Towards a pedagogical model for teaching through rather than merely with technology: A cultural historical approach

The global impact of COVID-19, a pandemic that has seen much of the world resort to stringent lockdown rules and the closing of schools, poses challenges for teaching/learning as what was originally a face to face endeavour, has now become an online activity. I have argued in a national newspaper for the distinction between teaching with technology and teaching through technology. In this exploratory article, I engage with this distinction and move towards developing a model of online pedagogy that can lead to learning, in the absence of face to face engagement. The article argues for a pedagogical model capable of delivering content in the absence of a face to face teacher and illustrates this through data from an online intervention with my Honours students. The case study described is exploratory in nature and seeks to understand how an intervention can be set up to effect acquisition, rather than seeking to provide evidence for the success of such an intervention. I draw on the work of Vygotsky (1978) and Hedegaard (1998) to provide a picture of developmental pedagogy that leads to cognitive development. The article argues for how it is possible for online pedagogy to achieve developmental learning by providing findings that indicate how one can teach through technology

Delivering biodiversity and pollination services on farmland: a comparison of three wildlife-friendly farming schemes

Data on the species and abundances of bees, butterflies, hoverflies, birds and plants found on farms together with data on the pollination services and species and densities of flowers, from twelve farms in the south of England. Triplets of farms were selected from four regions. All farms in each triplet were in the Government's Entry Level Stewardship scheme, one from each triplet was organic and one from each triplet was in the Conservation Grade scheme. For the four organic and four Conservation Grade farms, three were also in the Government’s Higher Level Stewardship scheme. A representative sample of all habitats on each farm was surveyed. The pollinator groups recorded were bees, butterflies and hoverflies. Bees and butterflies were recorded to species level as far as possible in all years and hoverflies were counted in 2012 and 2013 and recorded to species level as far as possible in 2014. Data from pollinator transects are from 2012, 2013 and 2014 and data from pan traps are from 2012 and 2013. The pollinator survey data have associated habitat and weather data. Pollination service data are from Californian poppy phytometer plants placed on farms in 2013. Flower and bird data are from 2013 and 2014

In-flight calibration of the high-gain antenna pointing for the Mariner Venus-Mercury 1973 spacecraft

The methods used to in-flight calibrate the pointing direction of the Mariner Venus-Mercury 1973 spacecraft high gain antenna and the achieved antenna pointing accuracy are described. The overall pointing calibration was accomplished by performing calibration sequences at a number of points along the spacecraft trajectory. Each of these consisted of articulating the antenna about the expected spacecraft-earth vector to determine systematic pointing errors. The high gain antenna pointing system, the error model used in the calibration, and the calibration and pointing strategy and results are discussed

The death of a mother in adolescence. A qualitative study of the perceived impact on a woman’s adult life and the parent she becomes.

Aim: The purpose of this research was to explore the lived experience and meaning of the unique stories of women who had been bereaved of their mothers during their adolescence. The objective: to develop and enhance an understanding of the perceived impact on their adult life and subsequent approach to motherhood. Method: This qualitative study was conducted by using semi-structured interviews with four participants, all of whom were mothers and over forty years of age to allow for retrospect. Data was analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Findings: The study revealed five main themes, all with striking similarity amongst participants. The findings indicated that the effect of mother death in adolescence was influenced by contextual factors such as suppression of grief through silence and behaviour of surviving parent. All participants reported an enduring psychological effect from their experience; an enduring sense of hurt; feelings of low self-esteem; anger; insecurity; anxiety; neediness and chronic sorrow for both themselves and their mothers. Sadness stemmed from continuous mourning felt through the loss of an adult relationship with their mothers and an awareness of having lost an aspect of themselves. The study identified a ‘ripple effect’ to future generations and established an effect on parenting, with mothers identifying themselves as anxious, uncertain, protective and over compensatory. The study also highlighted facets of posttraumatic growth. Aspects of their healing process were described by participants, including a felt sense of continuing connection with their mothers. All participants believed that they had developed positive character traits as a result of their loss, such as strength and empathy. Furthermore, with age and motherhood, participants experienced an enhanced awareness and self-understanding which afforded them some comfort. Conclusion: This work contributes to growing research suggesting ‘particular effect’ of mother death in adolescence and the subsequent impact on motherhood. Through participants’ words this research details how this experience shaped their lives and reiterates the enormity of loss and its ripple effect. Through the distinct similarities of participant responses, it affirms this phenomenon which has significance not only for women bereaved of their mothers in adolescence but for counsellors’ understanding of this phenomenon

Factors associated with self-perceived state of health in adolescents with congenital cardiac disease attending paediatric cardiologic clinics

The purpose of our study was to determine the ways in which adolescents with congenital cardiac disease believed that the condition had affected their life, and how these views were related to their perceived health. Interviews were conducted with a series of 37 adolescents, 17 girls and 20 boys, aged from 11 to 18, as they attended the clinics of 4 paediatric cardiologists in a teaching hospital in the United Kingdom. Transcripts of the interviews were analysed for recurring themes. A questionnaire was formed consisting of a set of questions for each theme, and additional items eliciting “perceived health”, and administered to a second series of 74 adolescents, 40 boys and 34 girls, who were again aged from 11 to 18 years. Slightly less than half (46%) perceived their health as either “good” or “very good”, and one-third (33%) rated it as “average”. The majority (66%) felt themselves to be “the same” as, or only very slightly “different” from, their peers. The assessment of the seriousness of their condition by the adolescents, the degree to which they saw themselves as different from others, and their perceived health, were not related to the “complexity of the underlying medical condition” as rated by their physician. It was the psychosocial themes, such as exclusion from activities or the effect of the condition on relationships, that were most strongly related to the perception of their health by the adolescents. Improved education of parents, teachers and peers, and attendance at classes for cardiac rehabilitation, might help to ameliorate some of these problems

Pedagogy Analysis Framework: a video-based tool for combining teacher, pupil & researcher perspectives

Background: dialogue between the teaching profession and researchers regarding pedagogical strategy is sometimes problematic. Pedagogy research may benefit from incorporating research methods that can investigate teachers’ and pupils’ interpretations. Purpose: this research expands the Pedagogy Analysis Framework (Riordan, 2020) by explaining in detail the meso-strategies (tactics) and a macro-strategy (grand strategy) used by participants in three school science lessons about chromatography. The research design builds on previous work by using full lessons and introducing pupil group verbal protocols. In addition, Pedagogy Analysis Notation is introduced to help understand and explain macro-strategic behaviours. Sample: one class of thirty 13-year-old pupils and one science teacher. Design and method: four research methods were used (lesson video analysis, teacher verbal protocols, pupil group verbal protocols and researcher group interviews). Data were video recorded (managed using NVivo). Fourteen hours of video data were analysed using Grounded Theory Methods by two educational researchers and the class teacher. The interpretivist theoretical perspective (symbolic interactionism) was underpinned by a social constructionist epistemology (hence the methodology is Straussian Grounded Theory). Appropriate criteria for evaluating the emergent grounded theory were used. Data were recorded in 2017. Results: the Pedagogy Analysis Framework uses the concepts: means (human and non-human), strategy (a spectrum from micro-strategies (actions), through meso-strategies (tactics) to macro-strategies (grand strategies)), ends (regarding the self, another person or a thing, or a group of people or things), and accidents. Types of tactics identified in these data were: inform (misinform and disinform), question, instruct, use space/time, repeat, train, assess, and interact. Pedagogy Analysis Notation is used to understand and explain ‘the stationary [sic] cupboard’ incident. Conclusion: the extended Pedagogy Analysis Framework, combined with the Pedagogy Analysis Notation, improves strategic dialogue between teachers, pupils and educational researchers. This research design facilitates comparison of interpretations of classroom pedagogy by a teacher, pupils and two researchers

#RhodesMustFall: Using social media to "decolonise" learning spaces for South African higher education institutions: A cultural historical activity theory approach

Since the end of 2015, South African universities have been the stage of ongoing student protests that seek to shift the status quo of Higher Education Institutes through calls to decolonise the curriculum and enable free access to HEIs for all. One tool that students have increasingly turned to, to voice their opinions has been social media. In this article we argue that one can use Cultural Historical Activity Theory to understand how the activity systems of the traditional academy are shifting the wake of social media, with traditional power relations becoming more porous as students’ voices gain an audience. By tracing the historical development of CHAT, we show how 4th generation CHAT enables us to analyse potential power shifts in HEIs brought about through the use of social media.

Food reward. What it is and how to measure it

We investigated the contribution of hunger and food liking to food reward, and the relationship between food reward and food intake. We defined liking as the pleasantness of taste of food in the mouth, and food reward as the momentary value of a food to the individual at the time of ingestion. Liking and food reward were measured, respectively, by ratings of the pleasantness of the taste of a mouthful, and ratings of desire to eat a portion, of the food in question. Hunger, which we view as primarily the absence of fullness, was rated without food being present. Study 1 provided evidence that hunger and liking contribute independently to food reward, with little effect of hunger on liking. Food intake reduced liking and reward value more for the eaten food than uneaten foods. The results were ambiguous as to whether this food-specific decline in reward value (‘sensory-specific satiety’) involved a decrease in ‘wanting’ in addition to the decrease in liking. Studies 2 and 3 compared desire to eat ratings with work-for-food and pay-for-food measures of food reward, and found desire to eat to be equal or superior in respect of effects of hunger and liking, and superior in predicting ad libitum food intake. A further general observation was that in making ratings of food liking participants may confuse the pleasantness of the taste of food with the pleasantness of eating it. The latter, which some call ‘palatability,’ decreases more with eating because it is significantly affected by hunger/fullness. Together, our results demonstrate the validity of ratings of desire to eat a portion of a tasted food as a measure of food reward and as a predictor of food intake

The “golden key”: A novel approach to teaching/learning Biology in a secondary school in Brazil: A cultural historical activity theory approach.

The importance of developing students’ conceptual understanding of biological science in school is well established as a precursor to future development (Cachapuz et al. 2005). However, students continue to underperform in this important scholastic area due in large part to not engaging in the deeper concepts taught. In this article we investigate an interdisciplinary approach to teaching biology in a school in Brazil. We draw on the theoretical concepts provided by Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to unpack how interdisciplinary teaching, across different activity systems, can lead to shifts in the activity systems, with students developing a deeper conceptual understanding of biology. Seven teachers (from chemistry, biology, the arts, and geography) and 196 students form the participants in this study. Findings indicate that contradictions arising both within and between activity systems across the teaching contexts led to students’ object shifting from merely covering the curriculum to developing a deeper understanding of biological concepts

A material-dialogic perspective on powerful knowledge and matter within a science classroom

“Powerful” disciplinary knowledge has the potential to enrich students’ lives by providing access to understanding beyond everyday experience (Young 2011). Learning science or any other school subject requires understanding of the core body of content within an academic discipline. However, contemporary discussion of disciplinary knowledge remains at the sociological level, offering little clarity around how such knowledge manifests in the complex and unique contexts in which people learn. The framing of powerful knowledge inherits a dualist philosophical assumption that a curriculum concept is a universal phenomenon, acquired through a myriad of activities and applied in new situations, but nevertheless something which is acquired (or not) (Hardman, 2019). The question then becomes how these universal concepts are acquired through the unique context of a specific classroom. Gericke et al. (2018) begin to address this question by highlighting the transformations made as disciplinary knowledge is taught in schools. These transformations occur at the societal, institutional and classroom levels. The term ‘transformation’ is an umbrella term reflected in both the tradition of didactics, for example, ‘didactic transposition’ (Chevallard 2007), ‘omstilling’ (Ongstad 2006) and ‘reconstruction’ (Duit 2013), as well as within the curriculum tradition in Bernstein’s (1973) notion of ‘re-contextualization’. As well as considering transformations, the term epistemic quality moves us towards conceptualizing how classroom activities have differing qualities in conveying the epistemology of disciplines (Hudson, 2018). In this chapter, we focus on the classroom, and seek to address the overarching question of: How can the transformation processes related to powerful knowledge and epistemic quality be described? Our contention is that the notions of transformation and epistemic quality hold the potential to frame the ways in which disciplinary knowledge and epistemology manifest in the classroom. However, as these notions are being developed, in this book and elsewhere, we wish to guard against any simplistic framing whereby idealised disciplinary understandings are in some way represented in classrooms. In our view, a learner does not receive a reduced, simplified form of some universal understanding. Understanding of a subject discipline, in terms of both knowledge and the epistemology of the discipline, emerge from the dynamic, messy and material contexts of classrooms. In this chapter, we consider how a material-dialogic frame (Hetherington et al. 2018; Hetherington and Wegerif, 2018) might contribute to this discussion. We first briefly lay out the material-dialogic frame and our reasons for proposing it. After that, we use a case study of a science classroom to support the usefulness of the frame in considering transformations of disciplinary knowledge in classrooms