Space is the place: pre-service teachers re/map cartographic landscape

This article reports on a research project, Re/Map, that looked at how pre-service teachers might question the taken-for-granted nature of digital maps as constructed sociotechnical artefacts, and then creatively speak back to the dominant historical narratives embedded within them through the production of their own media artefacts. Though analysis of pre-service teacher projects and interviews, we discuss the diverse ways pre-service teachers mobilized place-based inquiry and critical re-mapping practices to interrogate the hidden curriculum of everyday 'city-texts,' challenge dominant geographic imaginaries embedded in digital mapping tools, and consider the impacts of the project on their own future teaching. We signal the opportunities of this kind of inquiry-driven investigation to not only enable students to critique digital maps and visualization media, but also to support pre-service teachers in critically engaging with the places they find themselves teaching and living within

A Video of Myself Helps Me Learn : A Scoping Review of the Evidence of Video-Making for Situated Learning

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an “able” body to enact complex tasks in situated and/or simulation-based contexts (for example, “safe nursing practice”). Our interdisciplinary research seeks to intervene within the culture of professional learning by investigating what we know about the use of smartphone video recording for situated, practice-based learning, and for supporting interactive video-based assessment as a means of accommodation and extending access for students, including students with performance anxiety, mature students, ESL learners, students with disabilities, and students in remote communities. In this paper we employ a scoping review methodology to present our findings related to students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the use of smartphone video to demonstrate and document practical knowledge and practice-oriented competencies across fields in the arts and sciences. We also examine broader research, as well as the ethical and design implications for the development of our technology-based toolbox project – an online resource created to advance pedagogies deploying smartphones as tools for practical skills acquisition - and for accommodation - within multidisciplinary practical learning environments

"Me Too, I’m an artist": Refiguring aesthetic education

Who gets to play? This paper addresses the question by examining common forms of aesthetic experience enacted in everyday forms of classroom experience (as viewed through Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘the politics of the aesthetic’). The purpose of this paper is to build on a view of emancipated learning by linking Ranciere’s notion of ‘intellectual emancipation’ to equally resonant arguments in the works of Ellsworth, Lather, & Bakhtin (among many others). Using movie & theatrical idioms, my story pivots not only on Ranciere’s pre-supposition of the ‘intellectual equality of anyone’, but also upon the view that ‘knowing is nothing - doing is everything’. These two points, brought together, suggest a performative theater that departs not only from traditional/progressive forms of pedagogy, but also from forms of critical pedagogy that would see themselves as the emancipatory solution to the former. Taking Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (literally), I highlight a notion of ‘affordances of equality’ that updates Jacotot’s practice of experimenting in ‘the gap between accreditation and act’. This experimental way of doing challenges the opposition - or rather plays in the gap - between theater and world, imitation and reality, an expert role and a talent imitable by anyone at all

Re-mapping integrative conservation: (Dis) coordinate participation in a biosphere reserve in Mexico

'Community participation' has, over the past decades, become a key component of nature conservation initiatives worldwide. 'Participation', a term that signals the involvement of local stakeholders in conservation practices, is central to Integrative Natural Protected Areas (INPAs) in Latin America, where INPAs have become the dominant form of environmental protection policy and biodiversity research. Based on an analysis of the Sierra de Huautla Biosphere Reserve (SDHBR) in Mexico, this paper describes different and frequently conflicting understandings and practices of community integration. Drawing upon Situational Analysis (SA), we examine the forms through which local participation may be coordinated, in advance, by extra-local conservation agencies. We then trace competing forms of participation where local stakeholders devise tactics to challenge imposed policy templates and articulate their own co-emerging interests. By interrogating a neoliberal rhetoric of inclusion, and by re-mapping local participation on the ground, we make visible an approach to socio-natural conservation research that is more critical, more accountable, and more attentive to local agency

Deep assessment: an exploratory study of game-based, multimodal learning in Epidemic

n this study, we examine what and how intermediate age students learned from playing in a health-focused game-based digital learning environment, Epidemic. Epidemic is a playful interactive environment designed to deliver factual knowledge, invite critical understanding, and encourage effective self-care practices in dealing with viral contagious diseases, using a social networking interface to integrate both serious games and game-like multimodal design projects. Epidemic invites a playful approach to its deadly serious core concern – communicable disease – in order to see what happens when students are encouraged to critically approach information from multiple or contradictory perspectives. To identify what participants learned while interacting within Epidemic, we deployed two instructional and assessment models, noting the differences each instructional approach could potentially make, and what approach to assessment might help us evaluate game-based learning. We found that each approach provided importantly different perspectives on what and how students learned, and on the very meaning of student success. Recognizing that traditional assessment tools based in print-cultural literacy may prove increasingly ill-suited for assessing emergent multimodal literacies in game-based learning environments, this study seeks to contribute to a growing body of work on the development of novel assessments for learning

ALGORITHMIC LITERACIES: IDENTIFYING EDUCATIONAL MODELS AND HEURISTICS FOR ENGAGING THE CHALLENGE OF ALGORITHMIC CULTURE

Algorithms are interwoven in the fabric of digital culture. They increasingly mediate our experience of politics, culture, identity, and agency. Building on critical research in other fields, critical educational theorists are exploring the pervasive role of algorithms, AI, and ‘smart learning’ tools in reshaping what and how we learn. This work is articulating new critical literacies adequate to the challenges of ‘algorithmic culture’, where algorithms co-produce, with users, differentiated media experiences, knowledge, affinities, and communities, as well as new patterns of identity and embodied action. This article examines how educational theory is responding to the dramatic shifts in digital experience precipitated by algorithmic systems and explores how educators can support students in developing critical literacies and technical skills for navigating emerging algorithmically-mediated worlds. We offer conceptual and pedagogical heuristics to educational researchers and educators for navigating the challenges of algorithmic culture, as well as identify risks associated with the migration of big data techniques into formal educational spaces

“A video of myself helps me learn”: A scoping review of the evidence of video-making for situated learning

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an “able” body to enact complex tasks in situated and/or simulation-based contexts (for example, “safe nursing practice”). Our interdisciplinary research seeks to intervene within the culture of professional learning by investigating what we know about the use of smartphone video recording for situated, practice-based learning, and for supporting interactive video-based assessment as a means of accommodation and extending access for students, including students with performance anxiety, mature students, ESL learners, students with disabilities, and students in remote communities. In this paper we employ a scoping review methodology to present our findings related to students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the use of smartphone video to demonstrate and document practical knowledge and practice-oriented competencies across fields in the arts and sciences. We also examine broader research, as well as the ethical and design implications for the development of our technology-based toolbox project – an online resource created to advance pedagogies deploying smartphones as tools for practical skills acquisition - and for accommodation - within multidisciplinary practical learning environments