Shu-Shing Lee

Digital storytelling and the nature of knowledge

While storytelling pedagogy presents novel perspectives and affordances to educators, a fundamental question that bears attention is the match between storytelling pedagogy and the nature of knowledge. Quite simply, the problem may be posed thus: is storytelling the optimum means for teaching all forms of knowledge? While rather obvious matches occur for knowledge in the social science, humanities, languages and literacy education, would storytelling pedagogy ‘work’ for the natural sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics classrooms? If so, what may be optimum means to integrate storytelling instruction in these latter kinds of classrooms? In this study, we report on the results of an implementation of digital storytelling in a grade five science classroom. Using what we termed the ‘edu-tainment’ approach, we asked students to design a digital story that communicated a scientific concept embedded within the narrative structure—characters within the narrative would experience the effects of the concept, the quality of the story being proxy indicators of students’ understanding of the scientific concept. We propose that this pedagogical strategy presents a strong challenge to discern students’ understanding, and we also discuss the effect of knowledge forms on the success of this pedagogy.

An Ecological Perspective on Scaling: Balancing Structural and Individual Adaptivities

This chapter proposes an organic, ecological perspective on scaling that uses the ‘tight but loose’ framing to maximise the ‘spread’ and ‘growth’ of educational innovations. Unlike the medical field where translating and scaling research into practice adopts a linear staged process (Woolf, 2009), the educational sciences is more complicated with overlapping social dimensions and evolving teaching and learning contexts. In the natural sciences, the dominant model of translation and scaling is towards a ‘gold standard’. Once this is achieved, replication of this product (typically) is rolled out after clinical or laboratory trials have been satisfied across population groups. We argue that in education context matters. Hence, the natural sciences’ model of translation and scaling may not suffice. Our alternative proposed model suggests a synergy between the top–down (‘tight’) and bottom–up (‘loose’) structures to diffuse education innovations across different contexts and create the sociality that sustains change. In order to understand how this synergy and ecological model of scaling can be designed, secondary analysis was conducted by studying the developmental trajectories of three projects at teacher, school, and system levels. Through this analysis, preliminary insights on the ecological model of scaling are surfaced in terms of the need for different levels of structures as scaffolds to enable different levels of teacher-oriented, school-oriented, and system-oriented innovations to be scalable and sustainable. We argue that these three forms of innovations fostered in the Singapore education system enables it to be adaptive. The ecological model of scaling is about designing social interactions and communities with varying levels of top–down support for different innovations to spread, grow, and sustain over time.

Adaptivities in the Singapore Education System: From Great to Excellent

This chapter explores how educational research invested in the Singapore education system enables Singapore to adapt and progress. Singapore has been characterised as a ‘great’ system because students have consistently excelled in international benchmark examinations. By analysing educational research conducted across various levels of the system, the chapter attempts to understand the underpinning reasons for why and how the system has achieved such a status. These research findings provide a snapshot of the pedagogical innovations implemented across the system to inform how Singapore can shift from great to excellent. Moving forward, transformations towards twenty-first century teaching and learning goals are encouraged. The system needs to be adaptive in different ways at various levels and yet be aligned towards a shared vision. From the analyses and discussion, the move from ‘great’ to ‘excellent’ appears to focus on qualitative dimensions such as teacher quality for student-centred outcomes over and above the typical quantitative measures. The chapter hopes to bring across the stance that this shift requires a change process with key investments on human capital, namely, the teachers in the system through a long and gradual process.

Scaling from the Perspectives of Policymakers and Practitioners from Singapore

In many countries and regions, education authorities have shown interests in promoting new education initiatives or innovations. With the hefty investments, they are keen to see that their initiatives are well received by the various stakeholders, namely, national leaders, district-level leaders, school leaders, teachers, students and their parents, and can be successfully scaled and improve learning. However, are the perspectives and expectations of policymakers and practitioners with regard to education innovations and their scaling necessarily the same as those of the researchers? Some of these stakeholders may expect a linear model of scaling, i.e. innovations can be translated into ready intervention packages which can be replicated mechanically by all the practitioners and consequently uplifting learning outcomes within the nation. Others may expect extensive adaptation to be allowed for any education innovations accepted for scaling. This chapter describes an ecological model for scaling that allows for a productive tension due to the differences in stakeholder perspectives. Based on scaling practices and considerations that operate in Singapore, the lessons about how scaling can be advanced at the systems level, which may be relevant for school districts, regions or countries similar in size to Singapore, are drawn. The paper also attempts to distil underlying scaling principles that can provide some directions to help analyse or shape scaling strategies across a hierarchy of much larger scale levels.

Developing a Habitude: When Learning Isn’t Always Fun

In this chapter, we posit the thesis that learning is not just in the head or in social-cultural contexts, but very much also in the body. In this sense, the adaptivity in the body as it struggles to reconcile to the mind and the social others surrounding the individual. While bodily adaptations can be connoted to habits, we recognise that these individual dispositions are intricately woven with the social habitus. We describe and discuss how learning is a struggling process towards stability based on expectations in performance. Through this struggling process, habits of bodily sensing are developed, beliefs, and values are formed based on experience in doing and thinking, and these, in turn, are influenced by the social habitus. As this coupling relationship between individual habits and social habitus is co-evolving, disequilibrium or some form of struggling is necessary before reaching stability – both cognitively and bodily. Hence learning is not always fun. We use sports activities within schools contexts as cases because they are rich in cognitive and bodily actions at both the individuals and social levels.

Adaptivities in Teacher Learning Within the Context of Communities of Practice: A School District’s Learning Journey

Communities of practice (CoPs) can be platforms for teacher learning. CoPs enable teachers to collaborate with others, share experiences, and form new understandings. Wenger (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) identifies four dualities for designing learning in CoPs: (1) participation–reification, (2) designed–emergent, (3) local–global, and (4) identification–negotiability. This paper postulates a teacher learning framework which adopts the participation-reification duality and unpacks the learning processes from a social constructivist stance. We conjecture learning as the interplay between individuals and social-others and describe the learning processes in six duality pairs: (1) first person–third person experiences, (2) interpretation–dialogue, (3) personal–established theories, (4) identity–fellowship, (5) confidence–mutual trust, and (6) individual–social regulation. These duality pairs focus on the experience, cognition, and embodiment aspects of learning. Using this framework, we describe a school district’s learning journey to level up teacher professionalism. Interviews were conducted and data that supports the learning dualities are discussed. Findings show that the learning dualities enable adaptivities through teacher learning when supported by principal and district structures. Designs for teacher learning can be created with top–down and bottom–up structures by infusing informal learning designs with existing formalisations.

Learning Adaptivity Across Contexts

Adaptivity across contexts is an important twenty-first century disposition. Schools nurture adaptive domain experts (students) through teacher apprenticeship in Zones of Proximal Development (ZPD). This paper suggests that such interdisciplinary learning may be achieved by deliberate attempts to bridge between formal and informal contexts. The Zone of Adaptivity Development (ZAD) is proposed to illustrate how adaptivity across contexts might be nurtured with the help of a ‘broker-of-learning’. Metacognitive interactions with brokers-of-learning enable learners to analyse learning incidents in the ZPDs. This facilitates the transfer and adaptation of learning strategies across contexts. A case study is described to show how a broker-of-learning used metacognitive brokering and dialoguing to understand a Grade Four pupil’s learning experiences and helped transfer strategies used in bowling to improve grades in Mathematics. Our observations suggest that adaptivity within contexts and metacognitive brokering are useful to appropriate a disposition of adaptivity across contexts. The ZAD is discussed to highlight its preliminary implications for teaching and learning. Although this is an exploratory study, initial observations and implications are significant because they inform how academically weaker students may perform better by being assisted in the recontextualising and transferring of strategies for learning from one context to another.