The influence of online problem-based learning on teachers' professional practice and identity

In this paper we describe the design of a managed learning environment called MTutor, which is used to teach an online Masters Module for teachers. In describing the design of MTutor pedagogic issues of problem-based learning, situated cognition and ill-structured problems are discussed. MTutor presents teachers with complex real-life teaching problems, which they are required to solve online through collaboration with other teachers. In order to explore the influence of this online learning experience on the identity and practice of teachers, we present the results from a small-scale study in which six students were interviewed about their online experiences. We conclude that, within the sample, students' engagement with online problem-based learning within their community of practice positively influenced their professional practice styles, but that there is little evidence to suggest that online identity influences real-life practice

Writing as PARTicipation:Working towards in:tuition and intimating

This paper is a thought-experiment into the question, “How might we participate in the writing of this paper together?”  Having been both inspired and moved by Erin Manning´s beautiful chapter “Me Lo Dijo un Pajarito: Neurodiversity, Black Life and the University as we Know It’ (2020) we pick up the baton of moving thinking into how we can begin to work together to contribute to the reconceptualization of educational and research practices and specifically through practices of inclusion and participation within them. We do this with the starting point of our own participation in the writing of this paper.  We follow the faint line of two emerging techniques.  The first technique, in:tuition, emerges to help make operational a practice of participation that engages participants, students, us, on the register of the preindividual.  The second technique, intimating, works towards a notion of transindividual participation.  We offer an immanent and processual approach to practice, involving a ‘(r)eaching toward one another, (in which) our individuations qualitatively alter our “individuality.”  With Manning, we work with ‘thinking-feeling (as) the transversality of all planes of experience in the immanent twist’ with the desire of twisting into new and socially just practices

Tami Spry:The force of (co-)performing

In this short article, we work with the notion of Tami Spry as force. There is a tension here: We have come to recognize, both through the writing of this article and through our many years of encountering both Tami herself and Tami’s work as performer and writer, how we find ourselves needing to de-personalize and de-individualize: we are drawn into the beyond, the uncontainable, the “more-than,” of Tami and Tami’s work. At the same time as this impulse to de-personalize and de-individualize, we recognize—and cherish—that Tami Spry’s work could not happen without Tami Spry. We experience, and seek to convey here, our respect, our gratitude, our love, both for a person we are privileged to call our friend and for a body of work, whether performed, written or performed in writing, that is committed to the personal, the vulnerable, the intimate and the embodied

Between-ing:Collaborative writing and the unfoldings of relational space

In conversation with Claire Parnet, Deleuze is quoted as saying, “(w)e were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us.” Deleuze’s concept of “between-the-two” has been used by “Gale and Wyatt,” as a leitmotif for the collaborative writing with which they have engaged “between the two” and also in collaboration with others. The persistence and longevity of this usage has led to the possibility that an “image of thought” has been brought to life which is constitutive of the “us” rather than the “betweened.” In this, have “Gale and Wyatt” continued to swim in the calm, unquestioning, and welcoming waters of qualitative inquiry? Have they, in so doing, avoided those eddies, swirls, rip currents, and deep, dark waters of post qualitative inquiry that might be working to pull them out into the turbulent seas of free and wild concept making where, in becoming, their writing might move away from the applications and representations of simply human-centric thought and action and be of a more immanent doing? In this article, “Gale and Wyatt” address their alertness to the doing of this image of thought. They ask, does their collaborative writing rest more on the “two” of them, the people doing the writing, than on the “between” that talks more the materiality of relational space(s) unfolding amid them? In this article, they affirmatively critique this possibility. They ask: Between the two? How does this betweening work? What does this betweening do? Only two

Autoethnography and activism:Movement, intensity and potential

In this short article, we pay attention to what an autoethnography might do. In relationality, we understand autoethnographic practices as assembling and dissembling bodies that are active in always territorializing space and in world making. They have the capacity to affect and be affected and, therefore, as performing and performative practices, they act and are acted upon. With Madison, we see these acts as activist, and we, therefore, see autoethnographic practice as always shifting, always about movement, intensity, and potentiality; it never resides, it lives in the creation of the next moment, the next step into the not yet known

Writing through and writing against:Materials of resistance

This article concerns how writing, collaborative writing in particular, acts: how it moves, how it resists, how it does, the four humans writing alongside our co-authoring ‘materials’ – a guitar, for instance – and other more-than-human co-authors, such as affect, friendship, time. We explore writing against systems of oppression and writing through materials of resistance. Writing through can ignite the seething potentiality of a breaking through, and a writing towards the not-yet-known of other lives. We sense this as an unleashing that can act as a challenge to the self-perpetuating autopoieses that neoliberal autonomies and competitive frameworks require. Writing through materials of resistance offers an inducement to work towards the social capaciousness and the thinking with those collective orientations. Writing through refuses the surrender of freedom and offers, through practices of speculation, fabulation and experimentation, an animation of movement that can tap into the capacious fugitive energies of emergent and new collective futures. </jats:p

Writing<i> With</i>:Collaborative writing as hope and resistance

Collaboration in scholarship holds the peculiar position of being expected, encouraged, and, in the process, somewhat taken-for-granted as monolithic academic practice. Collaboration is important for the cultivation of a rich ecosystem of ideas, thoughts, methods, theories, and experimentation. It seems safe to assume that most scholars would agree with the need and the possibilities of collaboration. Yet, collaboration in scholarship is often understood in reductionist and pragmatic ways: While ideas and thoughts flow in certain stages of the collaboration, labor is often divided among collaborators, authorship is ranked and quantified, and subjective lived experiences are most ignored or codified in rigid fashion. In this article, we attempt to further explore how collaboration can also be an act of leaning on each other in order to make sense of thinking and narrating hope and resistance in times of neo-nationalism and authoritarianism. We each live in different parts of the planet, yet we share a common hope. Here, we come together to think, feel, commune, and write with each other in hope to find ways beyond individual positions and in search of collaborations that allow us to imagine possibilities of resistance and paths toward a kinder and more just future. </jats:p