Creation Of Learning Spaces Research Articles

Exploring Filipino Students’ Critical Thinking Skills: Basis for Enhancement of Science Laboratory Class Delivery

In today’s knowledge-based and rapidly changing society, developing students’ critical thinking skills in instruction is a vital concern in almost all science curricula. To acquire meaningful learning, learners need to develop skills in choosing suitable information, gauging the integrity of information, and crafting sound decisions. With this, creating learning spaces that stimulate critical thinking has become a challenge among educators. This study aims to explore the critical thinking profile of Filipino students in science laboratory classes as a means of generating insight for possible curricular enhancement. Utilizing a quantitative descriptive research design, a survey was administered to 300 junior high school students under K to 12 curricula. Results revealed that openness to different ideas is the most practiced aspect of critical thinking among Filipino students, while the planning and organization of information disclosed as the least. Furthermore, the importance of gathering information to support position is the most agreed factor, while the strategies in thinking of a problem in an experiment are the least. Hence, findings suggest that the necessary facets of critical thinking strategies should be explicitly articulated in the science curriculum framework, especially encapsulating it in the content and performance standards.

Review of the scientific literature on the impact of extending learning time with vulnerable groups

The scientific literature provides evidence of the importance of increasing the academic level of adolescents from vulnerable groups to achieve better well-being and quality of life (INCLUD-ED, 2006–2011). There are so far no systematic reviews of the scientific literature on how the Successful Educational Action (SEA) “Extending learning time” is achieving this. This article fills this gap to have a better understanding of how extending learning time as an out-of-school intervention is achieving social impact. To this end, we have conducted a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), in which seven studies have been selected that provide results on the implementation of this SEA with adolescents at risk of social exclusion. The results show that offering Successful Educational Actions during extending learning time contributes to the improvement of educational achievement by creating learning spaces that foster the development of personal and social skills that make it possible, managing to reduce the risk factors that increase vulnerability in adolescence.

Global trends in educational environment design: From cultural dimensions to innovations

This study aimed to examine global trends in educational environment design, concentrating on the shift from cultural dimensions to innovative strategies. The goal was to provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing the evolution of learning spaces. Our research methodology focused on a multi-case study approach, evaluating outstanding educational environments from various cultural and geographical backgrounds. Architectural blueprints and design documents were analyzed to gain insights into the creative processes behind these designs. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative analysis of international best practices in educational space design, emphasizing the role of culture and innovation in molding contemporary educational settings. This approach facilitated a detailed exploration of the key trends and their impact on learning experiences. The analysis revealed that integrating cultural dimensions and innovative systems in educational environment design results in flexible, inclusive, and adaptive learning spaces. The study also highlighted a growing focus on technology, collaboration, and sustainable design principles in shaping modern educational environments, mirroring the evolving needs of students and educators. These findings have substantial implications for educators, policymakers, and designers, as they underscore the importance of considering cultural dimensions and innovative methods when developing educational environments. By integrating these elements, academic institutions can create learning spaces that nurture creativity, collaboration, and personalization, ultimately enhancing student engagement and learning outcomes.

Responsibility in Institutions of Higher Education: Education for Sustainable Development

The paper presented here is part of an interdisciplinary project called "Educational Management," the purpose of which is to analyze the management and accountability policies applied in Public Institutions of Higher Education (IHE). Education for Sustainable Development has a privileged place since the approval of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations (UN), as it is listed as one of the goals pursued by these objectives. The approach to sustainable education was established at the World Conference on Education for All (EFA), held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990 and continued at the World Education Forum in 2000. The 4th Sustainable Development Goal seeks to promote learning opportunities and ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education. This goal is a commitment to educational innovation and university social responsibility as it is a protagonist in the formation of students and the creation of learning spaces. Likewise, IHEs must generate a culture and expansion of knowledge, scientific-technological innovation and be a model for society. Furthermore, they must contribute to the Agenda for Sustainable Development, the final document of which, entitled “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” promotes the end of poverty, fights against inequality and injustice, and addresses climate change so that no one is left behind by 2030.

Toward a pedagogy of connection: A critical view of being relational in listening

Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) perspectives define interpersonal work experiences such as positive work relationships and high-quality connections by the mutual growth and empowerment experienced by relationship or connection partners. Listening has been implicated as a key mechanism for building such positive interpersonal work experiences, but it is unclear how listening spurs on mutual, rather than one-sided growth, in relationship and connection partners. In this paper, we argue that management education currently focuses on the intrapersonal capability of listeners to execute key verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Less emphasis is placed on the mutual experience co-created between speaker and listener and, thus, on the potential for mutual growth and empowerment. We articulate what “being relational” in the listening experience means, and use experiential learning theory to articulate how educators might create learning spaces for “being relational” through conversations between listener and speaker. Throughout the paper we contend with issues of individual and structural power asymmetries inherent in understanding listening as a relational process.

Reflections on Pedagogical Hospitality and Remote Learning

Teaching involves teachers acting as hospitable hosts who create learning spaces that welcome their students into learning. Much of the literature on pedagogical hospitality works from the assumption that the teacher is the host and the students are the guests. However, in the period of remote learning during the Covid19 pandemic, this was turned on its head when teachers became guests as well as hosts as they “entered” their students’ homes, albeit remotely, to teach. This experience of being a guest is similar to the experience of Special Religious Education (SRE) teachers as they enter Australian Public School classrooms to teach about their Christian faith. This article explores pedagogical hospitality during remote learning with reference to the experiences of SRE teachers who experience being guests of the classroom teachers where they teach.

Sustainability Education and Environmental Worldviews: Shifting a Paradigm

Higher education institutions are tasked with education for sustainable development, of which the environment is a central pillar. Understanding the demographic factors that influence the establishment of environmental worldviews allows educators to better contextualize sustainability content and discussion. Identifying pedagogies capable of creating learning spaces within which worldviews can shift offers similar opportunities. Using a quasi-experimental design and model building, this study identifies important social psychological antecedents of environmental beliefs, assesses the effectiveness of outbound mobility pedagogy at changing those beliefs and identifies important predictors of the nature and magnitude of those changes. Sustainable outbound mobility courses were effective at increasing environmental worldview compared to a control group. At program commencement, political orientation and business majors were negatively associated with environmental worldview, while female gender was the reverse. For sustainability education courses, only gender was retained as a significant predictor of the nature and change of environmental worldview by the course’s end. These results suggest that the factors associated with environmental worldview upon commencement of a course do not necessarily predict the malleability of that worldview in higher education students.

Space matters: framing the New Zealand learning landscape

Significant funding is devoted across the world to transforming traditional classrooms into flexible learning environments. These efforts are often motivated by a desire to create learning spaces attuned to twenty-first century competencies, which involve learning how to communicate, collaborate, think creatively, and how to become critical users of technologies engaged in both the consumption and production of knowledge. In New Zealand, these flexible learning spaces are seen as part of innovative learning environments (ILEs), which are conceptualised as ecosystems involving learners, educators, communities, pedagogical practices, knowledge, and digital and material resources, including buildings and furniture. In line with ILEs, the notion of place-based spaces for networked learning foregrounds learning activity as enmeshed in an assemblage of elements—involving physical spaces, artefacts, digital technologies, people, ideas and tasks. In this paper, we adopt a networked learning perspective to frame the New Zealand learning landscape. Key findings from a national survey with 222 primary teachers, 126 secondary teachers and 163 school leaders, show that most teachers and leaders perceived their schools as being in-transition to ILEs. Findings highlight the importance of having a shared vision and leadership dedicated to supporting teachers’ experimentation with new practices in innovative spaces. The survey details the digital and material resources, the social configurations used in classrooms, the types of learning tasks students are engaging in and a range of emergent practices in innovative and traditional environments for learning across New Zealand.

RECKONING WITH OUR PRIVILEGES IN THE CYC CLASSROOM

As three white educators working in three different post-secondary contexts, teaching child and youth care (CYC) to diverse undergraduate students, we are interested in exploring the ethical, political, and pedagogical challenges and opportunities of creating learning spaces that can support concrete actions towards decolonizing praxis, social justice, and collective ethics. In order to support each other’s developing praxis, we have recently begun meeting monthly to explore various questions and tensions that exist for us in this work. These meetings have been deeply generative for us in that they have produced a sense of solidary and accountability to each other and our developing pedagogies. This paper attempts to capture some of this experience by sharing three perspectives reflective of the challenges and successes each of us have experienced in our respective institutions.

Menntun og þátttaka í nýju landi: Reynsla innflytjenda, flóttafólks og skóla

Fólki af erlendum uppruna hefur fjölgað mjög á Íslandi undanfarna áratugi. Menntakerfi gegna mikilvægu hlutverki við aðlögun barna og ungmenna að nýju samfélagi og við að stuðla að lýðræðislegri þátttöku þeirra. Markmið þessarar yfirlitsgreinar er að varpa ljósi á helstu niðurstöður nýlegra rannsókna höfundar og samstarfsfólks um málefni barna og ungmenna af erlendum uppruna. Fjallað er um reynslu innflytjenda og flóttafólks af menntun og þátttöku í íslensku samfélagi, reynslu kennara og stjórnenda af menntun barna og ungmenna af ólíkum uppruna, hvernig skólastarf hefur þróast til að mæta þörfum sífellt fjölbreyttari nemendahópa og hvaða leiðir eru færar í menntun fjölbreyttra hópa. Niðurstöður rannsóknanna benda til þess að mörg barnanna og ungmennanna hafi upplifað ýmsa erfiðleika í íslenskum skólum og frístundastarfi. Þrátt fyrir margs konar styrkleika sem þau telja sig hafa eiga þau í erfiðleikum með að læra íslensku og að tengjast íslenskum jafnöldrum. Samskipti heimila og skóla eru í sumum tilvikum ómarkviss og ófullnægjandi. Ein þessara rannsókna varpar þó ljósi á fjölmörg dæmi um öflugt og gott skólastarf, að nokkru leyti í anda fjölmenningarlegrar menntunar, þar sem áhersla er á lýðræðislega þátttöku og þar sem börnum og ungmennum af erlendum uppruna vegnar vel.

An Afrofuturistic Vehicle for Literacy Instruction

Afrofuturism is a storytelling genre that appears in multiple media types, including books, films, television, comics, music, and art. Drawing from genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and other speculative genres, Afrofuturism re-envisions the past, present, and future in order to show what the Black community does and can look like in imaginative and yet intensely real ways. Afrofuturism challenges its audiences’ ideas about race, gender, science, and technology, as well as those audiences’ assumptions about the past and expectations about the future. The fluid nature of Afrofuturism makes it difficult to define, but this fluidity allows for compositional flexibility and playfulness. Afrofuturism explore issues that also defy borders and definition, such as disability, sexuality, and gender. After surveying Afrofuturist works across media types, I found that Afrofuturism provides a rich resource for college literacy instruction, especially the teaching of composition and rhetoric. I argue that professors can incorporate Afrofuturism in their classrooms to create learning spaces in which all their students can practice thinking and writing more critically and fluidly, but also highlight how Black people have been and are creators of knowledge and stewards of literacy. Additionally, I provide pedagogical examples of how to incorporate Afrofuturism into the classroom beyond inclusion in the reading list.

Teaching on Mars: Some Lessons Learned from an Earth-Bound Study into Community Open Online Courses (COOCs) as a Future Education Model Rooted in Social Justice

This paper begins with a playful contention that visions of future Martian colonies provide us not only with spaces for imagining extraplanetary activity. These futuristic considerations also offer us opportunity to reflect on education and technology in the here, planet Earth, and now. The focus of this research was the creation of a learning and teaching platform that was offered freely to anyone with the contention that ‘anyone can teach, anyone can learn’. The platform itself was created using Moodle, as an open-source technology, and WordPress. The focus was on creating a space in which any individual, or group, might create learning spaces for free to share with others, based on social justice and challenging often exclusive, marginalising institutional practice. The project began as a critical response to institutional Massive Open Online courses (MOOCs) that promise widened access to knowledge, while rooted in conventional roles of where knowledge comes from and who teachers should be. The COOCs (Community Open Online Courses) project has now over 1500 registered course creators, and this paper discusses some of the key findings from an initial participatory action research process, involving twenty-five of the initial project users introduces some of the key findings from a research project. While decidedly earth-bound, the findings provide evidence of the benefits of widening who is involved in producing educational technology. The results suggest that widened access and greater awareness of power can help avoid continued inequality and marginalised knowledge as we look to a future that must include us all.

Creating ‘safe-ish’ learning spaces—attempts to practice an ethics of care

One way to approach the project of decolonising the university is to employ decolonising pedagogies, which allow the whole of people’s lived experience into teaching and learning spaces, affirm this experience as worthy of scholarly attention and create a dialogue between experience and theory. Encouraging the sharing of personal stories among diverse and differently positioned students however brings up questions about “safe spaces”. Using Tronto’s ethics of care as a normative framework we will reflect on a range of snapshot to exemplify ethical dilemmas encountered in a teacher education classroom within a digital storytelling project. Based on this analysis two main assumptions are challenged: that safe spaces exist and that safety is something that can be bestowed on students by the lecturer. We argue for teaching and learning that facilitates a heightened self-awareness on the part of (in particular white) educators about their own gendered, classed and raced subjectivities and how these play out in the classroom—a practice of care both towards others and towards the self. This self-awareness and self-care needs to be matched by the development of facilitation skills that may help to create learning spaces that re-affirm difference among learners while also enabling generative dialogue. We conclude with practical suggestions on how to implement such an attempt at practicing the ethics of care in the classroom.

Virtual Learning Spaces Creation Based on the Systematic Population of an Ontology

The creation of Learning Spaces on the Web, like the exhibition rooms of virtual museums, supported by an ontology that enables a conceptual navigation over the learning objects exposed, is a hard and complex task but of uttermost importance for the success of the knowledge acquisition process. In our opinion, the creation must be systematic and reusable from case to case, based on the query of the ontology instances that describe the museum assets. We will discuss how the ontology definition drives the way SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) queries extract information from the TripleStore to be prepared for visualization. However, to enable this approach, we need to populate the ontology in an automatic way, extracting the data from the annotated documents in the institution repository. We intend to show how that process can be implemented using the Museum of the Person (MP) as a case-study, describing the XML2RDF tool developed. To illustrate the complete approach proposed we will include a guided visit to the exhibition rooms of MP created according to that proposal and by our tools.

Integrating universal design for learning as a pedagogical framework to teach and support all learners in science concepts

This paper addresses one-size-fits-all curricula issue by integrating universal design for learning (UDL) as an innovative pedagogical approach for creating learning spaces for all students in the classroom - regardless of their ability and facilitates instructional adaptations that bring students together as a community of common learners. In this study, digital technologies were incorporated to support three UDL principles (multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement). The quantitative results of this research study revealed that students of Grade 3 exhibited physical engagement after receiving the UDL-infused instructions, but this gain was not significant in comparison to those who received the conventional instructions. Moreover, the gains were not significant in terms of emotional and cognitive engagement. Whereas, the qualitative themes that emerged in this study, under classroom environment and three factors of engagement - cognitive, emotional and physical, indicate that UDL provides teachers with a useful model for creating an enabling environment for all students to learn and engage.

Integrating universal design for learning as a pedagogical framework to teach and support all learners in science concepts

This paper addresses one-size-fits-all curricula issue by integrating universal design for learning (UDL) as an innovative pedagogical approach for creating learning spaces for all students in the classroom - regardless of their ability and facilitates instructional adaptations that bring students together as a community of common learners. In this study, digital technologies were incorporated to support three UDL principles (multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement). The quantitative results of this research study revealed that students of Grade 3 exhibited physical engagement after receiving the UDL-infused instructions, but this gain was not significant in comparison to those who received the conventional instructions. Moreover, the gains were not significant in terms of emotional and cognitive engagement. Whereas, the qualitative themes that emerged in this study, under classroom environment and three factors of engagement - cognitive, emotional and physical, indicate that UDL provides teachers with a useful model for creating an enabling environment for all students to learn and engage.

DISPARITY: THREAT OR OPPORTUNITY TO DISTANCE EDUCATION THROUGHPUT AT THE SOUTH AFRICAN MILITARY ACADEMY

Improved student throughput remains on the South African Higher Education (HE) priority list. To achieve greater throughput, all institutions of higher learning need to contribute. The South African Military Academy offers distance education (DE) programmes to employees of the South African Department of Defence (DoD). Its distance education (DE) programme, earmarked to become the main HE provider to the DoD, compared to its residential programmes, displays poor throughput. Poor DE throughput contradicts recent advances in educational technologies which provide a range of mitigation and support opportunities through the creation of learning spaces that mediate successful student learning anytime anywhere. This article contributes to the body of knowledge on firstly the disparate profile of Military Academy DE students, and secondly, their disparate access to learning technologies in their working and learning spaces. A survey among DE undergraduates and DE lecturers revealed disparity among respective DE students’ HE-related demographics, and disparity in their access to learning technologies (LT). Resolving disparity in access to LT can mitigate demographic disparity to promote graduate throughput.

Formative Assessment through Computer Mediation: Enriching Student Engagement

Student engagement is emerging as one of the strong challenges for university teachers. Digital natives not only stand out from their predecessors because of their technology suaveness but also due to their disenchantment with the traditional student engagement. The irony of Digital immigrants teaching Digital natives highlights the sauveness of them in usage of skill and aptitude in technology but also focuses and delineates their peculiar perspective, needs and demands. It widens the bridge of effective student engagement. The time demands to have collaborative and innovative engagements suiting to the purpose of these new-millennials. This inference is the basis of usage of web 2.0 as a learning-teaching tool. The technology-driven learning has actually changed the dynamics of learning acquisition. It has facilitated the creation of learning spaces 'for learners' and 'by learners'. It has also taken out the learning out of the confined of 'mortar and brick' classrooms to that of 'mortar and clicks'. This has helped them in acquiring learning at their own pace, space and time. Keeping all this in mind, a pilot project was launched for a course where the use of hypermedia was used. This paper encompasses insights from this pilot project involving 441 undergraduate students of an Engineering college. Blogging was chosen as the engagement tool. The paper will discuss the methodology and the results from the work. The paper intends to promote the blogging as successful and innovative tool for learning and students engagement.

Reflections on a Socratic approach to engagement

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to enhance involvement in the learning process in order that students are active co-creators in their learning, developing their capability for proactive change. Design/methodology/approach – Action inquiry (Torbert, 2004). This involves simultaneously conducting action and inquiry in a systematic way. Findings – Engagement is a “contact sport” in which complex problems can only be solved by the development of social collaboration where the authors are able to share knowledge and assumptions and co-create together. This requires that groups go through a development process. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is the bias and social influence of the tutor/trainer in the process of developing deeper dialogue. Research needs to explore how the “leader” is able to limit their own bias whilst facilitating development through the stages of dialogue development. Practical implications – Most training and teaching assumes that the teacher/trainer has expertise to pass on. This implies that they have the answer to problems being explored. Increasingly the authors need to facilitate the collective creativity of groups to solve complex problems for which the facilitator does not have the answer. This requires a different mindset and “felt-sense”. Social implications – To solve complex problems the authors need to develop collective communication capacities, and shift from a focus on personal ego to thinking together in a spirit of learning and inquiry. Originality/value – To date there has been little reported that helps facilitators in education and training practically to develop the facilitative and design skills to create learning spaces where groups think together in a non-defensive and generative way. This paper is a step in that direction.

New Landscapes and New Eyes: The Role of Virtual World Design for Supply Chain Education

With the common availability of advanced educational technology, we are able to increase the emphasis on the design of learning experiences and benefit from the given flexibility and variety of opportunities to create learning spaces. As instructional design models become more commonplace we examine their role vis-a-vis with the fidelity of the experience while learning. High- fidelity experiences are known to be valuable in learning as they provide authenticity in learning and motivation; yet, high fidelity comes at the cost of greater investment. In this paper we outline our experiments with two setups of differing levels of fidelity: using Second Life and the consumer-focused Oculus Rift Head-Mounted Display (HMD). We show qualitatively interpreted comments and user responses to demonstrate importance of the level of fidelity, uncover important elements, and relate back the fidelity to the learning experience. High-fidelity experiences can be supported by software and hardware that are now readily available but present the seductive opportunity to greatly improve participant engagement in the virtual environments presented.