Browse results
Abstract
This article investigates researchers’ methodological preconceptions when aiming at insight by involving visual methods in focus group interviews. The authors examine the photos used in photo-elicited focus group interviews in a project investigating Chinese and Norwegian early childhood education master students and teacher educators’ values and beliefs about proper artifacts for local and national belonging. They aim to adopt a “defamiliarizing mode” for their interpretations while emphasizing conflicting perspectives among the interviewees using provocative photos to prompt the discussion. To critically investigate the photos and problematize the authors’ choices of photos that reflect their preconceptions, this article is structured around the research question: how can photo-elicited interviews (pei) provoke researchers’ methodological preconceptions? The conflicting perspectives were analyzed building on Bakhtin’s concepts on outsideness, chronotope and polyphony. The authors’ analysis surfaces new insight into the limitations and strengths of photo-elicited focus group interviews contextualized in educational research.
Abstract
This article explores a series of non-linear films produced in an undergraduate digital arts course. Drawing on concept of the time-image, the researcher theorizes how filmmaking produces events of duration () for which bodies, living and nonliving, are actively engaged in processes of becoming. She makes connections with what Deborah Bird calls shimmer with practices of immediation () a brilliance that brings us into “the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world” (, p. 53). The researcher argues that filmmaking is a shimmering practice in a kaleidoscope world – capable of generating affective, embodied, and sensorial events – practices-in-the-making. Thus the article aligns with the goal of this special topic: to analyze affective and somatic modes of filmmaking and their potential to create virtual openings in the ubiquitous quality of sensation in the city ().
Abstract
Since their inception, Game Studies and its sub-discipline Historical Game Studies have stressed the pedagogical potential of (historical) games for learning. Today, popular off-the-shelf historical digital games such as Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2017), Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), and Red Dead Redemption (2010) have achieved period-faithful and authentic interactive representations of elements of history that possess pedagogical value distinct from written accounts. To substantiate this claim, the authors forward a multimodal account of the varied ways in which historical knowledge is present in both game design and the gameplay experience. Their approach is illustrated with an under-investigated (yet valuable) mode of historical exploration – ‘Imaginative History.’ Using video and/or screen captures from several sequences of recorded game footage taken from A Plague Tale: Innocence, the authors present a case example from the game’s fantastical portrayal of the Black Death plague. The game’s value for teaching and learning is examined in relation to its re-mediation and subversion of past pre-modern folklore imaginations and beliefs concerning the Black Death. The authors also account for the relevance of the way games achieve a specific mode of engagement that is experientially based and structured within gameplay.
The conversations conducted in the series will contribute to expanding the discourse around the way people encounter and experience practice, education, work and society.
Abstract
This video article series investigates the emergence of a ‘digital haven’, that hosts a new type of society. These people are converging in digitally constructed realities for multiple reasons: some seek refuge from the harsh realities of the contemporary social order, others investigate new ways to socialise, or seek somewhere where the limitations of the real world don’t apply. Both science-fiction media and academics predicted that once virtual reality technologies (vr) reach the general consumer, society would change (; ; ; ). In recent years the number of households with vr devices has increased (; ). This article suggests that vr technology has given birth to an ‘Immersive Virtual Online Avatar Society’. This society harbours many occasional visitors, but also some permanent virtual residents. Important questions arise; starting with: “Does an online community established in the virtual space constitute a ‘real’ society?” This will be investigated with sources from virtual worlds developed with the social multi-user vr software VRChat, drawn from academic research, from video recordings of interactions in VRChat and from philosophical inquiry into the author’s personal experiences and the experiences of other users.
Abstract
The authors explore how multiple viewpoints can challenge our habitualised way of viewing and expand the area of thinking about children’s outdoor learning. They draw on micro-fieldwork in a Sámi kindergarten in Arctic Norway. There, learning through participation and practical experiences is a traditional strategy in child rearing. This method of learning is currently being transformed in Sámi kindergartens, wherein the goal is to strengthen the Sámi language, identity and culture. The authors’ aim is to explore how learning through participation in pedagogical practices could be made visible by employing different viewpoints. They used GoPro® cameras worn on children’s bodies, combined with their own gaze, as well as a handheld video camera used by one of the authors. Such a combination of viewpoints allowed gaining an insight into the complex outdoor kindergarten practices. Drawing on Jayne White’s polyphonic dialogical approach to video, the authors placed these diverse viewpoints in a dialogue during the process of analysis. These dialogues revealed our pre-defined human-centric view and effected a change in our theoretical approach, from socio-cultural learning theories to new materialist theories, to include the premise that children learn in all interactions and entanglements that they are part of in a socio-material world.
Written in the most accessible way, the theory and its application will likely appeal not only to researchers, but also to teachers and school administrators. Norris has created a real applicability to school leadership in various international contexts.
Written in the most accessible way, the theory and its application will likely appeal not only to researchers, but also to teachers and school administrators. Norris has created a real applicability to school leadership in various international contexts.
Critical Leaders and the Foundation of Disability Studies in Education is a sub-series to the book series Studies in Inclusive Education. The series and subseries have independent editorial teams that work closely together. For the volumes published in the main book series, please visit its webpage.