Narrative Pedagogy Research Articles

Online Education for Chinese Elementary and Secondary School Students: Experiences and Challenges

In addition to studying in schools where online learning has been increasing in recent years, many Chinese elementary and secondary school students participate in outside school online education programs, often urged by their parents so that their learning can be enhanced. Being descriptive, this is a literature review study. The purpose of this article is to provide a narrative of online education for Chinese students with regard to experiences and challenges in the last two years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data sources of this paper are mainly documents published by the Ministry of Education, but literature published by other organizations and individuals are also referred to. Four hundred and twenty-three million Chinese had received online education by the end of March 2020. For elementary and secondary students, increasing online education in schools and outside schools plays a positive role in reducing the dropout number and provides other substantive benefits. In addition, online education for students during the pandemic allowed children to continue their learning without being on campus, but their overall experiences were mixed, and there were serious challenges to be dealt with.

Pedagogical narratives of choral conductor L. M. Venediktov

The purpose of the article is to consider the teaching activity of the professor of NMAU named after P. I. Tchaikovsky L. M. Venediktov, who in communication with students formed an understanding of the essence of creative personality in kinship with society, and the expression of their own vision of artistic paths and civilizational progress of society contributed to the rapid development of culture by future generations of creative youth. The methodology is related to the use of pedagogical narrative technologies, from the point of view of activating the creative potential of higher education students, focusing on the threefold connection of language, communication, and social component, focuses not only on the logical presentation of events but also in a certain state of society. Scientific novelty. For the first time the teaching activity in the context of the theory of historical and psychological narrative is considered, the pedagogical school of the teacher is analyzed as a way of systematization by the individual of historical experience and its transfer to students on the basis of the psychological narrative. The diversity of the teacher's efforts in combining language content of different levels of orientation is revealed: intellectual, emotional, sensory, visual, etc. Conclusions. The features of psychological, historical, and biographical narrative concepts used by the teacher to achieve the professional and spiritual growth of his students are described. It was stated that the teaching activity of the outstanding Maestro was crowned by a whole galaxy of outstanding artists who now work in many countries of the world and in Ukraine.

Justice-oriented lurking: How educators lurk and learn in the Marginal Syllabus

This case study examines interviews describing the experience of social reading and lurking as a form of informal learning. This study details the ways educator lurking occurred in the Marginal Syllabus, a public informal learning community that discusses educational equity topics, implications for literacy education, and digital pedagogy. Strategies are offered for instructional designers to optimize social reading and lurking practices for informal online communities that challenge dominant cultures and educational narratives. Research on social reading and lurking as informal learning is needed to leverage informal online communities to dialogue about educational equity and more just learning futures.

Narratives of music teachers in Brazil: everyday learning through spirituality/religiosity

Neste artigo, apresenta-se três corpos de pesquisas relacionados ao tema espiritualidade/religiosidade de professores de música: dois sobre formação inicial e formação continuada de professores e um sobre aprendizagem a partir de experiências espirituais/religiosas. Partindo de uma tripla construção teórica, essas pesquisas compartilham pontos comuns: espiritualidade na educação musical; teorias da vida cotidiana; abordagem (auto) biográfica em educação. A discussão concomitante dessas três pesquisas pode contribuir para os debates sobre espiritualidade e educação musical na perspectiva das pesquisas brasileiras, especificamente daquelas realizadas no estado do Rio Grande do Sul, região sul do Brasil.

Saving Humanity: Despair and Death as Pedagogical Challenges while Caring about Human Existence

The concepts analysed in this paper pertain to despair and death, since these are insufficiently present in pedagogical narrations. Despair and death, which accompany our existential experience throughout our lives, are most frequently treated one-sidedly, pejoratively, and presented as an expression of human evil. The thoughts of Paul Tillich, Viktor Frankl, Vittorino Andreoli and Krystian Lupa open a space for understanding despair and death as existential challenges a person needs to be capable of facing and should treat as valuable experience; an experience which creates an opportunity for a new dimension in our own appreciation of life.For this reason, an existentially oriented education seems to enable serious thought about a person in the context of their entire life.

Teaching LGBT+ Health and Gender Education to Future Doctors: Implementation of Case-Based Teaching.

Improving the education of medical students and physicians can address the disparities in LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and others) health care. This study explored how teachers used case-based teaching to teach medical students about gender and LGBT+ health care and discussed the implementation and effectiveness of case-based teaching from the perspective of the teachers and students. This study employed the case study method and collected data through semi-structured interviews. This study used two gender courses in clinical psychiatric education as case studies. Two teachers and 19 medical students were recruited as participants. The findings of this study were as follows: (1) effective cases links theory to clinical practice and competency learning; (2) experience sharing by LGBT+ is highly effective; (3) discussions promote the effectiveness of case-based teaching; and (4) the challenges of case-based teaching included time limitations, the multiplexity of the cases, and multilevel learning. This study also found that using narrative cases is a form of narrative pedagogy, which can help students to integrate medicine, gender, and LGBT+ competency education. A successful narrative case–based teaching strategy involves teachers integrating knowledge related to gender, guiding students through the cases to understand the importance of these cases, and reflecting on the medical profession to make improvements. However, teachers face challenges in this approach, such as changes in the school’s teaching culture and a lack of institutional support.

Online, Digital or Distance? – Spread of Narratives in ICT-supported Education

Digitization and digitalization have transformed educational practices. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a sudden change in the mode of the delivery of education and forced schools and universities to relocate education to digital platforms and revolutionize educational processes. The shift to online platforms brought terms like digital education/learning, online education/learning, blended and hybrid education/learning to the forefront, while traditional terms like eLearning, distance learning and mobile learning remain popular. This paper studies these terms and by backing the educational process redesign with ICT development and the time-space-group dimensions, it highlights the viral nature of the narratives of the terms.

Narratives of Systemic Barriers and Accessibility: Poverty, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Call for a Post-Pandemic New Normal

This paper captures the intimate, intensely lived, and storied experiences during the pandemic, on teachers’ narratives of teaching and education. The narratives illuminate deep knowledge and insight into pre-existing school systemic barriers prior to the pandemic, and how those same barriers are magnified during the pandemic in what has become a global watershed moment that calls for equity reform in school systems. A narrative theoretical framework is used, as well as an ethic of care framework that informs the study. Issues of poverty, diversity, equity, and inclusion are illuminated, with further focus on topics of technology access, streaming, resilience, and teacher-student identity and relationship. Recommendations to eradicate systemic barriers in schools are explored, highlighting suggestions for equity reform in areas that include: enhancing professional practice; building a school culture of care, and; developing partnerships and relationships.

Multimodality and Digital Narrative in Teaching a Foreign Language

The article focuses on the authors’ pedagogical experience of exploiting digital narratives in a foreign language education at a modern university (on the basis of National Technical University of Ukraine “KPI” named after Igor Sikorsky). The study aims to consider multimodality in terms of foreign language didactics. It was designed by the constructivism theory and narratology in terms of teaching a foreign language. The research exploited the set of theoretical methods: analyzing, summarizing, and interpreting scholarly sources on the issue under scrutiny; generalization and conceptualization of the authors’ pedagogical experience. Applying those methods in coherence logic enabled the effective study and interpretation of the concepts of “narrative” and “digital narrative” in their interrelations. In the study, the narrative is viewed as a sociocultural tool that provides students with deeper self-understanding, and complements the communicative system of foreign language acquisition with metacognition and values of life meaning. The digital narrative as a form of expression, empowered and determined by digital technologies incorporates multimodal communication and narrative as a cognitive unity. The authors have stated that multimodality, grounded on information technologies, is introducing entirely new semiotic resources into the communicative environment of foreign language learning. It is also generating innovative ways and forms of oral and written interaction. Multimodal learning activities illustrating the specifics of creating digital narratives by learners of English as a foreign language, are highlighted. The significance of the study lies in the fact that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is unquestionably a rather fertile condition for active implementing digital technologies into foreign language education, and developing different multimodal learning activities in this area

Race talk and white normativity: classroom discourse and narratives in Norwegian higher education

ABSTRACT How does the process of racialization unfold as a discursive project at the university? How do students and faculty in the classroom use racial categories in supposedly post-racial places? How do People of Color in higher education in Norway narrate their experiences of being ‘Othered’? We draw on two linked studies and use membership categorization analysis and the analysis of narrative interviews to examine the shared dynamics of racialization in classroom discourse and lived experience. We use Nirmal Puwar’s (2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg) Space Invaders to explore the racialized dynamic of disorientation in academic spaces, and how disorientation and assumptions of non-belonging contribute to the condition of epistemic injustice (Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) in higher education.

Building trust, resilient regions, and educational narratives: Municipalities dealing with COVID-19 in border regions of Portugal

This article recounts how municipalities from border regions in mainland Portugal interacted with the population in the face of the new social order brought about by COVID-19. Our aim is to interpret new educational spaces, beyond schools, emerging from community-level strategies to build trust during the pandemic lockdown and state of emergency. The material consists of 1503 posts from 38 Facebook pages of municipalities that were analysed and organised into dimensions: health and COVID-19; offline to online adaptation strategies; cross-border impact information; economic encouragement; care and social support; community engagement and participation. The article focuses on this last dimension given its pre-eminence. Key findings manifested five educational narratives associated with community engagement and participation: past and memory; place; voicing and wisdom; recognition and solidarity; and participation and learning. We consider those narratives as community resilience builders, accounting for municipalities’ educational strategies that enhanced locally anchored responses. If those actions represent an opportunity for local-governing new protagonism, they also generate a footprint for encouraging transformative resilience grounded in situated literacies and new educational audiences. Municipalities were more than timely information providers – they invested in connecting with the population, an investment possibly explained by the awareness that a health crisis could easily morph into a social crisis.

Prospective Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge Development in an Elementary Science Methods Course

ABSTRACT This study investigated the nature of the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) development among 22 prospective teachers enrolled in an elementary science methods course. The nature of prospective teachers’ PCK development was investigated in relation to their experiences in planning, enacting, and reflecting upon a Physical science lesson. The study was framed by the literature on the nature of PCK and PCK development. Narratives, together with other data sets, were used to embed the prospective teachers’ experiences throughout the 15-week methods course. Data analysis indicated that prospective teachers’ orientation to teaching was focused on keeping students’ engaged with teacher-centered or student-centered activities and was a needed requirement for learning science content. This orientation to teaching also served as the predominant knowledge component that scripted, filtered, amplified and mediated the other PCK components, and thereby dictated the prospective teachers’ PCK development traced across time. This orientation was also used as a frame of reference to plan, enact, and reflect upon science lessons. Implications include the need for teacher educators to provide authentic platforms for prospective teachers to trace and track their PCK development. Authentic platforms include the use of studenting and teaching narratives together with other praxis tools, and the use of domain/discipline-specific PCK as a frame of reference to provide the essential explanatory factor for understanding PCK development from the dynamic processes of planning, enacting, and reflecting upon science lessons respectively.

Theories Supporting the Use of Puppets as Pedagogical Tool with Young Children

Puppets as pedagogical tools with young children have a long tradition in therapy and healthcare, but the tradition and practice in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) have decreased in recent years. The academic learning outcomes of ECEC require a clearer connection to researching the professional practice. If puppets are to be introduced as functional pedagogical tools, it is important to find theoretical support for their use. This study is a systematic review of 37 research articles concerning the pedagogical use of puppets with young children, focusing on the theoretical relationship. The review reveals four theoretical perspectives, constructivism, psychology, sociology and art. The finding of the two most common perspectives, constructivism and psychology is not surprising but does give some new insights into relevant and functional terms and approaches. Perezhivanie is an example of a relevant term from Vygotsky to understand the pedagogical use of puppets. A bit surprising was the finding of Corsaro in the perspective of sociology, and an insight here is that also this theory and concept can be useful when puppets are used to teach children social behaviour. More surprising is that the art perspective includes few articles. However, the foundation of theoretical support in art, narrative pedagogy, seems highly relevant and worthy of development.

The Qur'anic Method of Teaching and Learning and its Limitations in the Present Era

Islam has made it obligatory for every Muslim to acquire knowledge. This does not mean obtaining a certificate or a degree, but to consider the phenomena of nature intellectually and rationally. When is it possible to acquire knowledge by considering the phenomena of nature? What methods are useful for this? According to Quranic instructions it is necessary to adopt a systematic and scientific approach to acquire knowledge. Qur'an briefly describes different angles of acquiring knowledge. Narrative, interrogative, question, analytical, poetic, comparative and critical methods of teaching are briefly described in the Holy Quran. The Muslim Ummah has a firm belief that the Qur'an is a comprehensive book which mentions every dry and wet, but this does not mean that the Qur'an is a manual book. This means that the Qur'an contains symbols and hints about everything. The fact that everything is mentioned in the Qur'an means that the Qur'an only provides guidance, while its interpretation requires contemplation. The method of contemplation can also be called the method of teaching and learning because the purpose of both is to acquire knowledge. The Qur'an has also provided guidance towards the method of teaching and learning. In the context of this guidance, this article has been compiled to expose new aspects of teaching and learning.

Massification, unification, marketisation, internationalisation: a socio-political history of higher education in Sweden 1945–2020

ABSTRACT Since the mid-twentieth century, higher education has been subject to spectacular growth. While the expansion of higher education is undoubtedly a general trend, its actual characteristics in terms of its specific conditions and driving forces vary by context. In this article, our aim is to develop such a socio-political historical narrative of Swedish higher education since 1945. We focus on how the Swedish case evolved in four salient aspects: (I) the transformations of the welfare state and the economy broadly defined; (II) the policies directly involved in redesigning the higher education system; (III) the scale, composition and structural relations between the parts of the higher education system; and (IV) the way different social groups (vis-à-vis gender and class) have used the system. We show that higher education policy has shifted its focus from massification and unification to marketisation and internationalisation. We notice that the conditions for the expansions differ substantially during the first three decades after 1945 compared to the 1990s in political, economic and demographic terms. While the system has opened up for increased participation overall, the way students are sorted into different institutions and fields of study by gender and class reveals a remarkably rigid social structure.

Applying digital storytelling in the medical oncology curriculum: Effects on students’ achievement and critical thinking

BackgroundDigital storytelling (DST), which combines traditional storytelling with digital tools, can provide a narrative pedagogy that promotes critical thinking (CT). However, we found no previous study in medical education. Materials and methodsThe aim of the study was to investigate if DST can promote CT and, if so, which CT skills were improved. Thirty-two students participated in a non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest research study, with 16 in each group. The participants were fifth-year medical students on a hematology rotation. We compared the routine instructional method (control group) with DST (intervention group). The measures of CT used for the pre- and post-test in both groups was the Health Science Reasoning Test (HRST) and knowledge test. We also evaluated the satisfaction of the students in DST group. We used Paired and independent t-tests for comparing the mean scores. To eliminate the confounding effect of pre-test on the results of the intervention, the ANCOVA test was used. ResultsThere was no significant difference in the overall CT pretest scores (P-value = 0.51) between the control and intervention groupsbut the difference was significant for the post-test scores (P-value = 0.03). Although post-test scores showed a significant increase (P-value = 0.002) compared to pre-test scores in the intervention group, no significant increase was observed in the control group (P-value = 0.26). Most students considered that DST improved their CT, deep learning, communication skills and team-working. ConclusionsThe study demonstrated that DST promoted CT. We recommend the use of DST to promote CT in clinical education placements.

Towards an educational modernization process: UNESCO interactions with Franco's Spain (1952–1970)

PurposeAfter World War II, an educational modernization process gained ground worldwide. International organizations such as UNESCO began to play a key role in the creation, development and dissemination of a new educational vision in different countries. This article examines the origin and development of this modernization process under the dictatorship of Franco. More specifically, we will show how the adoption of this conception in Spain must be understood from the perspective of the interaction between UNESCO and Franco's regime, and how the policies of the dictatorship converged with the proposals suggested by this international organization. Our principal argument is that the educational policies carried out in Spain throughout the second half of the 20th century can be better understood when inserted into a transnational perspective in education.Design/methodology/approachThis article uses documents from archives that until now were unpublished or scarcely known. We have also analyzed materials published in the preeminent educational journals of the dictatorship, such as the Revista de Educación, Revista Española de Pedagogía, Bordón and Vida escolar, as well as documents published by the Spanish Ministry of National Education.FindingsFranco's dictatorship built an educational narrative closely aligned with proposals put forward by UNESCO on educational planning after World War II. The educational policies created by the dictatorship were related to the new ideas that strove to link the educational system with economic and social development.Originality/valueThis article is inspired by a transnational history of education perspective. On the one hand, it traces the origins of educational modernization under Franco's regime, which represented a technocratic vision of education that is best understood as a result of the impact that international organizations had in the second half of the 20th century. On the other hand, it follows the intensifying relationship between the dictatorship and the educational ideas launched by UNESCO. Both aspects are little known and studied in Spain.

REFLECTIVE PRACTICES OF TEACHER EDUCATORS IN PUNJAB: A NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Purpose of the study: Reflective practices are considered very important and influential for teacher training and professional development. This study was conducted by using a narrative perspective. The main aim of this study was to explore the role of reflective practices in building teacher educators’ professional lives. Their stories were explored to understand what is needed to become an effective teacher educator. Methodology: The current research involved six teacher educators from GCETs selected purposively as research participants. Semi-structured interviews were used as data collection instruments. Teacher educators who have a minimum of ten years of experience were interviewed. After gathering stories, the researchers build categories and themes from interview data. The narratives of teacher educators were reconstructed through analysis and discussion. Main Findings: The findings of the current research reveal that reflective practices can play a very effective role in the professional grooming of teacher educators. The effective use of reflective practice tools is significant in building these practices. It is implicated by the study findings that novice teacher educators and future teacher educators can learn from the experiences of experienced teacher educators. Novelty: This research will help the administration to know about problems that teacher educators face while using reflective practices. Future researchers can be helped to explore the ways that how the reflective practices-related challenges and problems can tackle. Moreover, how the reflective practices of school teachers and college teachers can be made more effective.

Teaching in the New Millennium: An Autoethnographic Approach to Exploring Occupational Adaptation of Occupational Therapy Professors

This autoethnographic research examines the lived experience of occupational therapy faculty. Researchers penned their teaching narratives and identified themes related to teaching today's students. Upon completion, the researchers completed both first and second cycle coding of their own story and then the story of the co-investigator followed by the development of themes stemming from the collapsed data. Five themes emerged: faculty community, dancing as fast as I can, values, self-perception, and emotional rollercoaster. The findings provide insight into the lived experience of faculty members and the importance of these experiences to faculty identity, competence, and adaptation. The authors describe the implications of these findings to faculty growth and development and student learning.

The well-worn path: Learning from teachers who moved from hard-to-staff to easy-to-staff schools

This study analyzes the narratives of teachers who moved from hard-to-staff to easy-to-staff schools within one large urban school district in the United States. Their accounts describe stark contrasts between their experiences at the different schools. We find their choices to transfer can be understood through the lens of craft conscience and thus read as a critique of the inequality they encountered. This analysis offers a novel way of approaching the issue of teacher mobility.