Loughborough University Library: Open Journals
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Development of Students’ Technical Abilities during 1993-2022 in Finnish Comprehensive School
Full text linkThe aim of this study was to find out if there have been any changes in technical abilities among Finnish school children during the last 30 years. Technical abilities were first measured in the affective, psychomotor, and cognitive areas in the year 1993 and these results were later compared with the results from 2012 and 2022. The number of test participants was 267 in the year 1993, 317 in 2012 and 282 in 2022. The age of the student respondents was 11–13 years. The measurements were done with exactly the same research instruments in all three years. Some positive changes were found in affective area among girls’ test groups. Unfortunately, in all research groups the development was negative in the psychomotor and cognitive area. The reason for the decline could be in the reduction of craft and technology education lessons available, especially for boys. From a broader point of view, the changes can be due to the changes in society as a whole. It seems that the curriculum changes during last 30 years have not worked as they have been planned. Especially, boys underachievement is explained by the fact that, even if students work with systematic planning models and use their creativity, aesthetic design usually overshadows technological issues. It is assumed that progressive teaching and assessment favour girls and traditional methods are more congenial to boys
The development and use of online information literacy activities to engage first year health students during the COVID-19 pandemic
Full text linkThe article discusses the development of online tutorials to support the Academic Librarians’ information literacy instruction during the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. The content and development of the activities are presented in relation to information literacy (IL) standards. At the University of Northampton, the first-year students each receive two IL sessions from an Academic Librarian that support their information skills development. The first session focuses on identifying an information need and how to search for relevant information. The second session supports students to understand the referencing process and how to use information ethically. The IL sessions are based on the principles of Active Blended Learning and focus on providing interactive and engaging workshops for students. The activities were designed to support the students on health programmes who began their studies in April 2020 and the students who were receiving their final IL session. The reflections on the IL sessions highlight lessons learnt during the online delivery
Drawing the Loss of Movement
Full text linkThis paper is a reflective review on the experience of drawing my father during his last years with Parkinson’s disease, as a framework to address the role of embodiment in drawing. More than a record of the body, drawing someone with Parkinson’s disease is primarily to report a paradox: making visible the loss of movement and expression, but also the erosion of language and the disappearance of the other person’s world. It is argued that drawing allows to intimate this loss as an affect and an event, an emotion and a process, as the drawing act defies telling and incites a memorialising function of the trace.
As a projection of a moving body representing another body, drawing a Parkinson’s patient triggers the experience of empathy as a shared representation, which enable us to perceive the other’s experience within our own corporality. Empathy is addressed as part of the perceptual experience of drawing, but also as apperception: a co-apprehension of the other’s emotion through his movements and expressions over time, blending direct observations and recalled images. As the enactment of a relationship, drawing is a coming together with the world, an “as-if-body-loop”
Book review of Lloyd, A. 2021. The qualitative landscape of information literacy research
Full text linkUnsettling information literacy: Exploring critical approaches with academic researchers for decolonising the university
Full text linkIn the past seven years, student-led decolonisation movements have taken root in UK universities. Decolonising the university is an intellectual project, asking critical questions about the content of curricula, disciplinary canons and pedagogical approaches. It is simultaneously a material one, challenging the colonial legacies that manifest in institutional spaces, cultures and financial decisions, students’ experience and staff labour conditions (Cotton, 2018, p. 24). Academic libraries have recognised their role in addressing how ‘coloniality survives colonialism’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243), in particular through the diversification of collections and resources. However, libraries have neglected to interrogate their educational potential for decolonisation, specifically in exercising information literacy (IL) teaching and approaches.
This qualitative research examines IL through a decolonial lens with an eye to both its colonial attributes and its potential for decolonising the curriculum. Interviews with five academic researchers are used to explore the potential for critical information literacy (CIL) in decolonial work and ask what IL might look like from a decolonial perspective. The findings of the interviews are structured according to Icaza and Vázquez’s framework of three core processes for decolonising the university; they reveal that CIL might usefully facilitate positionality, practice relationality and consider transitionality. In turn, these findings lead to a set of recommendations for unsettling IL and generating the potential for decolonisation. The relationship between CIL and decolonising the curriculum is as yet unexplored and academics’ engagement with and opinions on CIL have rarely been examined. This research therefore offers some novel contributions for IL practitioners and researchers in relation to both teaching/ learning and research. It also contributes some points of departure for a more a powerful and holistic decolonial pedagogy in the university. A more fitting approach than traditional IL, critical information literacy can become a key part of scaffolding a decolonising approach to learners’ navigation of information and processes of knowing
From a teacher student’s view – how STEM-actors have impact on teacher education and teaching in STEM
Full text linkIn this study, Swedish STEM-teacher students' experiences of STEM-actors are explored. 85 teacher students have visited each, of a total of 21 different STEM-actors (science centres, museums etc.) who all offer school classes STEM-activities but also in-service teacher education. The teacher students were given the task of observing, interviewing and analysing. The teacher students' report texts constitute data that has been analysed thematically.
The teacher students face a preconceived view that more individuals are needed for a career in technology and science (T&S). The teacher students describe how the STEM-actors clarify views and knowledge required for the future: that self-confidence in technology is required, new innovators are needed, that girls can choose STEM careers, curiosity and creativity are important, etc. In their analyses, the teacher students seem to share the same views. The teacher students seem to get the impression that the school education itself is not able to make that possible. The teacher students seem to take for granted that the starting point for pupils is that T&S are boring and uninteresting, and it is necessary to present the subjects fun and exciting. Teacher students describe the importance for pupils to meet the STEM-actors' environments. In the teacher students' statements, no disputing attitude towards the STEM-actors emerge. It seems that a preconceived approach is being developed among the teacher students that the school system needs external STEM-actors for both further education and teaching in T&S, an approach evoked by STEM-actors
Drawing (Out) Place
Full text linkThis paper discusses how drawing might mitigate ‘loss’ of place. By memorialising, recalling, reimagining and standing in for distant, inaccessible and/or missing places, drawing might bring together ‘lost’ and ‘encountered’ fragments in an attempt to retrieve places one had previously ‘dwelled’ in. The person engaged in the act of mark making is immersed and drawn into the process, as drawing makes and at the same time loses its own maker. An intensive drawing process often engulfs one’s thoughts and general focus; it makes one look away from everything else to be able to focus attentively on lines and marks up to a point of blindness. The practice of drawing also entails complex decision-making; a good amount of energy is invested in the heightened hand, eye and mental coordination as gradually some things might be lost or encountered in the process. The following paper presents a place-oriented practice centred around four charcoal drawings emerging from an ancient valley (wied) in the Mediterranean island of Malta. Borrowing from a phenomenological tradition it is set to describe how place might be re-visited through drawing during an exceptional period of lockdown and deprivation of outdoor time
Drawing The Extinction Crisis
Full text link‘Precarious Birds’ is an ongoing collaboration through which the authors ‘stay with the trouble’ of the extinction crisis; engaging in creative practice to process our grief in response to critically endangered and extinct bird species. The project uses birds as an index – markers that point to the ecological, cultural and ethical dimensions of the extinction crisis more broadly. The collaborative aspect of the project involves thinking through deliberately slow processes of drawing, cross-stich and writing, as well as contextualising this creative practice with shared texts and conversations: with each other, as well as ecologists, historians, artists and nature writers. This paper frames the collaboration as an ‘expanded conversation’ and uses the unfolding creative processes in response to two birds – Passenger Pigeon and Laysan Duck — to demonstrate how processes of drawing and tracing open opportunities for us to understand the ‘entangled significance’ of individual species within the extinction crisis, and argue that through documenting and sharing our expanded conversations, processes and artworks, we contribute to cultural ‘archives of loss’, which foster collective cultural memory about precarious bird species. 
Reading between the lines: An examination of first-year university students’ perceptions of and confidence with information literacy
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to explore how first-year university students at a regional university in Australia perceive and use Information Literacy (IL) as they transition from school to university. A survey method was used to gather data through pre- and post-intervention surveys with 1,333 first-year students enrolled in their first semester of study across all disciplines at the university. The study identified that between 25–35% of students did not enjoy reading, with many students preferring not to read. Students arrived at university with largely misguided confidence in their personal IL skills, especially the skills needed to meet the demands of university level coursework, with up to 47% of students unlikely to have experienced well-resourced libraries at school. The study concludes that implications for university teaching include gaining an early understanding of the IL skills students have when they arrive at university, and the explicit teaching of IL skills, given the identified impact of IL skills on student success and retention rates