Scott Richmond @ UBC MET

An interesting phenomenon I’ve been hearing about in my teaching circle lately is the idea of “decision fatigue”. Making hundreds of executive decisions each day takes its toll. While draining, this is part of what makes the work so rewarding and responsive. The reflective nature keeps teachers agile, able to respond to the nuanced push-pull of the teacher-student relationship. Taylor (1996) points out that with the advent of open learning, teachers and students have lost opportunities to make or to influence decisions. The structure in which teaching and learning take place is important, as it exerts an undue influence on the dynamic between parties on either end of the medium. A great example of this kind of structure-obstruction is when Delores Umbridge responds quite harshly to Harry, Hermoine, and Dean on their learning methodologies for the class ( Rowling, 2003). Her reasoning is that much smarter wizards have devised the program. She has locked herself into a syllabus that doesn’t allow any room for wavering from “the plan”. 

Walcott (1993) found that teachers who were considered to be excellent in the classroom, when moved to distance-learning instruction, focused more on what to teach rather than how. Lack of consideration for methodology and teaching as an extension of a syllabus reinforces learning that doesn’t allow for interaction and intra-action between people, artifacts, or matter. No room for reciprocity. This again cuts across the grain of what I believe constitutes good teaching and the conditions for great learning. 

The pandemic that has strained much of the world has led to a shift toward online learning for safety reasons, and there are few who would debate the merits of this. But Taylor describes “high tech” open learning environments as “impoverished virtual worlds” stripped of the social and cultural support provided through body-to-body interactions and of opportunities for learning. Lave and Wegner (1991) describe these opportunities as “legitimate peripheral participation”, which is to say that individuals share a space and implicitly share and co-model how to be a student, a teacher, and an educated person. 

My pursuit of a Master’s degree through UBC has been fascinating on a number of fronts. It’s a story of intense learning and opportunities, and also one of loss. Full-time work and family life have been taxing, to say the least. In addition to losing time with my closest friends, studying virtually has left me wanting. I don’t get to connect on a deep level with colleagues. I long to sit around a table and really gnaw on the meat, fat, and gristle of a paper. I know that’s how I learn best, and in fact, it’s how I teach best as well. I’ve lost out on those experiences but like so many attitudes during the pandemic, it’s an optimal scenario given context, circumstances, and limitations.

References

Lave, J. and Wegner, E.1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Vancouver: Raincoast Books.

Taylor, Peter G. (1996). Pedagogical challenges of open learning: Looking to borderline issues. In E. McWilliam & P.G. Taylor (eds) Pedagogy, Technology and the Body. New York: Peter Lang.

As a young undergraduate studying history, I was keenly interested in people and the ways we have interacted with others; be it those within the same group or with ‘outsiders’. Just how those interactions led to where we are today is fascinating. What is becoming abundantly clear is just how much more there is to the story of people. Not only do we interact with each other, but we intra-act with other, both organic and non-organic. Intra-action, as Barad (2011) states, is “when two things are what they are in relation to each other and come into being”. Of course, two entities can interact and intra-act simultaneously, but this way of thinking about humans and everything else around us can shift our thinking into the view of new materialism. 

New materialism is a way to look at the world and the things in it that goes beyond the anthropomorphic binary of human and else. This dualism ignores the fact that non-organic material has incredible potential for impact on the sentient world. Objects themselves are influential and exert agency on other objects and on humans as ‘agential matter’ (Bolt, 2012, p. 3).

The Microbit, a small computer chip with a variety of inputs and outputs is mean to teach students about computing and programming. This little device goes much further than just helping the brain understand computer science fundamentals; it provokes the learner to engage with matter in a way that seems interactive. This thing is responding to very specific instructions given by the learner, which in turn, elicits more response by the learner in the form of debugging or increasingly complex code. The form and function of a Microbit is, admittedly, produced by a human, but the fact that this is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon doesn’t render it any less important for exerting agency and potential. The device and user are then engaged in an entangled dance that results in the altered trajectories of human experience, learning, and collaboration. They act, together with other things and forces, to exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010)

The Microbit manages to take this primary engagement to a secondary level. The design, like any other crafted tool, is done by humans on the other end of the production process. In this way, the designers have a significant influence on the mediation of interactivity and intra-activity. The way they build the hardware and program the software affects how kids learn to write programs. This then triggers what the device becomes, and in turn, triggers new learning and development of the user, and a reciprocal relationship ensues. Toohy Kelleen (2018) points out that a new materialist perspective affirms that humans and non-humans (things, places, time, and so on) interact with one another and are continually in states of becoming. When both user and object inform the development and becoming of each other, we organics are able to see the material world as more than having just “engagement potential”; we view it as a partnership that we can affect, and can be affected by, in order to develop and evolve. 

References

Barad, K. (2011). Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle, 19(2), 121-158. doi:10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0121

Bolt, B. (2012). Introduction. Toward a “new materialism” through the arts. In E. Barrett & B. Bolt (Eds.), Carnal knowledge: Towards a ‘new materialism’ through the arts (pp. 1–14). London: I.B. Tauris.

Cher Hill (2018) “More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner” http://journals.sfu.ca/tlpd/index.php/tlpd/article/viewFile/28/pdf

Edwards, R., & Fenwick, T. (2010). Actor-network theory in education Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9780203849088

Jennifer Charterisa, Dianne Smardona and Emily Nelson (2017) Innovative learning environments and new materialism: A conjunctural analysis of pedagogic spaces. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49, No. 8, pp. 808–821 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2017.1298035

Toohey, Kelleen (2018) “New materialism and language learning”, Ch. 2 in Learning English at School (2nd edition) Multilingual Matters: Bristol

Retrospective Assessment

1. In terms of design, the primary desire was something more than a “talking head” video in addition to being more engaging than text or audio alone. We also strongly followed a design principle of being accessible and easily digestible by non-academic audiences, or a non-educators, so a citation-laden paper was out of the question, and even our original design idea of a “tip sheet” for parents seemed inadequate for our primary goal in these regards.
   As for motivation informed by educational researchers of the past, we propose that part of the anxiety surrounding parents’ lack of mathematics confidence and/or competence (for which we found strong evidence in the literature) may be rooted, ultimately, in a deficit of literacy; one operates in society as an adult and parent with the assumption (possibly false, but necessary as a defence mechanism) that one is operating as a literate member of their culture, which includes a functional mathematical ability. This, paired with an unconscious fear that one’s child may also lack this literacy facet and requisite, would naturally cause radical insecurity. In this regard, we took this to be a bigger issue than simply the concerns over children and their math grades as the research may suggest, and this was informed by our reading of DeCastell and Luke (1983) in terms of, not only academics, but also societal values and power. 
2. In terms of assets, the sound effects and titles were taken from the catalogue of available options in iMovie, but all of the illustrations and voiceover work was one hundred percent generated by the two of us. Scott and Chris collaborated on the idea and script over the phone. Chris brought in the initial papers which supported the starting idea, Scott did a larger portion of the supporting research. Scott also did a majority of the illustrations and some of the voiceover, and Chris did a majority of the voiceover and video editing. This paper was co-written. 
3. While Chris had some experience with video editing, he had never attempted stop-motion or RSA style videos involving sped-up footage to match the length of the audio for the particular effect. Scott had to develop the skills of camera setup and framing, requiring multiple takes to accomplish his vision for each segment. Of note, we both also built this video project from the research forward, as opposed to setting out to do a video with a particular agenda and finding research to support pre-conceived arguments. This was new to both of us, as often in undergraduate and other studies, students may start with a thesis and select research to fit. In this case, we examined the literature, filtered with theoretical perspectives and pragmatism, and build the video guide on what we determined to be most helpful. 
4. The purpose of our tool was to help parents and the medium had to be equally as accessible as the message. The use of whiteboards was partly based on the format itself being a popular fad for informational videos, and on its ease of production for the two of us; no complicated animations or programming were required. 
5. While we did not place particular emphasis on identity representation… nor did we explicitly target any particular group for engagement, we attempted, with our limited time and resources (and talent) to not reference any particular ethnicities or genders with our illustrations, nor, in fact, did we ever represent more than one parent at a time with a child, thereby avoiding unintentional viewer interpretations of family structure or makeup. We definitely fall short in accessibility for non-English speakers or the hearing impaired – Chris intended to supply subtitles for the video but did not have time (also, to be fair, the video is a proof-of-concept and not a polished market-ready product). 
6. Both of us are actually somewhat surprised to have created something that we would share with our students’ families. Our final product has a sincerity, pragmatism, authenticity, and lack of agenda that neither of us expected to come out of this project. As for an “aha! moment,” we both agree that it was in the moment when we realized the conflict that existed and is created by the educational institutions and structures asking parents to be involved and the chaotic possibilities and realities of what that actually looks like at home. We realized this juxtaposition created a niche in which our tool could exist, be a viable solution, and could be produced in a simple and interesting way.

Individual Overview

The making of our RSA-style video on homework was born out of a long history of discourse between Chris and myself. Over time we have tried to reconcile the tension between educational bodies pleading for more home and parent-involvement in the learning process, only to feel like we were unintentionally contributing to the achievement gap in students, thanks in part to the varied efficacy of homework help. This project was our attempt to bring these two seemingly parallel, yet ultimately perpendicular ideas closer together in order to achieve a more equitable system regarding homework and the theory around finishing work at home.  

Our tool is motivated by equity – presuming that parent engagement in the homework-assistance process, and parental competence and confidence, is correlated with socioeconomic factors, our tool, therefore, functions primarily to serve poverty-of-opportunity students, as Pestalozzi advocated (Heafford, 1967). 

At first, we sought to create a digital tool that would assess parent mathematical competency, and use that data to steer toward resources that would optimize the homework process. After feedback and a re-envisioning of our goals, we realized that we ought to take a Pestalozzian approach; one that looks at the whole child and their capacities both in and outside of school, beyond the teacher-student relationship. If the school is part of the educational media ecology, then how is it not so that the student’s place of residence isn’t part of that ecological system as well? Suffice to say it may be inappropriate for a teacher to think they can shape much of how a student lives at home, but it may be just enough to suggest ways in which learning of school-related activities can be maximized.

When I view our project through the lens of McLuhan’s tetrad, I am initially struck by what our original and overt intention was in terms of enhancement: to bring straightforward pedagogy to parents in order to make the homework/help process at home more enjoyable, productive, and meaningful. In terms of retrieval, I have come to learn that not many parents actually read teacher newsletters home, for a variety of reasons, one of which is how impersonal they can be. In this way, our video was meant to bring relevant tips to parents while bringing back that personal touch through our voices and hand-drawn sketches. Ironically, while the project retrieves the personal touch of a teacher, it also obsolesces personally relevant details of each student’s homework needs, much like a phone call home would do. It potentially reverses the evolutionary shift of responsibilities from the teacher back to the parent. It also might reverse the idea that technology is meant to make our lives more efficient and convenient, yet the production of media in this way is while somewhat simple, it takes considerable time to get right and potentially takes longer to watch than it would to read a short letter containing the same information. 

Ultimately, we aimed to create a tool that advocated for research-based methods of helping students learn at home, yet wanted to balance the fact that it may be perceived as teachers telling parents how to parent. There was some fear around being too “preachy”, which would render our tool and it impacts null and void, but I believe we struck the right chord, one that will ideally help our students and families in the future.

Jennifer Gonzalez is a former middle school language arts teacher in the United States and currently works with pre-service teachers to prepare them to build their practice.  I came across her on Twitter when some colleagues whose opinion I deeply said that I should give her a follow. A few years later I still enjoy seeing her take on education. 

My analysis will explore her tweets on a variety of themes; She touches on many areas of education, but I’ll be focusing on her original content that centers on social justice in the classroom and classroom strategies that improve teaching and learning. She also dabbles into teacher wellness, large-scale education reform, racial injustices more broadly in the United States, 

WIll on occasion retweet from places like tolerance.org and edutopia.org, and I’d consider this low hanging fruit in the teaching twitter world, but still worthwhile to get an idea out there. I pay particular attention to her own content from her website or podcast as I find her opinions backed by experience and research. This is why I thought she would be a solid “tweeter” that connects theory to practice. 

She currently has 146,000 followers that seem to be mostly from the education and teaching world, but from my quick scan (I didn’t look through all of them), they are global in scope. From what I gather, 150k followers is a lot in the education world. The kinds of people that she tends to follow are other movers and shakers in education, particularly those with progressive voices on topics like EdTech, education reform, and social justice within an educational context. 

The first theme that I’ve pulled from her tweets is that of social justice in the classroom. In the following tweet, she shares an article from tolerance.org, an organization that is dedicated to developing a parallel curriculum that is meant to complement the common core standards in the US. 

So why does this matter? I’m glad you asked. For someone who has an impressive platform like Mrs. Gonzalez, it’s an opportunity to affect real change beyond what any other teacher is capable of. I get the sense that she feels a real sense of responsibility; that she’s keenly aware of just how many teachers are listening to her. By forwarding an article that digs into the social justice standards, this saves time and simplifies the process for busy educators. It’s also important to mention that she holds a lot of credibility with her audience, given the fact that she was a “boots on the ground” teacher for so many years. 

In another tweet, she talks about making schools a safe place for LGBTQ students. I know she lives in Kentucky which isn’t exactly a beacon of social progression. I can speak to this personally as I attended university in the southern US and witnessed this first hand. As Gerdin (2020) points out, teaching about social justice issues isn’t enough; teachers must teach and model social cohesion, the importance of diversity and difference, and why and how we address social inequities. 

Here, she cuts right to the heart of what teachers can do in order to reduce the discrimination that LGBTQ experience in schools, in an easily digestible format. Because of this, Twitter affords educators who don’t necessarily have the time (or cognitive energy) to delve into research a way to access some of the latest ideas coming out of academia. In a meta kind of way, Twitter is a tool for academic equity for educators, so that educators can learn how to exercise equity in learning in their classrooms. 

The most dominant theme in her content is classroom strategies to improve teaching and learning. Again, what I love about this format, is the ability to cut through the weight of academic research, action research, and the experiences of veteran teachers. As those in the business know, teaching can sometimes feel like you’re on an island by yourself, doing your best to put it all together and make it work. 

This next tweet links to an article on her website that outlines classroom strategies that are backed by research. I think it’s important to note that I hear the phrase “supported by research” all the time, which is understandably hard to explain in a collegial conversation. (Do I just start listing references verbally?) In this post, she outlines the activities that cognitive scientists have pinpointed as optimal for storing information in long-term memory, also known as learning. Something I deeply appreciate about her work here is the fact that her content doesn’t propose sweeping changing to an existing practice; it somehow feels like a gentle reminder of ideas that we already knew, at least for myself anyway. 

In another post, she discusses the power of note-taking as summed up by research (prefer the term note-making as per Brownlie & Schnellert (2009), but that’s a story for another day). In the article itself, she references seventeen different studies relating to note-taking, which lends itself much more credibility than tweeting in all caps “STUDENTS NEED TO LEARN TO TAKE NOTES BECAUSE IT TEACHES DISCIPLINE” or something along those lines. There is a strong through-line in her work, one that almost always comes back to the thinking and wellbeing of students.  

The last tweet I’d like to address broaches a topic that I’m certain almost every teacher has thought about at some point, and those that haven’t really need to. The validity of assessment. With this post, it appears as though she is attempting to shed some light on assessment to those teachers that may be just assigning busy work, without much thought into why. I think it’s worth mentioning the tone of her work here. She isn’t posing an all-out assault on your practice per se, but rather she is using more friendly language to get you to do some introspection on whether or not your assessments are measuring what you think they are, among other things. 

When I first considered this assignment, I wondered whether or not I should focus on educationalists like Dylan Wiliam or John Hattie, but instead elected to go with someone a little closer to the field of play, so to speak. Her writing isn’t littered with debates about the legitimacy of effect sizes, sample size, or whether the treatment relates to actual classrooms. Not to say those aren’t important – they absolutely are, but Jennifer helps everyday teachers separate signal from noise, and in a time when teachers are busier than ever, her voice is a breath of fresh air. 

References

Brownlie, F., Schnellert, L., & ProQuest (Firm). (2009). It’s all about thinking: Collaborating to support all learners, in english, social studies, and humanities. Winnipeg: Portage & Main Press.

Gerdin, G., Larsson, L., Schenker, K., Linnér, S., Mordal Moen, K., Westlie, K., . . . Philpot, R. (2020). Social justice pedagogies in school health and physical education-building relationships, teaching for social cohesion and addressing social inequities.International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(18), 6904. doi:10.3390/ijerph17186904

J.H. Pestalozzi was an eighteenth-century educational philosopher from Zurich who was greatly influenced by his poor upbringing. He lost his father at the age of six and he credited his “unstable” environment and lack of a “firm guiding hand” is what ultimately led to his ideas on education and politics.

This external environment caused him to spend an inordinate amount of time with the poor. Combine this with the fact that at that time, Zurich was a relatively liberally-minded city, and social issues were very much on the minds in the area. The result was a socially-oriented young man who wanted more for the common citizen. He believed strongly in humanitarian values; that humanitarianism was critical to helping those who are less fortunate. 

In 1797 he wrote the book “Investigations into the course and nature of human development”.  This work did not get much attention at the time but went a long way in clarifying his developing ideas on the importance of education, specifically how it ought to work with the natural desires and instincts of humans, rather than compete against it. (Heafford, 1967)

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and decades of politically unstable Zurich was just the setting needed to crystalize his percolating beliefs in education for all beyond the aristocratic class. 

His educational ideas were a definitive reaction to a system that valued intense discipline by schoolmasters, tradition, routine, rigidity, and memorization without context. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of Rousseau, who posited that children have various capacities that are directly tied to natural development. Rousseau and Pestalozzi’s work laid the foundation for later educational theorists Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and Jean Piaget’s stages of development. 

He developed a “method” of instruction that leaned on developmentally-appropriate instruction that was within the grasp of what the child was capable of learning. Sequencing of learning was also important, and it could be inferred that this was a manifestation of how he viewed the psychology of learning. We know that quality learning happens when new ideas are connecting to existing ideas, and Pestalozzi was absolutely correct in this way. His methods were considered more natural than previous methods that were contrived by what adults thought children ought to be capable of. This reminds me of a recent movement toward individualized education, which is again a reaction to an overly-standardized system. 

He saw talents and intelligence as mostly innate but believed that deficits in these areas could be mitigated in the early years with good education, much in the same way as Carol Dweck writes about mindset and how environmental factors can affect outcomes. 

Pestalozzi’s idea of an improved education system valued the character, personality, and learning of the whole child. He advocated for the adaptation of materials and methods that more closely matched the children themselves and their capacities and needs, as opposed to the then-tradition of top-down forming of children into small adults.

References

de Castell, S., & Luke, A. (1983). Defining literacy in North American schools: Socio-historical conditions and consequences. In de Castell, Luke and Egan (Eds) Literacy, Society, and Schooling. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Heafford, M., & Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z. (1967). Pestalozzi: His thought and its relevance today. New York;London, [England];: Routledge.

Silvia, Schmid (1997), “Pestalozzi’s Spheres of Life”, Journal of the Midwest History of Education Society

Educational Media Ecologies

Based on Strate and Lum’s biography of Lewis Mumford’s scholarly contributions, as well as Lum’s paper on the intellectual roots of media ecology, and de Castell’s (et. al) Building as interface, I think of media ecologies as the way an environment evolves through the interplay between media, technology, and agents. It is especially helpful to think of media ecologies in metaphorical terms as originally coined by Marshall McLuhan’s. No single species acts outside of its context, as selective pressures cause evolutionary changes over time in order to survive. Lum states that media struggle to survive in a complex ecology of social forces (2000, p. 1).

From an educational perspective lens, media ecology would consider how learning happens as a result of media and technology choices. Historically, many of the educational media choices have been made by those who are not necessarily the ones who would make use of it, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. I started tossing around different elements that one might include in an educational media ecology, and as I wrote down my ideas I kept on coming up with more elements that ought to be included. What’s more, is that I’m not entirely sure where it all “starts”, if anywhere. When I think of media and technologies, I keep coming back to how any specific medium or tool ends up in an educational setting. Someone somewhere made a decision, and it’s those decisions that fascinate me.

Inherent in those decisions, are values and ideals that impact the entire educational media ecology. Much like the biological systems metaphor, there are trickle-down effects from any measurable change in the web. Those embedded values work to shape the learning landscape in one way or another, for better or for worse.

The affordances and biases of the tools, media,  and values we work with affect how we communicate with one another, how we view ourselves and empathize with others, the hierarchical structures and power imbalances of learning settings, the rate and efficacy of the learning itself, and ultimately our behaviour and agency. Educational media ecologies are the critical landscape that set trajectories of affordances that impact almost every facet of what education has been, is, and ought to be.

References
Castell, S. d., Droumeva, M., & Jenson, J. (2014). Building as interface: Sustainable educational ecologies. MedienPädagogik, 24(24), 75-93. doi:10.21240/mpaed/24/2014.09.08.X

Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology. New Jersey Journal of Communication: The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology, 8(1), 1-7. doi:10.1080/15456870009367375

Strate, L., & Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics. New Jersey Journal of Communication: The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology, 8(1), 56-78. doi:10.1080/15456870009367379