1,720,959 research outputs found
Lenses from the margins: young schooling mothers' experiences in two high schools in Gauteng
Get PDFA research report submitted to the School of Education,
Faculty of Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Education
September 2014Listening to the voices of learners, also referred to as ‘student voice’, ‘pupil voice’ or ‘insider perspective’, is an aspect of inclusive education research that views learners as experts on their own lives, and provides insight into school subcultures that are relatively inaccessible to adults. This study listened to the voices of eleven young schooling mothers to find out the factors that help or hinder their successful completion of high school.
A participatory methodology was used to listen to learners’ voices. The study’s model of inclusive research involved using a participatory approach in which the young schooling mothers assumed the role of co-researchers. The multiple data collection methods employed recognise the values of community, respect for diversity and belonging also enabled inclusive engagement by building on the participants' strengths and encouraged meaningful participation. I collected data using cellphone messaging, learners’ journals, interviews, focus group discussions and video interviews. The multiple opportunities provided to the learners to speak about their school experiences highlighted the efficacy of the methods and revealed the learners’ preferences. Data was analysed using phenomenography, an approach that identified the qualitatively different ways in which the experiences of the young schooling mothers could be understood.
The study found that learner-managed methods (cell phone messaging, journaling and learners’ video interviews) provided unique and authentic perspectives into the young mothers’ private lives. The learners stated that they felt included in school by being involved in the research and by voicing their experiences of school as young schooling mothers. The young schooling mothers experienced school and schooling as rapidly changing experiences of inclusion, exclusion and marginalisation. The learners identified situations when they could be treated as both the same as, and different from other learners. Recommendations to ensure the learners successful completion of high school include a differentiated recognition of difference approach and a review of policy based on a non-judgmental construction of young motherhood
Professional learning communities for inclusive pedagogy: What teacher talk in professional communities reveals about teacher professional identity and agency
No full textA thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Witwatersrand, JohannesburgIn-service teacher learning for inclusive pedagogy seeks to address the perceived lack of capacity for teaching in inclusive classrooms in South Africa. Research suggests that teachers feel underprepared for this task, and that the prevalent delivery models for this learning, workshops, and short courses, have done little to enable sustained inclusive practices.
This study took a new direction, arguing that simply acquiring knowledge and skills for inclusive teaching misses the need to focus on teacher professional identity and agency. The professional and institutional change required for teachers to be pedagogically responsive to a range of learners, demands that professional learning address teachers’ immediate realities, be a long-term, school-based professional learning programme.
A three-year study in a full-service school in Johannesburg, South Africa, investigated teacher talk within professional learning communities (PLCs). PLCs are situated in practice and can promote and sustain teachers’ learning over an extended period. Wenger’s (1998) theory of learning as social practice and Sfard and Prusak’s (2005) theory of identity as narrative provided analytical insights into identity and agency in the PLCs. The subject focus of the PLCs was inclusive pedagogy, and the analysis was based on the Inclusive Pedagogical Approach in Action (IPAA) (Florian & Spratt, 2013). Using a Critical interpretivism perspective, teacher talk in the PLCs and individual teacher interviews were analysed.
Analysis of teacher talk in relation to the IPAA revealed two themes of talk: Inclusive Talk and Difference Talk. “Difference Talk” showed that the enactment of inclusion cannot be rigidly defined and demarcated in advance in every situation or in every instance or be abstracted from time and place. A nuanced interpretation of difference may help researchers avoid the binary distinctions about inclusive education and inclusive pedagogy and deficit interpretations about teachers’ practices.
The findings show that even though teachers talked about enacting inclusive pedagogy they did not consider themselves inclusive educators. They implied that since they had not had ‘special 5 education training’ they could not consider themselves as inclusive educators despite saying that they had taught in an inclusive manner. Participation in the PLCs enabled teachers to negotiate meaning and create a coherent community. A coherent community allowed teachers to challenge their perspectives about teaching inclusively and to share their experiences.
This study contributes a conceptual understanding of the interplay between teachers’ professional identity and the sociocultural contexts of PLCs, and how teacher talk can mediate teacher learning for inclusive pedagogy. The findings could be of interest to teacher educators in designing professional learning communities for inclusive pedagogy.The South African National Research Foundation (NRF)XN (2024
Professional learning communities for inclusive pedagogy: What teacher talk in professional communities reveals about teacher professional identity and agency
No full textA thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education, to the Faculty of Humanities, Wits School of Education,, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023.In-service teacher learning for inclusive pedagogy seeks to address the perceived lack of capacity for teaching in inclusive classrooms in South Africa. Research suggests that teachers feel underprepared for this task, and that the prevalent delivery models for this learning, workshops, and short courses, have done little to enable sustained inclusive practices. This study took a new direction, arguing that simply acquiring knowledge and skills for inclusive teaching misses the need to focus on teacher professional identity and agency. The professional and institutional change required for teachers to be pedagogically responsive to a range of learners, demands that professional learning address teachers’ immediate realities, be a long-term, school-based professional learning programme. A three-year study in a full-service school in Johannesburg, South Africa, investigated teacher talk within professional learning communities (PLCs). PLCs are situated in practice and can promote and sustain teachers’ learning over an extended period. Wenger’s (1998) theory of learning as social practice and Sfard and Prusak’s (2005) theory of identity as narrative provided analytical insights into identity and agency in the PLCs. The subject focus of the PLCs was inclusive pedagogy, and the analysis was based on the Inclusive Pedagogical Approach in Action (IPAA) (Florian & Spratt, 2013). Using a Critical interpretivism perspective, teacher talk in the PLCs and individual teacher interviews were analysed. Analysis of teacher talk in relation to the IPAA revealed two themes of talk: Inclusive Talk and Difference Talk. “Difference Talk” showed that the enactment of inclusion cannot be rigidly defined and demarcated in advance in every situation or in every instance or be abstracted from time and place. A nuanced interpretation of difference may help researchers avoid the binary distinctions about inclusive education and inclusive pedagogy and deficit interpretations about teachers’ practices. The findings show that even though teachers talked about enacting inclusive pedagogy they did not consider themselves inclusive educators. They implied that since they had not had ‘special education training’ they could not consider themselves as inclusive educators despite saying that they had taught in an inclusive manner. Participation in the PLCs enabled teachers to negotiate meaning and create a coherent community. A coherent community allowed teachers to challenge their perspectives about teaching inclusively and to share their experiences. This study contributes a conceptual understanding of the interplay between teachers’ professional identity and the sociocultural contexts of PLCs, and how teacher talk can mediate teacher learning for inclusive pedagogy. The findings could be of interest to teacher educators in designing professional learning communities for inclusive pedagogy.The South African National Research Foundation (NRF).MM202
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
Using online discussion forums to promote student engagement in an academic literacies course
Get PDFThe advent of Covid-19 forced universities worldwide to find ways of presenting content online that would otherwise have been facilitated in a face-to-face environment. A first-year literacy course at a South African university servicing a large number of B.Ed. students had traditionally relied on class discussions and small group work for clarification of concepts as well as the development of student writing. Online learning, however, made these practices very challenging, and subsequently online discussion forums were identified as a “second prize” way of achieving course outcomes that had traditionally happened in person. To our surprise, the online forums had affordances for the development of academic literacies, promoting student engagement and providing feedback that we had not anticipated. To investigate the reasons for this, focus group discussions were held with students. The feedback received from these focus group interviews confirmed our suspicion that online discussion forums must remain an integral part of our academic literacy course, even after all Covid-19 restrictions are lifted
- …
