The technology supporting augmented and mixed reality educational environments is advancing with recent hardware including self-contained headsets that are able to simulate holographic additions to real spaces. These technical advances appear to offer greater capacity to actually realise the educational potential and promise of such technologies noted in the literature over the last decade. This article adds to this literature by reporting on the pilot phase of an educational design research project using the Microsoft HoloLens device in a secondary school setting in Australia. Consistent with previous research in this area, this project found ongoing technical and managerial limitations in implementing augmented and mixed reality, including a continuing concern by many participating teachers of a lack of control of the mixed reality environment. Notably, the pilot study also revealed different understandings of the potential for embodied learning between students, teachers and researchers that requires further research.
Underpinned by the nation-wide Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) project, this practice illustration presents a design framework to respond to the challenges of scaling and sustaining a large design-based research project. The framework, known as STEM Practices Framework, is informed by work within the Learning Sciences which suggests that the interplay between project innovation and the wider educational reform priorities are critical to the sustainability and scalability of projects. The ELSA project responded to this by developing processes of developmental evaluation to parallel the design based research of the project. Emerging from that process was a design proposition that the object of the project, and the entire STEM education agenda, is not simply to improve educational practice, but to shift educational purpose. Specifically, the paper argues that STEM Practices represents a qualitative shift in purpose from the content bound traditions of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education towards developing a greater capacity to use practices in diverse STEM contexts. The STEM Practices Framework described here was developed to support educators and developers to implement the project innovations built on this understanding. The framework is in two parts: (1) an adaptation of Kemmis et al.’s (2014) practice architectures approach and the practice architectures that support and constrain those practices. (2) A heuristic for working with STEM practices in large scale implementation.
In this article we investigate the generative causes of variation in the professional identity of new teachers. Building on previous work that has shown a link between professional identity and socio-political context, we argue that the context experienced in late adolescence and early adulthood is particularly significant in shaping how beginning teachers think of themselves as teachers. This finding suggests that the linear response to neoliberal education reform described in much of the critical literature may be too simple to account for the range of ways teachers interact with the system. There is, therefore, a need for greater diversity in research approaches to work with the complexity of social systems in and around schools. To support this call for methodological diversity, we borrow the life story model of identity as a theoretical framework and use a computer-assisted phenomenographic analysis technique to find new ways into the research data.Keywords: teacher professional identity; life story model of identity; neoliberal reform; computer-assisted qualitative research Arguments that effective school reform requires an understanding of the complex ways teachers interact with the drivers of change has been present in the school change literature for over a decade (see for example Bascia & Hargreaves, 2000;Sarason, 1996). These interactions are shaped by the dominant and popular discourses of teacher's work which critical scholars including Connell (2009) andMoore (2004) have shown are shaped by the broader social and political setting, including the persistent government reforms of education over the last 20 years or so across the globe. Such work illuminates the connected evolution of popular discourses, the contexts within which reform takes place, and the identity of teachers, reflecting
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