What ‘children’ experience and ‘adults’ may overlook: phenomenological approaches to media practice, education and research

This paper argues that each utterance of media should be seen as in dialogue with each other utterance, and that children, being the phenomenological hub to their lived media experience, should be recognised as engaging with media holistically. Argument draws upon two recent qualitative studies with children between six and eleven years of age. These studies, although separate, shared certain phenomenology orientated conceptual underpinnings and arrived at relatable findings. Notably that participating children tended to address media in a platform agnostic manner and offered little sense that they saw the media platform itself as being of overriding significance to their holistic media engagement. Ultimately, if children’s lived media engagement is dialogic and holistic, then focusing on only one discreet media utterance (like television for example) can be said to become deeply problematic to those within children’s media practice, education and research

Assessing and Rewarding Excellent Academic Teachers for the benefit of an Organisation.

In this article we describe and analyse a system for rewarding excellence in university teaching developed at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University in Sweden. Individual teachers are rewarded for the effort they invest in the support of student learning. However, it is the organization that establishes a reward system and it does so for developmental purposes. These two purposes, individual and organizational, need to be balanced but the organizational perspective is wide enough to host the individual perspective, especially if the individual teacher contributes to the overall development at institutional level. The Faculty of Engineering rewards teachers with a clear focus on student learning and a developed capability to reflect scholarly on their teaching practice. The balance between theoretical knowledge about teaching and student learning and the actual teaching practice is crucial and examined in detail. It is the reflected practitioner that is rewarded – for the benefit of the organization