‘Getting the seat of your pants dirty’: space and place in ethnographic educational research

In this paper I consider the importance of space and place in ethnographic educational research. The paper draws on research that took place at Educational Video Center (EVC), a non-profit media education centre in New York City (NYC). In this paper I articulate EVC as a place imbued with meaning from the pedagogical practices that take place within and regarding it and argue for a consideration of spatiality in ethnographic educational research. I consider the role of the city landscape in order to identify how knowledge is emplaced and represented through digital, visual technology and conclude by outlining the criticality of spatialising our ethnographic practices

Meeting Disciplinary Literacy Demands in Content Learning: The Singapore Perspective

This chapter examines how systemic language and literacy support for content-area teachers to enhance their students’ learning is realised in Singapore with a focus on science at the secondary level. It highlights theoretical underpinnings that inform the perspective of disciplinary literacy guiding this work and describes how disciplinary literacy is contextualised in Singapore against what is broadly understood as effective communication. It unpacks the nature and extent of systemic support for developing literacy in science with specific reference to the professional learning courses and school-based collaborative research. The chapter addresses the challenges encountered and discusses the implications which impact curriculum and pedagogy in the integration of disciplinary literacy practices to meet students’ needs in the learning of science

Student Agency: an Analysis of Students’ Networked Relations Across the Informal and Formal Learning Domains

Agency is a construct facilitating our examination of when and how young people extend their own learning across contexts. However, little is known about the role played by adolescent learners’ sense of agency. This paper reports two cases of students’ agentively employing and developing science literacy practices—one in Singapore and the other in the USA. The paper illustrates how these two adolescent learners in different ways creatively accessed, navigated and integrated in-school and out-of-school discourses to support and nurture their learning of physics. Data were gleaned from students’ work and interviews with students participating in a physics curricular programme in which they made linkages between their chosen out-of-school texts and several physics concepts learnt in school. The students’ agentive moves were identified by means of situational mapping, which involved a relational analysis of the students’ chosen artefacts and discourses across time and space. This relational analysis enabled us to address questions of student agency—how it can be effected, realised, construed and examined. It highlights possible ways to intervene in these networked relations to facilitate adolescents’ agentive moves in their learning endeavours