A Video of Myself Helps Me Learn : A Scoping Review of the Evidence of Video-Making for Situated Learning

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an “able” body to enact complex tasks in situated and/or simulation-based contexts (for example, “safe nursing practice”). Our interdisciplinary research seeks to intervene within the culture of professional learning by investigating what we know about the use of smartphone video recording for situated, practice-based learning, and for supporting interactive video-based assessment as a means of accommodation and extending access for students, including students with performance anxiety, mature students, ESL learners, students with disabilities, and students in remote communities. In this paper we employ a scoping review methodology to present our findings related to students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the use of smartphone video to demonstrate and document practical knowledge and practice-oriented competencies across fields in the arts and sciences. We also examine broader research, as well as the ethical and design implications for the development of our technology-based toolbox project – an online resource created to advance pedagogies deploying smartphones as tools for practical skills acquisition - and for accommodation - within multidisciplinary practical learning environments

Towards a Generative Politics of Expression: Re-Negotiating Identity in the "Traditional" Dances of Fiji and Fiji's Canadian Diaspora

Recent performances of the “traditional” Fijian song-dance practice called meke indicate a re-negotiation of identity amongst Fijians living in Fiji and Canada. Post-independence Fiji has had a tumultuous history with four coups d’etat since 1987. Governance in that time, impacted by close to a century of British colonial rule, has been centred on a biopolitical terrain occupied by firm categories of race, ethnicity and culture. The politics of negotiating identity in post-independence Fiji have created ethnic tensions that have divided dance forms (Hereniko 2006). However, in light of Fiji’s most recent 2006 military coup in the name of multiracial harmony and anti-racism, there has been a re-negotiation of “Fijianness” in performances of meke that sometimes blurs boundaries formed by categories of race, and other times sustains race-based boundaries. These political and historical contexts are elements of what is being re-negotiated for members of Fiji’s disparate Diaspora in Canada that has grown significantly due to the coups (Lal 2003). In the context of shifting biopolitical terrains of power, my research asks: how does expressing movement-based affects (as relational feelings/sensations of intensity) activate and transform political tensions and identifications with nation, ethnicity, and culture for practitioners of meke in Canada and Fiji? The findings of this research are based on original dance-based participant observation fieldwork and archival research conducted in Western Canada and Viti Levu, Fiji between 2011 and 2013. I argue that meke in Canada and Fiji enables a re-negotiation of identity through experiences and expressions of powerful feeling states that generate and are simultaneously generated by movement. These affects enable Fijians to de-centre and strategically deploy discourses of multiculturalism in Canada and multiracialism in Fiji that divide Fijians by treating them as “ethnically” homogenous yet distinct groups. In addition, while haunted by felt intensities that migrate from Fiji, Fijian migrants in Vancouver generate new articulations of identity expressed through meke that emerge from new connections to place. I examine examples of Fijian dance that show how movement-based affects go beyond merely reflecting or representing culture and ethnicity, and instead expose how dance actively generates culture and identity

Towards Decolonial Choreographies of Co-Resistance

This article engages movement as a methodology for understanding the creative coalition work that we carried out for a project series called Into the Light (ITL) that used research from university archives to mount a museum exhibition and then develop an interactive public education site that counters histories and ongoing realities of colonial eugenics and their exclusionary ideas of what it means to be human in Canada’s educational institutions. We address different movement practices, both those initiated by ableist-colonial forces to destroy difference and by our coalition of co-resistors to affirm difference. We apply a decolonizing and Anishinaabe philosophical lens alongside a feminist disability-informed neomaterialist and dance studies one to theorize examples of ITL’s “choreographies of co-resistance”. Anishinaabe knowledge practices refuse and thus interfere with colonial-eugenic practices of erasure while enacting an ethic of self-determination and mutual respect for difference. The ripple effect of this decolonizing and difference-affirming interference reverberates through our words and moves at varying tempos through our bodies—traveling through flesh, holding up at bones, and passing through watery, stretchy connective tissue pathways. These are our choreographies of co-resistance as actions of mattering and world-building

“A video of myself helps me learn”: A scoping review of the evidence of video-making for situated learning

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an “able” body to enact complex tasks in situated and/or simulation-based contexts (for example, “safe nursing practice”). Our interdisciplinary research seeks to intervene within the culture of professional learning by investigating what we know about the use of smartphone video recording for situated, practice-based learning, and for supporting interactive video-based assessment as a means of accommodation and extending access for students, including students with performance anxiety, mature students, ESL learners, students with disabilities, and students in remote communities. In this paper we employ a scoping review methodology to present our findings related to students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the use of smartphone video to demonstrate and document practical knowledge and practice-oriented competencies across fields in the arts and sciences. We also examine broader research, as well as the ethical and design implications for the development of our technology-based toolbox project – an online resource created to advance pedagogies deploying smartphones as tools for practical skills acquisition - and for accommodation - within multidisciplinary practical learning environments

Results of the ICTuS 2 Trial (Intravascular Cooling in the Treatment of Stroke 2)

Background and purposeTherapeutic hypothermia is a potent neuroprotectant approved for cerebral protection after neonatal hypoxia-ischemia and cardiac arrest. Therapeutic hypothermia for acute ischemic stroke is safe and feasible in pilot trials. We designed a study protocol to provide safer, faster therapeutic hypothermia in stroke patients.MethodsSafety procedures and 4°C saline infusions for faster cooling were added to the ICTuS trial (Intravascular Cooling in the Treatment of Stroke) protocol. A femoral venous intravascular cooling catheter after intravenous recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator in eligible patients provided 24 hours cooling followed by a 12-hour rewarm. Serial safety assessments and imaging were performed. The primary end point was 3-month modified Rankin score 0,1.ResultsOf the intended 1600 subjects, 120 were enrolled before the study was stopped. Randomly, 63 were to receive hypothermia plus antishivering treatment and 57 normothermia. Compared with previous studies, cooling rates were improved with a cold saline bolus, without fluid overload. The intention-to-treat primary outcome of 90-day modified Rankin Score 0,1 occurred in 33% hypothermia and 38% normothermia subjects, odds ratio (95% confidence interval) of 0.81 (0.36-1.85). Serious adverse events occurred equally. Mortality was 15.9% hypothermia and 8.8% normothermia subjects, odds ratio (95% confidence interval) of 1.95 (0.56-7.79). Pneumonia occurred in 19% hypothermia versus 10.5% in normothermia subjects, odds ratio (95% confidence interval) of 1.99 (0.63-6.98).ConclusionsIntravascular therapeutic hypothermia was confirmed to be safe and feasible in recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator-treated acute ischemic stroke patients. Protocol changes designed to reduce pneumonia risk appeared to fail, although the sample is small.Clinical trial registrationURL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT01123161