namely whether an inquiry is open or closed, discovery-focused or information focused and individual or teambased. We argue that an open, discovery-focused and team-based inquiry offers the greatest potential for enhancing students’ skills in innovation. This paper has several implications for higher education research and practice

Information-Age Populism: Higher Education as a Civic Learning Organization

Viewing higher education as an environment "ripe for change," Harry Boyte makes the case for colleges and universities to forsake their traditional bastions of cloistered scholarship to become "civic learning" organizations. Many faculty members are willing and able to pursue their interests in the public relevance of teaching and research. What is needed to undertake the democratization of the production and diffusion of knowledge, Boyte says in this report from the Council on Public Policy Education, is to stress the need for disciplines to interact across porous boundaries with the wider world

Leading Deeply: A Heroic Journey Toward Wisdom and Transformation

This dissertation will explore leadership as a mytho-poetic transformational journey toward self-knowledge, authenticity, and ultimately wisdom; the power to make meaning and give something back to the world in which we live; and the necessity of transformation. I view leadership as a transformative process and a transformational responsibility. As leaders we must undergo our own transformation in order to lead change on a larger scale. The dissertation will be both philosophical and theoretical, exploring how the threads of the hero’s journey, transformation, wisdom, and leadership intertwine. It will also examine the role of education in this process. Education does not necessarily mean institutional learning as it is so often taken to mean. A broader understanding of what education is and how it needs to serve us individually and as a society, particularly with the intention of developing wisdom and leadership (or wisdom in leadership) will be explored. The hero’s journey, the mytho-poetic journey toward authenticity and self-knowledge, is the golden thread that weaves itself throughout this dissertation. It is both the idea of developing leadership and wisdom as a journey (as opposed to a destination) and the idea that meaning and authenticity is ultimately what drives wisdom and leadership. These concepts manifest themselves in different ways throughout the chapters. In many ways this is a very unorthodox and unusual way to approach leadership. It asks for full engagement, participation, excellence, and mastery—a lifelong dedication. None of these concepts are new, but most of them are often unheeded or not practiced. It also focuses on the common good, an element that research in both wisdom and higher stages of consciousness share. The intent is to explore the transformational process inherent in becoming a leader and consequently leading transformation that ultimately makes the world a better place on a number of different levels—leading deeply. Leading deeply makes a difference through tapping into meaning and purpose. When our lives are about contribution and giving back, growth and wisdom, evolution and making the world in which we live and in which our children will live a better place, the experience of life becomes deeper, richer. Leading deeply connects us back to life, creates meaning, and helps us understand that what we are doing does matter. A leader is one who has gone through his or her own heroic and transformative journey, returning with a gift, and enabling others to do the same. The goal is development. It is directed toward growth, flourishing, higher levels of consciousness, and understanding. It is paradoxically rooted in tradition yet always embracing the change in which we live. Leading deeply takes us deeper to what is ultimately important for all of us. This electronic version of dissertation is at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Leading Deeply: A Heroic Journey Toward Wisdom and Transformation

This dissertation will explore leadership as a mytho-poetic transformational journey toward self-knowledge, authenticity, and ultimately wisdom; the power to make meaning and give something back to the world in which we live; and the necessity of transformation. I view leadership as a transformative process and a transformational responsibility. As leaders we must undergo our own transformation in order to lead change on a larger scale. The dissertation will be both philosophical and theoretical, exploring how the threads of the hero’s journey, transformation, wisdom, and leadership intertwine. It will also examine the role of education in this process. Education does not necessarily mean institutional learning as it is so often taken to mean. A broader understanding of what education is and how it needs to serve us individually and as a society, particularly with the intention of developing wisdom and leadership (or wisdom in leadership) will be explored. The hero’s journey, the mytho-poetic journey toward authenticity and self-knowledge, is the golden thread that weaves itself throughout this dissertation. It is both the idea of developing leadership and wisdom as a journey (as opposed to a destination) and the idea that meaning and authenticity is ultimately what drives wisdom and leadership. These concepts manifest themselves in different ways throughout the chapters. In many ways this is a very unorthodox and unusual way to approach leadership. It asks for full engagement, participation, excellence, and mastery—a lifelong dedication. None of these concepts are new, but most of them are often unheeded or not practiced. It also focuses on the common good, an element that research in both wisdom and higher stages of consciousness share. The intent is to explore the transformational process inherent in becoming a leader and consequently leading transformation that ultimately makes the world a better place on a number of different levels—leading deeply. Leading deeply makes a difference through tapping into meaning and purpose. When our lives are about contribution and giving back, growth and wisdom, evolution and making the world in which we live and in which our children will live a better place, the experience of life becomes deeper, richer. Leading deeply connects us back to life, creates meaning, and helps us understand that what we are doing does matter. A leader is one who has gone through his or her own heroic and transformative journey, returning with a gift, and enabling others to do the same. The goal is development. It is directed toward growth, flourishing, higher levels of consciousness, and understanding. It is paradoxically rooted in tradition yet always embracing the change in which we live. Leading deeply takes us deeper to what is ultimately important for all of us. This electronic version of dissertation is at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Visualisation, Story And Metaphor As Tools To Build Self-Belief And Moral Awareness. An Ethnographic Case Study With Disengaged Pupils.

This case study of the Swindon Youth Empowerment Project 2001-2007, explores personal and social transformations when young people are encouraged to talk through their life choices conceptually using visualisation, symbol and metaphor. This educational project was designed to empower disaffected pupils in urban schools who are failing academically. They are referred to as ‘dispirited’ as they lacked motivation and ambition. The SYEP project is unique in that the procedure was created by the team and has no direct parallels. The fieldwork took place over three years, 2004-2007 with the researcher working as ethnographer as an outsider to the project. Data collection has included ethnographic observations, of training and events, and planning meetings. Interviews were conducted, group and individual pupils, teachers and learning mentors. The research drew on naturalistic data of the pupils involved, taken before, during and after the intervention. In doing so the team were trained to become evaluators and researchers. The researcher was allowed access to the work in order to encourage a long-term culture of evaluation, in schools as well as in the project. The research used a range of qualitative and ethnographic data collection methods and encouraged co-researcher dialogue. The analytical process was interpretative. The research demonstrates a clear effect on some of the young people involved. It reveals a range of factors contributing to this success. It also discusses the learning and development processes of the project team, including the process by which evaluation was improved and a future action plan is set. It locates the benefits of the project in relation to theoretical discussions about holistic education, self-belief, emotional literacy and wellbeing, and therapeutic approaches. It argues that young people can transcend their limited world view, learning to see themselves differently as people with energy, potential, compassion and the ability to affect positive change. In this they can reach out to others and with others, building moral understanding and cascading positive attitudes and energies to those around them

Freire re-viewed

The work of Paulo Freire is associated with themes of oppression and liberation, and his critical pedagogy is visionary in its attempts to bring about social transformation. Freire has created a theory of education that embeds these issues within social relations that center around both ideological and material domination. In this review essay, Sue Jackson explores three books: Freire’s final work Pedagogy of Indignation; Cesar Augusto Rossatto’s Engaging Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Possibility, which attempts to engage Freire’s pedagogy of possibility; and C.A. Bowers and Frederique Apffel-Marglin’s edited collection Re-thinking Freire, which asks readers to reconsider Freire’s work in light of globalization and environmental crises. Jackson questions the extent to which Freire’s pedagogical approaches are useful to educators as well as to “the oppressed,” and whether challenges to re-think Freire can lead to new kinds of critical pedagogies

Bridging the Ivory Tower: Culturally Responsive Education Connects Content to People

Higher education institutions shape the professions which are the conduit for the disciplines’ ways of knowing, the worldview or mindset of the professions, and the intellectual frameworks by which problems and policies are defined. The generational, conscious and unconscious agreements between higher education and the professions perpetuate the status quo, resulting in continued disproportional impacts based on race, gender, ethnicity, language, orientation, and differing abilities in every major industry sector; including education, health, employment, housing, finance, technology and the criminal justice system. Cultural responsive pedagogy provides a process of altering these agreements by surfacing the dual consciousness of our multiple social identities and the multidimensional social, political, and economic contexts in our collective co-existence. The connections between culture and mindset, conscious and unconscious, and the social-political context shape teaching and learning. Mindfulness is a pathway for cultivating cultural competency through embodied awareness by building the reflective muscle to recognize, disrupt and transform deep-rooted beliefs, entrenched assumptions, and well-established behaviours. Mindfulness invites both faculty and students to bring their intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual selves to the learning exchange

Ontological imagination: transcending methodological solipsism and the promise of interdisciplinary studies

This text is a presentation of the notion of ontological imagination. It constitutes an attempt to merge two traditions: critical sociology and science and technology studies - STS. By contrasting these two intellectual traditions, I attempt to bring together: a humanist ethical-political sensitivity and a posthumanist ontological insight. My starting point is the premise that contemporary world needs new social ontology and new critical theory based on it in order to overcome the unconsciously adapted, “slice-based” modernist vision of social ontology. I am convinced that we need new ontological frameworks of the social combined with a research disposition which I refer to as ontological imagination

Producing Transformative Leaders in Africa through Education Pipelines

The purpose of this study was to the draw the attention of national governments and educators to the escalating poverty of transformative leadership in African society. Governments need to invest in the development of effective leaders for every section, sector and strata in society to transform the continent. On the contrary, education pipelines in Africa are skewed to produce a few university graduates to take up apex leadership positions in society. Yet school dropouts become field leaders who play a critical role in local governance and national transformation initiatives without a leadership education. In this study, the researcher used deductive and inductive methods to thematically analyze current approaches to pedagogy and leadership education in Africa from published literature, academic journals and descriptive statistics. The author suggests that school teachers are in a unique position to reverse the trend of poor leadership in society by equipping students with life skills to resolve social-economic challenges in their circumstances. However, empowering teachers to successfully address this need will require a substantive review of the foundations, philosophy and objectives of national education pipelines. There is also a need to review education structures, curriculum design, teacher training, examination boards and develop supportive policy frameworks to produce transformative leaders for the continent

Designing Wise Communities that Engage in Creative Problem Solving: An Analysis of an Online Design Model

Addressing the conference theme of “design thinking,” this paper discusses an instructional design model, WisCom (Wisdom Communities) that we developed to build a wise learning community online, to solve open-ended, ill-structured problems such as solving a health crisis or an environmental disaster, which requires the exchange of multiple perspectives, inter-disciplinary thinking, creative problem solving, and social construction of knowledge. Based on socio-constructivist, sociocultural theories of learning and mediated cognition (Vygotsky, 1978), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995; Pea, 1993), group cognition (Stahl, 2006), research on how people learn (Bransford, Vye, Bateman, Brophy, & Roselli, 2004), and distance education design principles (Moore & Kearsley, 2011), WisCom specifies three components that must be designed to create a wise community online that engages in creative problem solving and transformational learning: (1) a cohesive learning community involved in negotiation of meaning and collaborative learning; (2) knowledge innovation – moving the learning community from data, information, and knowledge to wisdom, providing opportunities for reflection, sharing of perspectives, knowledge construction and preservation within the community, and (3) learner support and e-mentoring to achieve the communities’ learning goals