Educational Encounters Research Articles

Correlation of health literacy and learning style preference in persons with heart failure

ObjectiveThe purpose of the study was to describe demographic and health literacy correlates of learning style in older adults with heart failure (HF). MethodsCross sectional data on learning styles (VARK Questionnaire, 16 items) and health literacy (S-TOFHLA, 36 items) were collected. Preferred learning style was determined and correlated to health literacy and demographic measures. Results116 participants with heart failure (M age = 75.1 (SD 12.5) years, M health literacy of 19 (SD 11.5). Most identified as male (59 %); with inadequate health literacy (67 %). Thirty percent reported a multimodal learning style preference with a kinesthetic (r = .33, p = .03) and not a visual preference (r = −.49, p < .001). Among unimodal learning styles, the most frequent was kinesthetic (26.7 %). Those with lower literacy levels were older (r = −.44, p = <.001), had less education (r = .48, p < .001) and reported a kinesthetic learning preference (r = .37, p = .001). ConclusionOlder individuals identifying as male, with low health literacy, preferred a kinesthetic approach to HF education. Future research should consider the linkage between education tailored to learning style, health literacy and outcomes. Practice implicationsAssessment of learning style should be completed prior to an educational encounter.

IMG-20. IDENTIFICATION OF PRE-OPERATIVE IMAGING FEATURES ASSOCIATED WITH COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT IN CHILDREN WITH BRAIN TUMOURS USING A LANGUAGE MODELLING SYSTEM COMBINED WITH MACHINE LEARNING ANALYSIS

Abstract BACKGROUND Cognitive impairments caused by paediatric brain tumours negatively impact future quality-of-life. Impairments of processing speed and working memory are important contributors to challenges these children encounter in education. Inconsistent image acquisition and poor imaging quality can restrict advanced radiomic analysis in historical datasets. We developed and refined a language modelling human image-analysis support system, passing data to specific machine learning techniques that can utilise datasets with many data points in a limited population. METHODS Medical records of children treated for brain tumours with surgery and radiotherapy in Manchester between 2000-2020 were reviewed with imaging accessible from 2006-2020. Pre-operative MRI scans were reviewed for 52 patients along with their most recent processing speed and/or working memory test scores. 274 radiological variables analysing tumour features and damage to brain structures were reported per patient using a standardised reporting tool. Univariate analysis was performed using Linear Regression with time-to-test analysed as a covariate. Multivariate analysis used Elastic Net Regression. RESULTS Univariate analysis revealed risk factors for slower processing speed included midline shift, tumour in the corpus callosum, right temporal periventricular white matter oedema, diffusion changes in the left frontal lobe or amygdala and FLAIR changes in the left caudate nucleus (p&amp;lt;0.005). Risk factors for impaired working memory included midline shift, cortical tumour location, left periventricular white matter oedema and diffusion or FLAIR changes in the left frontal lobe (p&amp;lt;0.005). Despite the limited population size and review of only pre-operative features, multivariate analysis produced multiple predictive models able to outperform chance when predicting processing speed and working memory outcomes. CONCLUSIONS This study provides evidence that a radiological language modelling approach can be utilised for outcome prediction. It identified imaging features predictive of cognitive impairments prior to surgery and radiotherapy. Further work is needed to assess inter-observer variability and validate these findings.

Mapping patient education encounters in elective surgery: a cohort study and cross-sectional survey

ObjectiveDevelop a process map of when patients learn about their proposed surgery and what resources patients use to educate themselves.DesignA mixed methods design, combining semistructured stakeholder interviews, quantitative validation using...

Educators’ Subjectivities in Localising Global Citizenship Education: A Chinese Case

ABSTRACT Global citizenship education (GCE) encounters epistemic barriers in curriculum localisation, which, from a semiotic perspective, are related to educators’ subjectivation process. By choosing a Chinese case based on six secondary schools on the east coast of China, this paper builds on previous efforts to investigate how principals’ (n = 6) and teachers’ (n = 10) subjectivation process could influence their comprehension of the concept of GCE. The focus of this paper is on distinguishing the subjectivities in participants’ interviews that related to their perceptions and planning of the curriculum. The findings of the study included qualitative feedback, which was later categorised into three themes: the communitarian subjectivity, the hybrid subjectivity and the assimilated subjectivity. The three forms of subjectivity exposed the vulnerability inherent in participants’ efforts to localize GCE. This study demonstrated a specific epistemic condition that challenges the prevailing discourse, suggesting that defending traditional culture does not always serve the purpose of promoting cultural diversity on a global scale.

Teachers’ Utilization of Digital Tools and Confidence in Technology

The utilization of technology has emerged as a crucial instrument for educators to augment instruction and enrich the educational encounters of learners. This study sought to determine the extent of teachers' utilization of digital tools, their level of confidence in technology, and the significant relationship between the extent of teachers' utilization of digital tools and confidence in technology, among the 101 teachers from the nine (9) schools of Manolo Fortich III District, Division of Bukidnon, chosen through universal sampling. This study utilized two instruments. One was a research-made questionnaire for the teachers’ utilization of digital tools and for the teachers’ confidence in technology was adapted, and modified questionnaire from the study of Heather (2014). Descriptive statistics were used such as mean, standard deviation, and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient. The study revealed that most of the time teachers utilized Excel/Spreadsheets than video/Capcut. Teachers' confidence level in technology found to be Always Confident. Furthermore, teachers' utilization of digital tools such as PPT/canvas, video/caput and the like, and Excel/spreadsheets has a significant relationship to teachers' confidence in technology. Thus, to enhance video/CapCut usage, teachers need training, support, and collaboration. Schools should provide professional development, technical assistance, and recognition of achievements. These efforts boost confidence in digital tools, improve pupils’ learning, and encourage creative teaching methods in the digital era.

Orchestrating Good Educational Relationships With(in) Automated Teaching

Automated teaching tends to be underpinned by learning approaches that are personalised and adaptive by nature. This individualistic vision of education shapes our conception of knowledge and how it is created. Here, knowledge becomes objectified in the form of a quantifiable commodity in a commercial market. Consequently, knowledge creation becomes conceptualised as the transmission of this object from automated teacher to student. The human teacher is positioned outside the educational process, often to the point of exclusion. This research moves beyond a vision of automated teaching that is framed by learning approaches, where teaching approaches remain starkly absent. I coded an automated teacher in the form of a Teacherbot — a chatbot that functions as a teacher — to work with a group of Interactive Media students at a UK University. Posthuman critical theory is used to conceptualise knowledge and its creation as a process of relational encounters, rather than a transmissive object. The findings chart the transformations in student understandings around what constitutes knowledge and its creation. The emergent pedagogical encounters that brought about these student transformations are identified through the nature of the teaching relationships: the performance of an obligation of radical hope; the creation of disturbances; and, trust and the pursuit of risk. This paper is significant in its call to bring teaching back to automated teaching systems.

‘The queer pedagogical encounter: a continuum of futures’, introduction to ‘In Queer Minds’ special issue

ABSTRACT This article introduces the special issue of ’In Queer Minds’ by discussing the conceptual impact of queer in formal educational institutions and the importance of developing and sustaining the queer pedagogical encounter. The introduction provides a brief philosophical and cultural study of queer as critical to the understanding of what it means to be human. It argues that universities and other educational contexts must make queer a common cause for the betterment of self, society and the world. The various articles in the special issue are also briefly introduced.

Motherhood experiences of nurses receiving postgraduate education: A phenomenological research study

ObjectiveTrying to juggle multiple roles and responsibilities as a student, nurse, and mother can be challenging due to pressures from overlapping time management. This study was conducted to explore the experiences of graduate students who work as nurses and are mothers. MethodsThe qualitative phenomenological data for this study were gathered from nurses at a training and research hospital between August and November 2022, utilizing face-to-face interviews. The study cohort comprised twelve nurses aged 28 to 48, all actively engaged in postgraduate education. Data were collected using a descriptive information form and semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was executed through inductive coding, facilitated by the Max Qualitative Data Analysis (MAXQDA) Analytics Pro2022 software. ResultsFour central themes were developed: “Experiences During the Breastfeeding Process,” “Positive Effects,” “Encountered Challenges,” and “Expectations.” ConclusionsThe findings underscored that nurses who are mothers and pursuing postgraduate education encounter difficulties throughout their academic pursuits, notably attributed to working conditions and professional cultural values.

Positioning controversy in environmental and sustainability education

This study delves into the intricate dynamics of controversial issues in environmental education, challenging conventional notions. It explores the relationship between “controversy” and the field of environmental education, elucidating its multifaceted dimensions in and ambitions of teaching practice. In dialogue with previous research and based on our empirical study, we contend that controversy’s existence transcends the mere content of education and extends to its perceived fundamental core and normative underpinnings. We argue that controversy, including controversial sustainability issues (CSIs), is not confined to educational content alone but encompasses the purposes of education. We propose that controversy in educational encounters cannot be neatly categorized as a fixed, predictable social product and is not solely dependent on student interaction. This challenges earlier research positions that linked controversy to the presence of debate or dissensus in a subject area. Our study challenges the traditional understanding of controversy, highlighting its partial spontaneity and unpredictability in teaching. This contrasts previous positions that emphasized the epistemic dimension of controversy. Instead, our findings suggest that controversy plays an active role in the process of self-formation or subjectification in relation to any content.

What would an existential approach bring to research supervision in postgraduate psychotherapy and counselling psychology education?

AbstractBackgroundQualitative/phenomenological research approaches are popular in counselling psychology and psychotherapy post‐graduate training. This article attends to the experience of research supervision in this setting, where there is a need for containment, compassion, clarity and empathy (Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 2021a, 22, 689).AimsThis article aims to bring the philosophical development of qualitative/phenomenological research back into focus. It asks what extra value would be brought to the supervision of trainees through existential awareness and phenomenological exploration. The authors offer ways in which existential awareness can be developed and utilised in research supervision.Materials and MethodsThe results of a small survey into the experiences of students are used to ground our observations in practice.ResultsA relational tension is implied, where trust and good communication are essential. An existential anxiety could be prompted, when a trainee's world shifts from being homely, to uncanny and strange. In these experiences of groundlessness, the world no longer provides a sense of certainty about one's possibilities, and one feels estranged and uncomfortably self‐aware. Fostering this awareness can mean that teaching and supervisory relationships are experienced in their intersubjective, free and creative dynamics.DiscussionAttending to Threshold Concepts can support the transformational nature of professional training, which is often an experience of uncertainty. Likewise, Socratic Questioning and irony contribute to the development of critical thinking, reflexivity and the harnessing of assumptions.ConclusionExistential awareness will enable the development of more authentic relationships across the therapeutic and educational encounters of training.

The Touch of the Present: Educational Encounters, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Senses

The Touch of the Present: Educational Encounters, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Senses

Saint Paul and the education encounter: Lessons on love, event, and change

Saint Paul and the education encounter: Lessons on love, event, and change

Learning to navigate in the unknown: attuning to affordances in artist visits in schools

ABSTRACT Artist visits have become a common means of delivering arts education in schools; however, teacher education insufficiently prepares student teachers to use the benefits of art projects for teaching and learning. In this conceptual paper, I contribute to an understanding of what capacities are necessary for future teachers to engage in artist visits. I shed light on the fundamental capacity to recognise the affordances that arise in the sociomaterial environment produced through artist visits. By elucidating how affordances are perceived, I illustrate how teacher education can design educational encounters that enable student teachers to attune and attend to affordances through embodied experiences with the ‘unknown’. This approach involves a shift from generic knowledge and skills to ways of being, a shift that is valuable not only for teacher – artist collaborations but also for interprofessional collaboration and professional practice in general.

Teacher reflection as a research method: using phenomenology to reflect on classroom events

ABSTRACT Arguing that teacher reflection on events as a research method is necessary for naming unrecognized values and moral responsibility that have informed current practice, I apply phenomenological reflection to an event with a child from my own classroom experience, recorded through autoethnographic writing, to show how the significance of this revealed itself in its latency, bringing into nearness the originary and eidetic insights of this lived pedagogical encounter. I do this utilizing two insight cultivators – ‘essential a posteriori’ (the ‘too late’), and responsive contact. This type of autobiographical reflection is important for teachers because what is remembered, while often present in the form of fragmentary and unconnected scenes, informs educators in terms of who they are now, that is, who they have become.

A rights-based exploration of children’s pedagogic voice in the classroom

ABSTRACT The concept of ‘pedagogic voice’ emphasises the capacity of children to express their views on matters related to teaching, learning and curriculum. ‘Pedagogic voice’ aligns with children’s rights to be listened to and the extent to which their views are fully considered and acted upon. Combined, these rights based approaches positively shape children’s learning experiences. This paper draws on quantitative and qualitative data from the longitudinal mixed methods cohort study Children’s School Lives to explore children’s voice. Grounded in the sociology of pedagogic voice literature and building upon research on children’s participatory rights, the paper explores children’s experiences of being heard and actively participating in decision-making processes in diverse primary school settings in Ireland. It analyses children's voice by looking at their capacity to influence their own learning, contrasting their experiences and perspectives, to those of their teachers. Findings illustrate the interplay between children’s and teachers’ narratives regarding children’s voice and their pedagogical encounters to explore the impact on teaching and learning processes, highlighting structural challenges to the realisation of children’s voice in primary classrooms in Ireland.

Learning to view golfing bodies: developing professional vision through video analysis and embodied reenactments

ABSTRACT Inspired by recent research that investigates how coaches interpret performance through the support of video tools and analysis, this article explores how the embodied reenactments of a golf coach shape their student’s interpretation of golfing bodies. More specifically, this research investigates a pedagogical encounter a Professional Golf Association (PGA) coach has with their golf student while engaging in collective in-the-moment video analysis of their student’s performance. Using Goodwin’s (1994) notion of professional vision, this article shows how a golf coach’s embodied methods attune their student’s observation of golfing practices to modern and standard methods for viewing and analyzing golfing bodies. I leverage interaction analysis to unearth and interpret the embodied and interactional nature of their pedagogical encounter, and to better understand how the golf coach’s reenactments shape their student’s professional vision. This research suggests that the body is a fundamental element in teaching and developing professional vision in athletic and performance-based contexts, and provides an avenue for better understanding how coaches, and experts in other professional settings, can apprentice novices’ interpretation and professional vision of practices.

Affective encounters in higher education

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine how thinking with affect theory offers fertility within higher education studies to see and do teaching and learning differently. For many educators in universities, the idea that teaching is a cognitive process of information transmission is still taken-for-granted. These beliefs are visible through the persistence of nomenclature such as ‘content’, predictable learning ‘outcomes’, and by the dominance of linear teaching aids (such as PowerPoint slides) across the sector internationally. An alternative conception of what teaching and learning is, and does, posits the classroom as a space of emergent relational connections in which learning is experienced as an affective force that constitutes being-in-the-world. To sketch shapes for understanding the affective encounters of teaching and learning, we think with the concept of inconvenience from the work of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant. We offer three illustrative examples of how teaching might be understood as an opportunity to surface, to welcome, and to problematise the inconvenience of others. Our argument is that an engagement with the affective in education can help us in understanding how power relations make themselves felt within the affective currents of educational encounters, as well as enabling educators to recraft their teaching in creative and meaningful ways. We conclude by contending that critical theories of affect can enhance educators’ work towards fostering social justice in the classroom, as well as in moving closer to an enriched understanding of the discomfort and challenge of what it means to teach and to learn.

Challenges students experience with inclusive education: Significance of listening and advocacy

Some experts, believe that the concept of inclusive education is still imprecise and nebulous and there is a nascent research and literature about this subject. When this non-empirical research was embarked upon there was no noticeable evidence to explicitly highlight that there is a meaningful understanding of the various challenges and obstacles that children face in inclusive education. Similarly, no evidence made the connection between inclusive education, listening, and advocacy. There is a gap due to the paucity of information and this research seeks to fill it. This author firmly believes that listening and advocacy are two major elements that enable and foster inclusion. Too often when policies are implemented those who are affected are not consulted. Educators and policymakers must pay more attention to the perspectives of children because they are quite capable of presenting their issues. In this way, inclusive education will be meaningful and cater to those who need it. This research analyzed and summarized recent published literature on the inclusion of children and the fieldwork is not novel. It is interesting to state, however, that research undoubtedly noted that there is a dearth of information that focuses on the various challenges that children encounter in inclusive education. It is crucial that everyone, especially professionals and policymakers, pay particular attention to the importance of inclusion. They also need to be cognizant of the experiences of these children and the role that advocacy plays, especially when they implement policies that relate to their growth and development.

Uses of interpersonal touch in educational settings: A methodological commentary

Touch is a primordial resource for interaction and for managing social relations, something that quite literally connects us with other human beings. This discussion paper approaches the articles in this special issue from a methodological perspective by reflecting on analytical challenges and possibilities in investigating interpersonal touch in educational encounters. It will briefly outline relevant methodological issues and transcription-related concerns in approaching interpersonal touch from a multimodal and sensorial research perspective. Key ideas in the empirical articles are then discussed with a view to what kinds of insights the articles in the special issue generate for future studies of interpersonal touch in educational settings.

Whiteness and Bodies Out of Place: A Critical Discussion of Early Childhood Educators’ Regulatory Language Practice in a Danish Context

This article sheds light on contemporary interconnections between colonialism, whiteness and notions of Danishness. It offers a critical perspective on the possible (side) effects of emphasising Danish language proficiency in everyday pedagogical encounters with racial-ethnic minoritised children. Taking on the notion of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), the article considers Denmark’s colonial complicity and its present implications in today’s social structures and, in particular, in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). The article is based on critical ethnographic fieldwork (Madison, 2020) conducted in a Danish ECEC centre. By theorising whiteness (Ahmed, 2007) in relation to ideals of Danish language proficiency and by drawing on postcolonial theory (Fanon, 1952/2021, 1967), the article investigates how a regulatory language practice performed by ECEC educators can be understood as normative whiteness affecting a group of three 4–6-year-old racial-ethnic minoritised children with Turkish backgrounds. The analyses show how the children navigate the white space of the ECEC centre by adjusting their bodies accordingly as they are rendered bodies out of place. Conclusively, the article points to Danish ECEC institutions as critical sites in the reproduction of colonial power structures.