Joanne Orlando

ICT-mediated practice and constructivist practices: is this still the best plan for teachers’ uses of ICT?

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been introduced into schools internationally along with the expectation that teachers will use constructivist practices in their use. Despite ICT now being in schools for many years, research shows teachers are not changing in the expected constructivist direction. This article reports on a qualitative, five-year longitudinal study of the ICT practices of a small number of teachers to understand changes that developed in their practices. While ICT became more integrated into their teaching, school and systemic factors, as well as teachers’ core beliefs about learning, contributed to their maintaining of teacher-centred practices. While constructivist practices were not adopted, this article illustrates the changes the teachers made to their practices were educationally valuable as they supported the development of knowledge valued by contemporary society.

Veteran teachers and technology: change fatigue and knowledge insecurity influence practice

In recent years, a significant problem that has manifested in the quest to capitalise on the pedagogical potential of technology in schools is that veteran teachers are unwilling to integrate these resources into their practices. Given that veteran teachers comprise up to 40% of teachers, their lack of use is important. This paper aims to shed light on the issue of detachment by presenting empirically based findings of a five-year, grounded theory examination of the technology practices of a small group of veteran teachers. Data included classroom observations, teacher interviews and document analysis of teacher and school planning documentation, student focus groups, interviews with teaching colleagues and key school technology personnel observation. Analysis included the application of the teachers’ data to a framework of dilemmas teachers encounter when expected to change their practice. In using this process, change fatigue and knowledge insecurity (brought about by cultural and political changes to their contexts) were prominent factors which contributed to the teachers’ lack of technology use. Identifying their challenges opened scrutiny to the myriad of factors they drew on when making decisions about how and whether to use technology in their practice. The longitudinal analysis of the data showed that as these dilemmas alleviated, the teachers became more committed to educational technology. The findings inform how we can move forward from the issue of veteran teachers’ lack of use of technology to how to support this group in the development of their practices. In particular, the need for a re-imagining of professional learning to one which focuses on reshaping cultural and political aspects of technology practices. This includes changes to the management of technology-related policy changes as well as facilitating learning communities that promote a valuing and sharing of relevant knowledge amongst teachers and students.

Intentional learning with technological proxies: Goal orientations and efficacy beliefs

Digital technologies serve as an important educational resource for tertiary students. A key feature of many current digital technologies available to students is that they can function as proxies in the learning process; that is, technology can be used to carry out some academic-related tasks on behalf of the user. For tertiary educators, the widespread availability of technological proxies raises a number of important pedagogical issues. In this article, we discuss technological proxy in the context of intentional learning. Drawing from the literature on learner motivation, we identify three key variables – learners’ achievement goal orientations, self-efficacy beliefs, and proxy efficacy beliefs – and advance a set of propositions about how relationships between these variables may shape students’ use of technology as intentional learners. A key goal of this article is to expand current thinking around the ways in which tertiary learners’ efficacy beliefs relate to working with digital technology and, ultimately, their learning and performance outcomes.

Understanding Behaviours and Roles for Social and Adaptive Robots In Education: Teacher's Perspective

In order to establish a long-term relationship between a robot and a child, robots need to learn from the environment, adapt to specific user needs and display behaviours and roles accordingly. Literature shows that certain robot behaviours could negatively impact childs learning and performance. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to not only understand teachers opinion on the existing effective social behaviours and roles but also to understand novel behaviours that can positively influence children performance in a language learning setting. In this paper, we present our results based on interviews conducted with 8 language teachers to get their opinion on how a robot can efficiently perform behaviour adaptation to influence learning and achieve long-term engagement. We also present results on future directions extracted from the interviews with teachers.

Playing and (not?) understanding the game: ECRs and university support

Purpose – The aging research community and current research accountability frameworks raise concerns about developing future researchers who have the capacity and commitment to undertake and lead quality research in the future. The aim of this paper is to focus on the support that Australian universities currently provide to build the capacity of their ECR staff and how ECRs are experiencing this support. Design/methodology/approach – Email interviews were used with early career education researchers (ECRs) to ask them how they experienced the research support structures provided by their institutions. Findings – It was found that the anxiety and frustration some ECRs feel about their research careers may stem from the appropriateness or otherwise of the kinds of immediate goals they are choosing for themselves and, perhaps more important, the extent to which they see themselves working in isolation from their colleagues. Practical implications – While different kinds of material support, such as reduced ...

Adaptive Social Robot for Sustaining Social Engagement during Long-Term Children–Robot Interaction

ABSTRACT One of the known challenges in Children–Robot Interaction (cHRI) is to sustain children’s engagement during long-term interactions with robots. Researchers have hypothesized that robots that can adapt to children’s affective states and can also learn from the environment can result in sustaining engagement during cHRI. Recently, researchers have conducted a range of studies where robots portray different social capabilities and have shown that it has positively influenced children’s engagement. However, despite an immense body of research on implementation of different adaptive social robots, a pivotal question remains unanswered: Which adaptations portrayed by a robot can result in maintaining long-term social engagement during cHRI? In other words, what are the appropriate and effective adaptations portrayed by a robot that will sustain social engagement for an extended number of interactions? In this article, we report on a study conducted with three groups of children who played a snakes and ladders game with the NAO robot to address the aforementioned question. The NAO performed 1) game-based adaptations, 2) emotion-based adaptations, and 3) memory-based adaptation. Our results showed that emotion-based adaptations were found out to be most effective, followed by memory-based adaptations. Game adaptation didn’t result in sustaining long-term social engagement.

Effect of Different Adaptations by a Robot on Children's Long-term Engagement: An Exploratory Study

One of the known challenges in Children Robot Interaction (cHRI) is to sustain childrens engagement for long-term interactions with robots. Researchers have hypothesised that robots that can adapt to childrens affective states, and can also learn from the environment, resulting in sustained engagement during cHRI. In this paper, we report on a study conducted with three groups of children who played a snakes and ladders game with the NAO robot. The NAO performed 1) Game based adaptations, 2) Emotion based adaptations and 3) Memory based adaptation. The purpose of this study was to find which particular condition resulted in maintaining engagement over a certain period of time. Our results show that adaptations performed by the robot, in general, were able to maintain long-term engagement. However, we did not find any significant effect of one adaptation over another on engagement, social presence and perceived support.

Enabling exemplary teaching: a framework of student engagement for students from low socio-economic backgrounds with implications for technology and literacy practices

Engaging students in effective technology use and literacy learning is an ongoing challenge, particularly for students who are impacted by poverty. Exemplary teaching and teachers’ pedagogical choices play a critical role in addressing this challenge. This paper illustrates the practices of teachers, identified to be exemplary in engaging students in low socio-economic status (SES) locations, with a focus on their use of technology and associated literacy practices. The data is drawn from a large-scale study of the practices of 28 exemplary teachers in low SES primary and secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia. Using the Fair Go student engagement framework, we illustrate the ways these teachers used high cognitive, high affective and high operative strategies with technology to build students’ discipline and literacy knowledge, to scaffold their learning and to create a nurturing environment for literacy learning. Technology-literacy markers are presented as a pedagogical guide that draws on exemplary practice by teachers in a range of low SES settings. The analysis presented also provides forward-thinking input to governments and policymakers for re-conceptualizing educational technology for students in these contexts.

Democracy, critique, and the presupposition of knowledge : teachers as capable, resourceful theorists

Welcome to this Special Issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education exploring ideas of democracy, critique, and the presupposition of knowledge in the context of teaching and teacher education. These ideas are used is this issue to drive the valuing of teachers’ critique as an important resource for understanding education policy discourses. Teachers are capable and resourceful theorists of education and its systems. In recent years, the need for different modes of critique has grown, as governmental and commercially driven measures have changed the work of teachers in an instrumentalist direction. The authors in this issue argue that, increasingly, teachers are expected to spend time adhering to bureaucratic measures at the expense of the freedom to make their own informed decisions regarding curriculum and pedagogy. This change has serious implications for how teachers and teacher education are conceptualised and shaped, and how school education will develop. In this Special Issue, we include authors who engage with this problem in either one of two ways: first by considering pedagogies of and for criticality and, second, through their disputations of discourses that (dis)enable criticality. Teachers’ critiques can be understood as alternative theoretical resources, drawn from the front line of education, that provide understandings of what teachers and students do, what learning is, and through which decisions are taken and institutional initiatives launched. The papers in this issue draw on theoretical ideas from Boltanski (2011), Ranciere (1999, 2010), and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005). These ideas have not been commonly used in teacher education research, instead featuring in the work of management (Boltanski, 2011; Tange, 2012) and social science (Lambert, 2012). There is some leading-edge writing drawing on these theorists that focuses on education with, as yet, only a small body of work on teacher education (including Ng, 2013; Safstrom, 2011; Schostak & Goodson, 2012; Singh, 2011). However, we believe these concepts are useful for teacher education research because they are a counter-voice to neoliberal reforms and provide alternative theoretical resources, which assist research in interrogating what shapes, motivates, and hinders educational contexts as sites of quality learning and opportunity. This edition of the Journal offers international perspectives on critique and teacher education with authors from Asia, Europe, and Australia. The diversity in this issue provides a background to the politics shaping schools and education globally. Each of the articles provides its own perspective and its own challenge, and together they present a global perspective on “alternatives” for teacher education. The issue opens with a contribution from Shostak, who reports on research conducted in UK co-operative schools regarding their use of information technologies. He shows that, while information technologies have been introduced into these schools to improve student learning, the hidden aspect of this curriculum change is that the use of these technologies can lead to surveillance of teachers’ practices by school and education Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 2014 Vol. 42, No. 4, 321–323, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2014.956377

Educational technology: a presupposition of equality?

The work of philosopher Jacques Rancière is used conceptually and methodologically to frame an exploration of the driving interests in educational technology policy and the sanctioning of particular discursive constructions of pedagogy that result. In line with Rancière’s thinking, the starting point for this analysis is that of equality – that people are legally, morally, intellectually, and in their everyday practices discursively equal. The use of Rancière’s concepts, demos, police, and politics, to analyse three educational technology policies internationally shows that teachers are positioned within these policies as discursively unequal, and as intellectually inferior, not only in terms of technology expertise, but crucially as pedagogues. This positioning has important implications for teachers and teacher education. Teachers are capable of recognising and critiquing inequality, and this article makes a case for an act of politics that aims to reconfigure allocated identities and power imbalances in the educational technology order.