Connected Learning In School: Making Identities In Youth-Led Affinity Spaces

This visual ethnographic account explores how students at an urban high school cultivated their own youth-led affinity spaces: a youth activism group, a dance team, and a film club. My research examines how and why these youth-led spaces emerged, the kinds of making students did within the spaces, and how their identities shifted or changed over time both within and outside of these spaces. My research responds to discourses that seek to reimagine school through interest-driven learning. The Maker Movement and Connected Learning are two such movements that argue that students’ interests should be an integral part of their school learning experiences. These movements argue for students\u27 learning and participation in school to be active and authentic, to build on students’ out of school literacies, and to position students as creative agents. In urban districts, students are often subjected to test prep and didactic approaches that limit how youth express and demonstrate learning and are disconnected from their own interests or affinities. In creating youth-led affinity spaces, students were exercising agency, engaging in leadership, and pursuing their interests. Thus far, there has not been an examination of interest-driven learning, schooling, and identity. My examination of youth-making can create opportunities for youth to cultivate dialogic relationships with peers and adults, draw on their out of school literacies and media knowledge to influence their making, and perform new identities – within the institutional boundary of school

Evaluation of the NZAID Project

Evaluation of “Institutionalizing Community–Based Integrated Watershed Management within Local Government Units in the Bicol Region, Philippines: Scaling Up and Sustaining Capacity–Building Outcomes at Local Level” for the IIRR BICOL Progra

Reclaiming the right to look: making the case for critical visual literacy and data science education

As visual cultures scholars have argued, visual expression and aesthetic artifacts largely comprise the modern world. This includes the production of the school as an institution. A critical approach to education therefore must reinscribe students with the ability to see what educational processes attempt to hide and to construct an understanding of the real for themselves. To illustrate this argument, we explore the production of visuality within data science education as one example of how the visual manifests within schools. In response, we propose a visual literacy informed approach to engaging students with data, one that expands beyond contemporary forms of critical data literacy by involving an ontological critique of educational aestheticization. To ground this work, we examine the role of visuality and aesthetics within the implementation of co-designed arts-infused data science projects in four US middle schools. In analyzing interviews with teachers and students, we uncover a series of tensions that reveal the ongoing influence of school visualities alongside the potential for student generated images to amplify their right to look. We therefore argue that critical pedagogies must not only involve reading and critiquing aesthetic artifacts but also engage students in a critique of visuality itself

Connected Learning in School: Making Identities in Youth-Led Affinity Spaces

This visual ethnographic account explores how students at an urban high school cultivated their own youth-led affinity spaces: a youth activism group, a dance team, and a film club. My research examines how and why these youth-led spaces emerged, the kinds of making students did within the spaces, and how their identities shifted or changed over time both within and outside of these spaces. My research responds to discourses that seek to reimagine school through interest-driven learning. The Maker Movement and Connected Learning are two such movements that argue that students’ interests should be an integral part of their school learning experiences. These movements argue for students\u27 learning and participation in school to be active and authentic, to build on students’ out of school literacies, and to position students as creative agents. In urban districts, students are often subjected to test prep and didactic approaches that limit how youth express and demonstrate learning and are disconnected from their own interests or affinities. In creating youth-led affinity spaces, students were exercising agency, engaging in leadership, and pursuing their interests. Thus far, there has not been an examination of interest-driven learning, schooling, and identity. My examination of youth-making can create opportunities for youth to cultivate dialogic relationships with peers and adults, draw on their out of school literacies and media knowledge to influence their making, and perform new identities – within the institutional boundary of school

Imagination PLAYce: Towards Critical Liberatory and Digitally Mediated Pedagogies of Higher Education

As bell hooks writes, “classrooms remain the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” We take up hooks’ charge by exploring how we can shift teacher training to be informed by the changing digital media and technology landscape, such that they are cultivating digital and data literacies as essential to their practices. To do so, we argue that making digital and tangible artifacts as central to teaching and learning can have meaningful implications for future and practicing teachers across learning contexts. Our research question is, “what happens when educators engage in making tangible and digital artifacts as a central component to their educational experiences?” We are currently developing a classroom, titled Imagination PLAYce, that is rooted in the principles of play as praxis, productive failure, and tinkering. We want teachers to see their work as designing classrooms that are rooted in social justice, critical pedagogies, and dynamic ways of using technology and digital media to engage and nurture learners. The funding will help to: 1)source classroom materials 2) create digital content (e.g. digital stories, how-tos) 3) collect data and produce research on shifts in higher education pedagogies related to innovative technologies and media in classrooms

The programmers’ collective: fostering participatory culture by making music videos in a high school Scratch coding workshop

We highlight ways to support interest-driven creation of digital media in Scratch, a visual-based programming language and community, within a high school programming workshop. We describe a collaborative approach, the programmers’ collective, that builds on social models found in do-it-yourself and open source communities, but with scaffolding structures that support students’ learning. We analyze the work of a class of high school student collectives engaged in programming music videos as part of a collaborative challenge in the online Scratch community. Our multi-level analysis focused on students’ learning specific programming concepts, effects of collaborative and task design on learning, and their personal reflections on collaboration and media creation. We address how these overlapping collaborative experiences point to the value of “nested collectives,” or multiple levels of designed-for collaboration. We also highlight a needed shift from a focus on computation to computational participation, highlighting the innately social aspects of media creation

Comparison of knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding needle-stick injury among health care providers

Introduction: Needle-stick injury (NSI) is one of the most potential hazards for health care workers. They pose a significant risk of occupational transmission of blood-borne pathogens. The present study was done to determine the incidence of NSI among interns and nurses; their knowledge, attitude, and preventive strategies undertaken by the respondents after NSI. Materials and Methods: The cross-sectional study was done among interns and nurses in various departments of a tertiary care center in Kerala, India using a self-administered questionnaire. Results: The incidences of NSI among interns and nurses were 75.6% and 24.4%, respectively. The most common clinical activity leading to NSI among interns was blood withdrawal (42%) followed by recapping (29%). It was found that nurses had enough knowledge and followed better NSI practices and attitude than the interns. Conclusion: All the parameters analyzed were inadequate among the interns, indicating the need for continual awareness programs particularly during the preclinical years

Students Learning About Science by Investigating an Unfolding Pandemic

We explored the COVID-19 pandemic as a context for learning about the role of science in a global health crisis. In spring 2020, at the beginning of the first pandemic-related lockdown, we worked with a high school teacher to design and implement a unit on human brain and behavior science. The unit guided her 17 students in creating studies that explored personally relevant questions about the pandemic to contribute to a citizen science platform. Pre-/postsurveys, student artifacts, and student and teacher interviews showed increases in students’ fascination with science—a driver of engagement and career preference—and sense of agency as citizen scientists. Students approached science as a tool for addressing their pandemic-related concerns but were hampered by the challenges of remote schooling. These findings highlight both the opportunities of learning from a global crisis, and the need to consider how that crisis is still affecting learners.publishe