Sociocultural understandings of technology-mediated educational practices: improvable objects and meaning-making trajectories in the ICT-literate classroom

Informed by sociocultural theory, this thesis addresses the gap between the view that teaching-and-learning should be an extended, integrated experience, and the limited research available on how classroom technologies can support this (Glover, et al., 2007). The research explores a new programme using technologies (including interactive whiteboards: IWBs) together with dance/movement and more traditional classroom activities to support teaching-and-learning. Data are presented from eight consecutive history lessons on the Great Fire of London with a Year 2 class (6-7 years), together with four interviews, two Video-Stimulated Reflective Dialogue sessions and a focus group. Findings are based on sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004), multimodal analysis (Jewitt, 2009; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of these data. With implications for both theory and practice, analysis shows how the IWB was used in innovative ways to offer structure and flexibility across lessons. Evidence is also provided of how exploring the topic through dance/movement, images and other activities could support pupils in building conceptual understanding. This then served as a context to develop verbally-expressed understanding. Analysis indicates, however, that confusion could arise in the different ways concepts were referred to through this integrated approach. Based on these findings, Wells’ (1999) concept of the ‘improvable object’ is extended to illustrate how flexible use of IWB slides and talk around them, and how exploring and re-versioning concepts across activities, brings new dimensions to the knowledge-construction process. Furthermore, the importance of addressing meaning making as an interactional achievement became evident, through extension of Baldry and Thibault’s (2006) ‘meaning-making trajectory’. Analysing teacher and pupil perspectives offers valuable insights, regarding how the teacher used and improvised from his lesson plan to acknowledge pupils’ interpretations, and support ongoing meaning making. These contributions represent important understandings of knowledge construction in contemporary, technology-mediated classrooms

Less is More – focusing on feedback

Teachers, Arvon tutors and the Craft of Writing research team all enjoyed a return to Lumb Bank for the second set of Craft of Writing residentials in January – and across the three groups fought off the challenges of snow and a broken boiler, making the weekends quite different to June memories of sunshine and the World Cup! During this time the teachers continued their journeys as writers and wrote in workshops and their own free time, refining and revising their writing. They also shared their experiences, challenges and successes of putting the Craft of Writing Framework into practice, and discussed ways of circumnavigating difficulties when seeking to develop children’s creative writing in school. The Framework, as noted in earlier blogs, was derived from an analysis of the craft knowledge deployed by professional writers. The data had been collected in the previous Teachers as Writers project. The focus of this second weekend was on critical feedback in order to generate a shared vocabulary and language to talk about writing and help revision skills. The tutors Steve Voake and Alicia Stubbersfield prompted the teachers to write and then, working in small groups, to read their work to one another, explore authorial intentions and offer focussed feedback. The teachers also attended one to one tutorials and received yet more critical feedback to support them as writers. As a community we reflected on the stubborn resilience in all our writing, of a tendency to tell rather than show – something we acknowledged we all need to work on, and the value of modelling ways to do this in the classroom

‘Collaborating2Create’: A conceptual tool to develop learners’ capacity for collaborative creativity through Virtual Internships in schools

Background: Many employers are clear about the skills future workers need: technical and practical skills, alongside transferable skills including an ability to effectively solve problems and to work creatively within a team. School-based ‘Virtual Internships’ offer potential to respond to these calls, enabling learners to engage in pedagogically-aligned challenges grounded in authentic workplace practices. Limited research has, however, investigated how schools may facilitate authentic workplace experiences virtually – through online interaction as well as role-play of workplace practices: to enable young people to develop important competencies around creative groupwork through curricular activities. Aim: In this paper we outline the development of ‘Collaborating2Create’ (C2C): a conceptual tool devised through the ‘Virtual Internships Project’ to support the teaching of group creativity, in a way that meaningfully links education to the world of work. Method: We offer a critical literature review followed by extracts from qualitative discourse analysis of classroom data, selected to evidence the value and practice of C2C in genuine classroom interaction. Extracts are presented with integrated analytic commentary, followed by a summary, to make salient features of dialogic interaction that promote C2C. Extracts from a teacher post-programme interview and student focus group, around the deductive theme of C2C, are incorporated to evidence how the programme was developed iteratively based on learning from trials. Findings & Implications: This paper argues that C2C conceptualised as a ‘complex competency’ within a broader Virtual Internship programme offers a conceptual tool that can be embedded and have value beyond the current project. Further, many charities and businesses are keen to establish links with education but their capacity to engage learners in schools is limited. It is argued that C2C could act as an effective ‘bridging concept’ between education and the world of work.Project funded by BT and Huawe

Simulated internships in schools::Engaging learners with the world of work to promote collaborative creativity

School curricula have often struggled to authentically engage young people with the world of work. This chapter examines the potential of ‘simulated’ school classroom-based internships to support collaborative and creative learning and links to the workplace. It reports on design-based research in areas of low social mobility in England. This investigates how simulated internships give students access to authentic experiences of workplace practices in addition to enhancing skills associated with collaborative creativity. Through a challenge-based learning pedagogy implemented as part of regular classroom instruction, simulated internships involve small groups of students aged 11-13 studying Computing or Design and Technology. Over six-to-seven-weeks, together they design, model, or build a local solution to a global challenge presented virtually by engineers in two leading international telecommunications companies. An empirical ‘case study’, based on discourse and thematic analysis, is provided to evidence the scope and challenges of embedding a mutual focus on creative collaboration and supporting authentic insights into the world of work. Reported research is significant as it offers a proof of concept that identifies the potential of simulated internships in generating meaningful insights into the world of work. Focused on the development of collaborative creativity, this conceptualisation of simulated internships can inform and guide future pedagogical and research initiatives. Potentially this could expand to cover other curricular areas and, indeed, other educational settings

‘If it’s not written down it didn’t happen’: Contemporary social work as a writing intensive profession

Social work writing, often referred to as ‘recording’ or ‘paperwork’, is frequently the target of criticism in reviews and public media reporting. However, despite the many criticisms made and its significance in social work practice, little empirical research has been carried out on professional social work writing. This paper draws on findings from an ESRC-funded study in the UK to offer a baseline characterization of the nature and function of writing in contemporary social work. Drawing on text and ethnographic data, the paper foregrounds three key dimensions: the number of written texts, key textual functionalities and genres; the specific ways in which ‘text work’ constitutes everyday social work professional practice, using case studies from the domains of adults, children and mental health; and the concerns by social workers about the amount of time they are required to spend on writing. The baseline characterization provides empirical evidence for claims made about the increased bureaucratisation of social work practice, signalling contemporary social work as a ‘writing intensive’ profession which is at odds with social workers’ professional ‘imaginary’. The paper concludes by outlining the educational and policy implications of the baseline characterization and calls for debate about the nature of contemporary social work practice

Exploring the core ‘preoccupation’ of social work writing: A corpus-assisted discourse study

The profession of social work has become increasingly ‘writing intensive’ in recent decades, yet little empirical research has been carried out on the nature of this writing. This paper describes and explores the 1 million word corpus compiled as part of the ESRC-funded study ‘Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape’ (WiSP http://www.writinginsocialwork.com), outlining the challenges involved in collecting and anonymising hard-to-reach texts from social workers (n=38) across three UK Local Authorities. Using the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse analysis alongside ethnographic insights and in consultation with expert insiders, the paper focuses on what a keyword analysis reveals about the core focus or ‘preoccupation’ (Baker, 2010) of social work writing. Attention is paid to the three main text categories of writing in social work – casenotes, emails and assessment reports – and to the three social work domains of children’s, adult generic and adult mental health services. Findings include confirmation of the extensive recording of communication exchanges, differences in the ways social workers refer to their own and service users’ views, and the considerable extent to which evaluation is threaded through all social work writing via the use of lexis. We also discuss how keyword analysis can provide a set of ‘candidate professional lexis’ and further examine selected items. The paper concludes by reflecting on aspects of methodology, in particular considering the subjectivity around keyword calculation, the equal treatment of all items in a corpus, and the usefulness of combining keyness analysis with additional data sources

Feedback on Academic Essay Writing through pre-Emptive Hints: Moving Towards "Advice for Action"

This paper adopts an “advice for action” approach to feedback in educational practice: addressing how provision of “hints” to participants before they write academic essays can support their understanding and performance in essay-writing tasks. We explored differences in performance by type of hint, and whether there was a transfer of better performance in subsequent essays. Fifty participants were recruited, consisting of eight men and 42 women aged 18-80. Participants were assigned in rotation to four groups, and asked to write two essays. Groups 1 and 3 received hints before Essay 1, whilst Groups 2 and 4 received hints before Essay 2. Groups 1 and 2 received essential hints; Groups 3 and 4 received helpful hints. Essays were marked against set criteria. The results showed that an “advice for action” approach to essay-writing, in the form of hints, can significantly improve writers’ marks. Specifically higher marks were gained for the introduction, conclusion and use of evidence: critical components of “good” academic essays. As the hints given were content-free, this approach has the potential to instantly benefit tutors and students across subject domains and institutions and is informing the development of a technical system that can offer formative feedback as students draft essays

Educational change and ICT: an exploration of priorities 2 and 3 of the DfES e-strategy in schools and colleges: the current landscape and implementation issues

Landscape review of integrated online support for learners and collaborative approaches to personalised learning activities

Supporting location-based inquiry learning across school, field and home contexts

Here we explore how technology can be applied to support inquiry learning spanning a range of contexts. The development process of a location-based inquiry learning toolset is presented for a secondary school GCSE Geography project. The design framework used and the process of participatory development is discussed with regard to the co-development of the activities and tools involved in an inquiry project. The lessons learned relate to the formation of a motivational context for the inquiry; the role of personal data collection in the field; the use of bridging representations across field and classroom activities; and the development of flexible, re-usable tools to support and bridge sequences of activities