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Abstract
Virtual Reality (vr) is widely purported as an effective strategy for learning practical skills across disciplines such as medicine and sport, but it has yet to be fully exploited in relation to education. Learning how to engage pedagogically with students calls for sophisticated and nuanced relational skills, but opportunities to practice these with ‘real’ learners are often hard to access. This is especially so for students who are learning how to enact relational pedagogies with infants in early childhood education settings (ece) through sensing encounters. To address this lacuna, the authors co-designed and trialled a prototype for a vr game scenario that simulated ‘real-life’ presence with a virtual infant to explore its potential for learning relational pedagogies based on observable features of presence. The authors videoed the vr screen as cohorts of ece students and teachers interact with the prototype simulation and/or observed their peers. The authors found that learners quickly became sensorially engaged once they had mastered the technology. Their application and attitudes towards important features of relational pedagogies were keenly evident through these engagements – on and off the screen – with opportunities for future development identified.
Abstract
This article offers a means of analysing social networking, visual dialogues of emojis, gif s (images in the Graphics Interchange Format), embedded images, videos, and url s (Uniform Resource Locators). Doing so addresses these often overlooked and undervalued forms of visual communication, suggesting a unique means of gaining insights into their use within online interactions. Utilising a Bakhtinian methodology, the author extracts excerpts from her research, situated within Facebook, to demonstrate a Bakhtinian genre analysis, a framework that the author contends is adaptable to multiple social networking spaces. Highlighting emojis, gif s, embedded images, videos, and url s as integral components of online communication, an emphasis is placed on how the text dances with the visual, presenting a nuanced framework for such an analysis. Consequently, an argument is developed for the significance of visual dialogues in contemporary online spaces, and the need for researchers to better understand these dynamic forms of communication, offered through Bakhtinian dialogism.
Abstract
Film making provides a tool for Indigenous peoples of West Papua to tell a story, consolidate community collective memory (solidarity), support human rights advocacy and assist trauma healing. Moreover, films raise critical awareness among Indigenous Papuans in relation to the outside world. Film making allows Indigenous voices to be seen and heard by others beyond West Papua. So, film is an important media tool with the potential to enable vulnerable Indigenous communities to produce knowledge, and tell stories about life and culture from their own perspectives. It also supports Indigenous West Papuan communities to document human rights abuses and to advocate for their human rights in the international arena. Film making therefore provides an important medium to expose the oppressive realities of Indigenous peoples’ lives in in West Papua, so often distorted by the propaganda of the occupying Indonesian military. This article explains the context of film making in West Papua. Next it shares some personal experiences of film making in West Papua before sharing three approaches adopted by Indigenous West Papuan filmmakers. These film making approaches empower Indigenous communities to tell their own stories and support their own decolonization goals.
Abstract
In recent years, school building policy in New Zealand has emphasised the development of flexible learning spaces (fls). Through deliberate design choices, flexible learning spaces are intended to promote student-centred and collaborative teaching practice, creating an innovative learning environment which is adaptable and future-focussed. However, this intended practice is not always realised. This article draws on data from a study examining the practice of seven English teachers working in a flexible learning space in one New Zealand secondary school. Using Lefebvre’s spatial triad of conceived, perceived and lived space, the author will argue that elements of the learning space are imbued with layers of visual symbolism, highlighting the tensions between the rhetoric and the reality of innovative practice in flexible learning spaces. While the policy intent of the flexible learning space is made visible through elements of its design, the use of the space by teachers and students indicates that their visual interpretations of these elements can serve to reinforce teaching and learning practices that flexible learning spaces are designed to disrupt. These findings highlight that teachers require increased spatial competence and critical awareness of visual learning space elements to maximise the potential of fls for innovative teaching and learning.
Abstract
How can school-weary youth regain faith in their abilities and their own future? The film discussed in this article is a critique of compulsory school’s inability to mediate knowledge and self-confidence through practical experiences. We meet two young boys who describe their schooldays as a time of little self-accomplishment and little joy in learning. Being given the opportunity to participate in the practical relation between themselves, the materials, the tools, and the customers at the car workshop Midtun Dekk, they now have experienced performance accomplishment and developed self-efficacy. They both emphasize how this workplace has changed their lives and their attitude towards themselves, and they both express a sincere gratitude to the company manager who gave them trust and responsibility. This article will highlight some of the conditions that may have contributed to their positive development. The determinative experiences of the boys combined with the power of visual communication makes it also necessary to discuss some of the considerations to be made in the process of presenting research through a research film. The author wants to ask: How much is it acceptable to edit in a research film? Can too much intervening change the result from argumentative reasoning to propaganda?
Abstract
Misinformation is accidentally wrong and disinformation is deliberately incorrect (i.e., deception). This article uses the Pedagogy Analysis Framework (paf) to investigate how information, misinformation, and disinformation influence classroom pedagogy. 95 people participated (i.e., one lesson with 7-year-olds, another with 10-year-olds, and three with a class of 13-year-olds). The authors used four video-based methods (lesson video analysis, teacher verbal protocols, pupil group verbal protocols, and teacher interviews). 35 hours of video data (recorded 2013–2020) were analysed using Grounded Theory Methods by the researchers, the class teachers, and groups of pupils (three girls and three boys). The methodology was Straussian Grounded Theory. The authors present how often participants used information, misinformation, and disinformation. They illustrate how the paf helps understand and explain information, misinformation, and disinformation in the classroom by analysing video data transcripts. In addition, the authors discuss participant perceptions of the status of information; overlapping information, misinformation, and disinformation; and information communication difficulties.
Abstract
This editorial explores education as a beautiful risk and its embodiment in the Association of Visual Pedagogies (avp) Twitter Conference. The conference aimed to co-construct visual pedagogical provocations and engage participants through Twitter. The authors formed a diverse organizing team and leveraged their strengths in technology, pedagogies, global networking, and organization to create an invitational dialogue. Twitter was recognized as a powerful tool for professional networking and accessible resource for conference participation. The call for visual pedagogical provocations generated diverse responses across educational sectors, fostering connections and expanding visual pedagogy possibilities. The conference showcased various visual forms, challenging conventional notions of pedagogy. It inspired a community of practice, with participants sharing artistic, informative, and thought-provoking contributions. This editorial concludes by sharing a video compilation of selected provocations, inviting readers to explore the transformative potential of visual pedagogy.
Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of COMPASS (Didaktische Kompetenzen in der mehrsprachigen Klasse [Didactic Competences in Multilingual Classes]), a two-year research and professional development initiative on inclusive plurilingual education that is being carried out in South Tyrol, Italy. Launched in 2021, the initiative includes a training course for teams of primary school teachers. Its aim is to promote the development of some of the competences and tools that are necessary to leverage linguistic diversity in the classroom and embrace more inclusive and socially just forms of education. In addition to its training component, COMPASS includes a longitudinal research study aimed at documenting whether the course has any impact on the participants’ beliefs, knowledge and practices. In this contribution we will discuss some of the preliminary findings of our study by drawing on data from one school team, i.e. nine teachers of various subjects working at the same school in a suburban area of South Tyrol: focusing on the concept of the schoolscape, i.e. the display and use of language-related signs in educational environments (Brown, 2012), the chapter will discuss whether and how the participants developed a more responsive attitude to the issue of the implicit and explicit language hierarchies that are present in their educational environment, as well as whether this has an influence on the way languages are displayed and used in school.
Abstract
Persistent teacher shortages pose a challenge to schools that have to meet their daily obligation to provide a sufficient number of lessons for their students. Thus, to this end, attempts are being made at schools – with varying degrees of success – to additionally recruit different groups of people. This chapter focuses on the current situation of teacher shortages in Germany, which is one of the central topics in education in Germany at the moment and has initiated a debate about professional standards of teachers among educationalists as well as other stakeholders. It provides an overview of responses to the situation and focuses in particular on hiring alternatively qualified teachers. The chapter details the qualification backgrounds of these newly hired teachers along with statistics regarding the range of alternative routes into the teaching profession in Germany. Examples of country-specific recruitment and qualification concepts are outlined that reveal a possible trade-off between professional standards and the supply of teachers. This perspective is complemented by a review of the current state of research and supplemented by an insight into the specific situation regarding foreign language teaching in Germany. The chapter concludes with a discussion focusing on the implications for educational policy, teacher education and teacher education research.
Abstract
Bee Movie is a short film that invites questions for conversations on visual ethics. The viewer is invited into a world of circular, tragic and absurd questions concerning what a filmmaker, an abstract writer, a journal editor, and a film viewer ought to do when observing the apparent reality of a bee’s circular attempts to escape a pond. As a filmmaker and abstract writer, one does not want to tell the viewer and reader how one feels about this bee, bees, insects, ponds, water, life, death and circles. And one feels obliged not to explain the context through which the film came to life as the bee was engaged in efforts that might be narrated as lifesaving but also as another complex of efforts entirely. As an open image, without our textual dissection (or, at least, with a dampening of that dissection to an abstract and with a few questions and challenges), we regard Bee Movie as inviting questions about the ethics of the use of images as pedagogy. Whatever we thought about whether and how to share this film, we find ourselves in 359 other relationships, and always back again to what we assumed might be the starting position.