Mark Baildon

Examining Ways Readers Engage with Websites during Think-Aloud Sessions.

Findings from this study of how two pairs of eighth-grade students each transacted with a website during think-aloud sessions at the conclusion of a curricular unit on Mexico and migration highlight the ways the students engaged in three interrelated tasks: 1 Identifying and making sense of “new” information 2 Evaluating claims and evidence 3 Considering ways to use the site in the writing of their own narrative While these findings represent ways that these students demonstrated proficiency with literacy practices in beginning to read websites in more disciplined and disciplinary ways, they also point to two key challenges: contextualizing and corroborating sources of information and setting purposes for reading websites in a dynamic learning context.

How Do We Know?: Students Examine Issues of Credibility With a Complicated Multimodal Web‐Based Text

Abstract As reading continues to become governed by a spatial “logic of the image” rather than strictly a temporal or linear logic of written language (Kress, 2003), and readers increasingly engage with a range of Internet-based texts, a host of challenges ensue for educators and students alike. One of the most vexing of these challenges deals with discernments of credibility. Determining the credibility of multimodal texts, especially on/within the Internet with its “vast network of relations of credibility” (Burbules & Callister, 2000), is particularly challenging because these texts mix images, music, graphic arts, video, and print to make sophisticated claims supported by various forms or types of evidence. This article examines how a group of ninth-grade students grappled with issues of credibility after viewing the controversial Internet video, Loose Change, a well-documented and comprehensive multimedia account that argues the “real story” of September 11 was covered up by the U.S. government. Findings from the study highlight the range of knowledge and literacy practices students mobilized to “read” the video and the challenges they experienced reading and evaluating the video as a multimodal text. Implications of this work point to the need to consider epistemological issues and further develop tools that can support teachers and students in critically assessing multimodal texts.

Content Literacy for the 21st Century: Excavation, Elevation, and Relational Cosmopolitanism in the Classroom.

This article makes the a case for conceptualizing content literacy, especially in social studies, as inquiry-based social practices for understanding and addressing complex, multifaceted problems. Two core practices especially needed for a Web-dominated 21st century are then described—excavation and elevation. Next, these two practices are applied to the complex, multifaceted problem of climate change to suggest ways teachers and students can use excavation and elevation with two Web texts about climate change. This leads to a model for framing, understanding, teaching, and learning content in 21st-century schools: relational cosmopolitanism in the classroom. The article concludes with attention to the ways that this model could frame a focus on climate change in middle school, secondary school, and university level classrooms.

A tale of two countries: comparing civic education in the Philippines and Singapore

This article provides a comparative analysis of citizenship education in the Philippines and Singapore. Through an analysis of historical contexts, citizenship education policy and curriculum, it examines Makabayan in the Philippines and National Education in Singapore. It identifies particular policy and curriculum trajectories as responses to national and global imperatives to demonstrate how countries are redefining the kinds of knowledge, skills and values deemed necessary for national citizenship in global contexts. This comparative case study illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions facing citizenship education in new global contexts and highlights the different ways countries try to manage these tensions through citizenship education policies and curricula. Findings point to different factors that shape and constrain the implementation of citizenship education programmes in both countries.

Deliberating values for global citizenship: A study of Singapore’s social studies and Hong Kong’s liberal studies curricula

This chapter examines the role and nature of values in civic education curricula in the Asian global cities of Singapore and Hong Kong. Using a qualitative, comparative case study approach, we situate civic education in broader contexts and analyze the ways values are represented in Singapore’s Social Studies curriculum and the Liberal Studies curriculum in Hong Kong. Through our analysis of syllabus documents and broader societal discourses, we found several common core values across the two settings that simultaneously represented nationalist and global neoliberal discourses of citizenship. Rather than emphasizing political or civic concerns, curricular and societal discourses worked together to underscore self-management and the creation of orderly national societies attractive to global capital and necessary for economic growth in a competitive global economy. However, we found distinctions in each syllabus regarding approaches in values instruction. Documents in Singapore emphasized teaching values through transmissive methods, whereas, in Hong Kong, the Liberal Studies curriculum advocated a more deliberative pedagogy. The chapter poses broader questions regarding narrow, utilitarian forms of citizenship and possibilities for reimagining more critical forms of citizenship education in a globalized world.

Technology in the middle and secondary social studies classroom, by Scott K. Scheuerell

This is the final draft, after peer-review, of a manuscript published in Pedagogies: An International Journal. The published version is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1554480X.2016.1165164

Disciplinary Intuition as Praxis: The Role of Intuition in Social Education

This chapter examines how the concept of Disciplinary Intuitions can be enacted in social education. It draws on the work of Bergson to develop a notion of Disciplinary Intuitions that can be useful as an approach to teaching. This conception of Disciplinary Intuitions emphasises the role of experience and intuition as foundational for learning in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. The idea of Disciplinary Intuitions highlights the value of immersing young people fully in social experiences and the tensions or problems that are fundamental to living in society. The chapter outlines some key reasons educational practice needs to give greater emphasis to experience and intuition rather than reified forms of disciplinary knowledge. This makes possible a view of disciplinary experience and intuition as necessary prior stages of educational practice in the disciplines and subject matters central to social education. The chapter also offers an initial overview of what Disciplinary Intuitions might look like in social study classrooms. This suggests that curriculum and instruction should provide greater opportunities for authentic experience and then guide students to examine experience as a way to help them develop disciplinary understanding.

Geographies of Online Spaces and Intercultural Citizenship.

In this article, we explore the potential of social media for production and distribution of ideas, public deliberation, and political participation, and as civil spaces and public platforms. We offer an analytical template for critically examining images, discursive structures, and multicultural civic participation promoted by websites aimed at diverse youth in Singapore. Focusing on the controversial issue of immigration, we examine how the issue was addressed in four different online spaces and consider how ideas of citizenship and civic participation in a multicultural society are constructed and defined. Key immigration issues include concerns about the number of immigrants from China, India, and other parts of Southeast Asia, and the consequent impact on housing, employment, and education. We critically evaluate the extent to which these issues are constrained by Singapore’s political and multicultural social context in which the government has long prescribed rules for discussing ‘sensitive issues,’ such as race and religion. We then consider the educational implications of these sites for teaching about culture and citizenship.