1,720,957 research outputs found
Understanding Teacher Educators' Pedagogical and Technological Cultural Habitus (PATCH): An Ethnographic Study in the Maldives
No full textA substantial body of literature discusses the complexity of integrating technology in teachers’ pedagogical practices (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). The literature over the last two decades, specifically suggests that teachers and teacher educators have shown limited pedagogical changes regardless of their frequent use of technologies in their teaching. However, the literature overlooks the impact teachers’ culture may have when investigating their use of technologies in their practices. Bourdieu (1977) argues that people’s practices are embodied within their cultures; hence they form habitus through their past and present experiences, both consciously and unconsciously. I argue that teachers’ pedagogical and technological practices cannot be fully understood without considering the social and cultural norms of their specific cultures. My thesis aims to explain the impact of Maldivian teacher educators’ culture and background on their pedagogical and technological practices. The main research question therefore is: How do teacher educators’ pedagogical and technological practices form in the Maldives? Sub-questions arising from this are:
1) What are the social and cultural learning norms that influenced teacher educators’ use of technologies in their pedagogy?
2) How does the institutional context influence teacher educators’ use of technologies in their pedagogical practice?
3) How do teacher educators form their pedagogical and technological practice?
My research used an ethnographic methodology, linked with Bourdieu’s (1977) habitus as a lens for exploring teacher educators’ practices in the Maldives. Data were gathered from eleven teacher educators who work in a Maldivian university context: using interviews, observations, focus groups and the hanging out approach. The findings were generated through grounded theory for capturing an in-depth understanding of how these teacher educators’ pedagogical and technological practices were formed. Key findings demonstrated that teacher educators’ pedagogical and technological practices were influenced by their own culture, early learning experiences in the Maldives, and their workplace (institutional context). The study revealed that these teacher educators selected and used specific digital technologies available in their workplace to deliver content. As a result, they formed their pedagogical (content-oriented) and technological (PowerPoint-assisted) cultural habitus that most often mirrored their existing pedagogical thinking.
This study has contributed to the research field by recognising the impact of these teacher educators’ culture and background on their pedagogical and technological practices. It fills a critical gap (i.e. a connection between technology use, pedagogy, and culture) which has been neglected in the technology integration research and models. My research therefore, contributes a PATCH framework for understanding teacher educators’ pedagogical and technological habitus and an additional layer into the TPACK framework to represent teacher’s PATCH. Through applying Bourdieu’s habitus lens, I have devised a conceptual framework for investigating pedagogical contexts, an outline of ethnographic process and an analysis model for understanding qualitative data using various technological tools
Maldivian teacher educators' cultural embodiment and the shaping of ICT habitus in their pedagogical practices
No full textBourdieu's concept of habitus has been widely discussed as a means of understanding cultural habits and practices in various contexts. This article identifies some of the characteristics of Maldivian teacher educators (TE) in terms of their habitus when they incorporate information and communication technology (ICT) in their teacher education programmes. In the Maldives, education is, broadly, teacher-centric and exam-focused. The TEs have this deeply ingrained in their teacher education practices. The findings, generated through an ethnographic approach using narrative interviews, observations and focus group discussions, suggest that TEs generally adopt ICT to make their own roles more efficient without necessarily changing their pedagogy, thus embracing teacher-centrism. This article highlights issues linking cultural capital and the formation of specific ICT habitus within this context, thus contributing to understanding of habitus as it applies to teacher education in the Maldives
Employer and academic staff perceptions of science and engineering graduate competencies
Full text linkThis paper reports on the findings from a study investigating science and engineering employ- ers and university academic teaching staff perceptions of the competencies science and engineering recent graduates require in the workplace. Data were collected through surveys and focus group interviews of science and engineering employers and academic teaching staff. Participants rated 26 graduate competencies on how important they are for graduates entering the science and engineering workplace across three aspects: important today, important in 10 years’ time, and, the perceived competency performance level of recent graduates that have entered the workplace. The findings revealed that employers thought teamwork, written communication, problem solving, oral communication, and interpersonal relationships were particularly important for today while academic teaching staff, however, viewed problem solving, written communication, critical thinking, conceptual thinking, and oral communication to be important today. The findings offer insights into the extent current preparation of science and engineering students are meeting employer expectations and highlight shifts in perceived future competencies to enhance support for student learning and employability outcomes. Implications are offered for strengthening curriculum, pedagogy and assessment approaches for workplace preparation. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the present study and how future research might resolve those limitations
To share or not to share:Teachers’ use of student data for making pedagogical decisions
Full text linkTeachers are expected to use evidence about students’ progress to inform their teaching and account for this progress to others. These requirements emphasise the need for educators’ competence in the collection, collation, analysis, interpretation and use of a range of data. In this paper we report on the results of a one-year University of Waikato Strategic Investment Fund (SIF) research project aimed at understanding how New Zealand teachers collect student data, what data they collect, how they share the outcomes of data analysis, and how they use the data to inform their teaching.
To address these questions we collected data through an online survey, which had 311 teacher and principal respondents, and through focus group interviews with 45 participants. The survey questions explored educators’ perceptions about needed data literacy skills for pedagogical action and ways of scaffolding and developing them. The interviews focused on school’s context, content, practice and relationships when analysing student data. Quantitative and qualitative analyses explored how individual teachers and the collective generate, interpret, share and plan pedagogical actions using students’ recorded data.
The results indicate that teachers collect and collate a range of different types of data and use them for various purposes such as to identify student learning needs, help students’ transitions and work with their set targets for student learning. However, the participants raised concerns regarding their data literacy skills and the accuracy of their own interpretation and understandings of how to use the collected data to make informed decision for their teaching. The findings also suggest that teachers consider there are a number of challenges in sharing and discussing data with their colleagues within their own school and across Kāhui Ako schools. The participants raised issues around moderation, lack of validity and reliability of data, feeling uncomfortable for being judged when sharing data and/or the potential for data use for appraisal.
These findings have implications for supporting teachers’ collaborative data analysis and use, data literacy professional development of teachers/leaders, and informing the data-driven pedagogical decisions across schools
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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