Liz Taylor

ICT Skills Learning Strategies and Histories of Trainee Teachers

Abstract As yet, there is only a small volume of research on how trainee teachers develop their personal ICT skills. This paper reports the findings of a one-year action research study which explored in detail the processes by which a cohort of postgraduate teacher trainees learned these skills. Learning histories before the course were found to be complex and varied. Trainees reported that they consciously drew on a repertoire of learning strategies whilst developing their skills, and a set of factors including previous experience, match of learning opportunities with preferences and software attributes affected a successful learning outcome. An initial model of the learning process was completely revised to reflect the findings. Implications of this research for those working with trainees or other adults who are developing their ICT skills are suggested

Core principles for involving people with dementia in research: innovative practice

The Scottish Dementia Working Group Research Sub-group is part of the Scottish Dementia Working Group, an internationally renowned campaigning group of people with dementia. We co-created our core principles for involving people with dementia in research between September and December 2013. The principles address six areas: (i) how people with dementia are valued and involved in research, (ii) lived experience as valid knowledge, (iii) physical and emotional safety, (iv) accessibility of all aspects of research, (v) training for researchers and (vi) the impact of our experiences of time on research processes. Through our core principles, we challenge researchers across all disciplines to re-consider how we and other people with dementia are involved in research as well as how knowledge in dementia research is created.

Place-Related Identities Through Texts: From Interdisciplinary Theory to Research Agenda

ABSTRACT The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attracting growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration is created through an analysis of place-related identities in narrative theory, texts and literacy processes. The emerging research agenda focuses on the ways children perceive and represent their place-related identities through reading and writing as inspired by and manifested in texts.

My Place: Exploring children's place-related identities through reading and writing

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider childrens place-related identities through their engagement with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern England. A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Masseys notion of place as a bundle of trajectories, and Louise Rosenblatts notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, this paper will examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps and writing the children produced based on their place.

Place-related identity, texts, and transcultural meanings

The spatial turn has been marked by increasing interest in conceptions of space and place in diverse areas of research. However, the important links between place and identity have received less attention, particularly in educational research. This paper reports an 18-month research project that aimed to develop a theory of place-related identity through the textual transactions of reading and writing. The research was an in-depth qualitative study in two phases: the first phase involved the development of an interdisciplinary theory of place-related identity, which was ‘tested’ in a second empirical phase. Two contrasting primary school classes were the site for the research that included the development of a unit of work, inspired by the book My place, as a vehicle for exploring place-related identity. The data were interviews, classroom observations and outcomes from pupils’ work. The construct of transcultural meanings, established from the analytic categories of localising identity, othering identity and identity as belonging, was identified as a defining phenomenon of place-related identity. The conclusions offer reflections on the development of our initial theory as a result of the empirical work, and the implications for practice and future research.

The Case as Space: Implications of Relational Thinking for Methodology and Method

This article considers the potential of Doreen Massey’s work on the relational conceptualization of space as a multiplicity of trajectories to inform case study research in educational settings. I argue that the conceptualization can be useful at two levels: methodology and methods. At a methodological level, the case itself can be conceptualized as space. The heterogeneity and dynamism of space thought of in this way has implications for familiar case study issues such as the bounding of the case, the positioning of the researcher, issues of generalization, approach to triangulation, and ethical practices. At the level of methods, implications include the need for multiple methods that explore relationships and change over time. When the substantive topic of research is itself children and young people’s understanding of place, congruence between the conceptualization of place/space and methods of data collection used is particularly important. Overall, it is argued that Massey’s ideas have potential to inform, challenge, and enliven the practice of case study research.

Children constructing Japan: material practices and relational learning

Childrens understandings of place have been researched from the differing perspectives of ‘new social studies of childhood’, developmental psychology and geography education. However, the processes by which children construct their understandings of distant places have received relatively little attention. This paper summarises insights from the existing literature and outlines the findings from empirical research which employed a range of interpretive methods within a class of 14-year-olds studying Japan. Representations of Japan and the richly diverse material and relational contexts of their construction are summarised and illustrated by an in depth case study.

Investigating change in young people’s understandings of Japan: a study of learning about a distant place

This article demonstrates how a set of complementary qualitative methods can be used to construct a detailed picture not only of the nature of young people’s representations of a distant place but the processes of learning by which such representations develop over the medium term. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of a class of 13‐ to 14‐year‐olds in England learning about Japan as part of their geography curriculum. The findings identify three processes through which students’ representations of Japan became more detailed and nuanced over time: transfer of existing knowledge from other locational contexts to the distant place; active connection with new information; and processing of that information through categorisation and category refinement. Evidence from the study suggests the potential for learning activities designed to encourage these processes and highlights the need for additional longitudinal research in geography education.

Diversity between and within: approaches to teaching about distant place in the secondary school curriculum

This study outlines some challenges of teaching about distant place and demonstrates how different strategies can influence school students’ framings of diversity. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of 13–14 year-old students learning about Japan in a UK school. Their changing representations of Japan were tracked in detail over a 10 week period of study. The findings show that students’ representations of Japan were multi-stranded, demonstrating different levels of sophistication depending on the aspect of the country under consideration. Learning activities that enabled contact with the lives of young people from the distant place or that involved multiple images were shown to challenge stereotypes and to encourage more nuanced understandings of diversity between and within.

Discombobulations and transitions: Using blogs to make meaning of and from within liminal experiences

We live in a digitalized world, where social media have become an integral part of scholarly life. Digital tools like blogs can facilitate various research-related activities, from recruitment, to data collection, to communication of research findings. In this article, we analyze our experience of blogging to suggest that they provide a useful resource for qualitative researchers working with reflexive accounts of personal experience. Through our personal story of engaging with blogging while traveling abroad to participate in a conference, we explore how we used the blog in different ways to concretize transitional processes, to engage in public storytelling, and to form a network of relationships (self, others, and blog). We argue that the technology of blogging is particularly suited to creating sense-making narratives from liminal or discombobulating experiences, and highlight the usefulness of understanding the production of data through blogging as culturally located within networks of relationships and normative discourses.