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Using participatory research with student teachers in a South African English Education lecture-room: methodological implications
Get PDFAbstractThis article focusses on the methodological implications of using participatory actionresearch (PAR) in an English Education lecture-room at a South African university. Itargues that research with, by and for student teachers may engender their empowerment andtransformation. Using a system of interventions with literary texts as catalysts, the studentteachers worked towards becoming agents of change in their future classrooms. Over a twoyearperiod, the student teachers and researcher worked collaboratively on the study thatwas framed by critical pedagogy. Information was collected using interviews, focus groups,student evaluations, drawings and written work and the data was analysed qualitatively. Thestudy found that using PAR teaches student teachers important research skills that they maytake into their classrooms. Further, the use of active dialogue and collaboration in asupportive environment facilitates PAR progressing successfully. Finally, critical reflexivityin PAR enables the process of change agency
Recontextualising principles for the selection, sequencing and progression of history knowledge in four school curricula
Get PDFAbstractThe purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare four high school history curriculumdocuments with regard to how they select, sequence and make clear the progression ofhistory knowledge. Thereafter the aim is to establish if there are any recontextualisingprinciples that can be drawn from the comparison. The paper analyses secondary schoolcurriculum documents from South Africa, Canada (British Columbia), Singapore andKenya. A review of the history education literature indicates that the following concepts areproductive when analysing history curriculum documents: the purpose of school history, theknowledge structure of the discipline and the distinction between substantive andprocedural knowledge (or first and second order concepts) in history. These concepts thusinformed a content analysis of the curriculum documents. The findings show that a memoryhistory approach informs the Kenyan curriculum, while South Africa, Singapore and BritishColumbia take a disciplinary history approach. This informs the depth and breadth of thesubstantive knowledge that is selected, and highlights the first recontextualising principle,which is space. Curriculum designers make selections about the extent to which the historycontent is local, regional, national or international. The second principle is chronology,which is the key organising principle for the sequencing of content in all four curricula. Thethird principle relates to the conceptual progression of the substantive concepts, which isthe extent to which there is progression from generic concepts, to unique, contextualisedhistorical concepts to universal decontextualised historical concepts. The fourth principle isthe extent to which the curricula choose to develop procedural knowledge in the discipline.It is not clear how disciplinary procedural knowledge finds progression in these fourcurricula. Research has been done on progression in historical thinking in classrooms, butthis is not reflected in these curriculum documents, which do not map progression inprocedural knowledge clearly
Building capacity for green, just and sustainable futures – a new knowledge field requiring transformative research methodology
Get PDFAbstractEducation has contributed to a society-wide awareness of environmental issues, and we areincreasingly confronted with the need for new ways to generate energy, save water andreduce pollution. Thus new forms of work are emerging and government, employers andeducators need to know what ‘green’ skills South Africa needs and has. This creates a newdemand for ‘green skills’ research. We propose that this new knowledge field – like someother educational fields – requires a transformative approach to research methodology. Inconducting reviews of existing research, we found that a transformative approach requires areframing of key concepts commonly used in researching work and learning; multi-layered,mixed method studies; researching within and across diverse knowledge fields includingnon-traditional fields; and both newly configured national platforms and new conceptualframeworks to help us integrate coherently across these. Critical realism is presented as ahelpful underpinning for such conceptual frameworks, and implications for howuniversities prepare educational researchers are flagged
Telehealth Nursing Research: Adding to the Evidence-base for Healthcare
Get PDFThis paper reviews recent, nurse-led telehealth research with the goal of describing research findings that provide evidence for practice. Methods: Using an iterative search method, of eight electronic databases, 84 nurse-led research papers were separated into intervention research, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and descriptive research. The main emphasis was on full text analysis of the intervention research. Results: Fifteen intervention research papers reported findings related to cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, older age, young adults, early adolescents, children with special health care needs, people with a stoma, post-partum mothers and nurses. Also reviewed for useable evidence for practice were 10 systematic reviews, two meta-analyses and two papers that described reviews plus meta-analyses. Resuts: Fifty-five papers with descriptive designs are briefly described. Nurse-led intervention research is increasing knowledge about the use of telehealth technology and applications in care delivery. People with healthcare needs do better with individual attention and increased follow-up. People have a tolerance for technology used with them to advance their quality of life and healing but there is a point at which too much technology is overwhelming. Clinical research is a challenge due to the number of extraneous variables that are difficult to control and that can affect a person’s response to the research intervention. Conclusion: Continuation of nurse-led telehealth intervention research will help to ensure that technology used to support and advance care delivery will be evidence-based
Remote Medical Education in Indonesia: Analysis of 10 Years of Activities
Get PDFIntroduction: With ongoing development of technology, and especially amid the current COVID-19 pandemic, there is rapidly increasing need for remote communications, including in the field of medical education. This study aimed to evaluate our telemedicine activities between Japan and Indonesia. Methods: We retrospectively analysed the data acquired for the period 2010–2019 inclusive, looking at number of programmes, content, participating sites, and videoconferencing systems. We also digitally sent questionnaires to attendees to request their evaluation of image quality and programmes. Results: There were a total 135 programmes, with 29 participating institutions in Indonesia. The number of programmes increased rapidly in 2017, following a rapid increase of participating sites in 2016. Programmes included endoscopy (50 programmes, 37%), neurology (25, 19%), and dentistry (12, 9%). Between 5 and 10 sites connected with 81 programmes (60% of all), and more than 10 sites with 33 (24%). The most commonly used videoconferencing system was Vidyo (108, 80%), followed by Zoom (15, 11%). Participating institutions were located among 19 cities on the five major islands. Image quality received a favourable evaluation from 98% (504/516) of questionnaire respondents, with 100% (400/400) holding a favourable view of the programmes. Conclusion: Remote medical education expanded in Indonesia in the 10 years under review. This expansion is expected to continue to foster more specialists and it is anticipated to improve medical care nationwide
Applied Public Health Informatics: An eHealth Discipline Focused on Populations
Get PDFThe discipline of public health informatics, part of the broader eHealth field, brings methods, knowledge, and theories from computer science and information science to support population health and well-being. This branch of informatics is most often found in governmental public health agencies that focus on population-level activities, including surveillance of disease as well as disease prevention. There are several specialised public health information systems used to prevent or mitigate disease, including syndromic surveillance, electronic laboratory reporting, and population health dashboards. This article defines and describes public health informatics and its role in eHealth. The article further discusses the role of public health information systems and challenges they face for the future. Strengthening public health will require greater investment in interoperability as well as analytics and the workforce. Disease outbreaks like COVID-19, Ebola, and H1N1 demonstrate the need for robust public health informatics applications and methods. Yet there is much work to be done to evolve existing tools and methods to strengthen the public health infrastructure for the next pandemic
Scaling up the Big Health Data Ecosystem: Engaging all Stakeholders!
Get PDFThere is now an urgent need to scale up our collective capability to learn insights from health data, to improve patient care pathways and health services, to ensure that public health measures and strategies are underpinned by real time evidence, and to accelerate research such as the development of drugs, vaccines and AI algorithms. Europe is investing within and across countries in research infrastructures to enable this scaling up, most frequently through federated architectures. The latest development is the plan from the European Commission to create a European Health Data Space. However, any architecture to combine data or to run distributed queries is critically dependent upon the data being held or mapped to a standardised form (structurally and semantically). Standards exist to achieve this, although more stakeholder engagement is needed in defining practical clinical models and value sets, but the real adoption of interoperability is disappointing and needs further incentivisation and investment. Data quality is another concern that can only be improved if there is awareness that this is important, a willingness to invest and a recognition that many stakeholders need to become motivated to improve quality. Scaling up the uses of data also means involving new actors such as industry. Societal trust is a vital prerequisite for enabling novel uses of data. Transparency is a critical success factor for trust. Data access governance rules must be developed through open public consultation. The bodies who make access decisions must publish information about the data accesses they have permitted. For the public to be on board they have to understand much more than most people do about the nature of health data, how it can be used for the benefit of society and what safeguards protect them when the data are used
Restorying lived lives in educational research: Storyboarding as a creative space for scholarly thinking in narrative analysis
Get PDFAbstractTraditionally, a storyboard has been used in the film-making industry as part of the preparatory process of filmproduction. In this article, we focus on its use as a creative space for analysis in educational research.Specifically, we make visible our learnings, as social science researchers, about storyboarding as animaginative, tangible, and reflexive space for narrative inquirers to work with the complexity of restorying livedlives in educational research. We draw on Sibonelo’s reflections on using the storyboard in his doctoraldissertation and offer our subsequent dialogues on his reflections as the data for this article. Our learningsindicate that storyboarding opens-up researcher subjectivity in the restorying process. In engaging criticalfriends, it serves as a space for the mediation of multiple perspectives and meanings of participants’ lived livesand is an imaginative space in which to filter creatively large amounts of field texts. We thus suggest thatstoryboarding enhances verisimilitude in the restorying process.
Keywords: critical friend, narrative analysis, narrative inquiry, productive ambiguity, storyboarding,verisimilitude, visual researc
Reflecting on BEd students’ experiences of unfamiliar school contexts during school-based learning: A proposition for transformative learning
Get PDFAbstractAs critical teacher educators we advocate for the transformational potential of School-Based Learning (SBL) in order to generate theoretical support, practical and emancipatory outcomes. This paper offers an illustrative case of how implementation of an SBL programme via changing school-based practice teaching contexts can foster emancipatory and lifelong learning outcomes within a university context that is becoming ever more focused on student throughput, rather than on the quality of their learning. Changing practice teaching contexts so as to accommodate appropriate SBL experiences for student teachers can offer them an excellent opportunity to develop transformative autonomy as public intellectuals and as agents of change: yet anxiety about unfamiliar placements often prevents them from making the most of potential learning experiences. In this paper we explain how student teachers were able to narrow the gap between their teaching practice experience and societal concerns which impact on children’s teaching and learning. We generated data via “world café conversations” where final year B.Ed. student teachers described their experiences of operating within an unfamiliar schooling context. The findings suggest that changing the SBL context can enable rich learning experiences for student teachers through fostering positive relationships, building trust, creating a supportive environment, and encouraging collaboration, communication and the development of classroom teaching competencies such as accommodating learning opportunities for learners with learning barriers. Student teachers reported that they not only developed classroom skills, knowledge, confidence and a deeper appreciation of learning opportunities through changing practice teaching contexts, but that they also gained a new understanding of what teacher transformative learning involves. Keywords: School-Based Learning; critical pedagogy; social justice; transformative learning