Enacted Agency in a Cross-Border, Online Biliteracy Curriculum Making: Creativity and bilingual digital storytelling

This research investigated potentials of bilingual digital story making to engage the creativity of 13 Canadian and Chinese biliteracy learners aged 11–15. Findings in this paper draw on six focal participants and their digital story creation. Informed by asset-oriented multiliteracies, new media literacies, and new materialism, this research adopted a netnography methodology to explore the communal and sociomaterial practices embedded in the intra-actions of human, matter, and virtual spaces of Seesaw and Skype. Drawing on data from six focal students, findings relate how intra-actions among researchers, teachers, students, matters, and spaces shaped participants’ creative acts. This research adds to the knowledge of developing and applying material-informed pedagogies which attend to the enacted agency among teachers, students, materials, and spaces.

Percepción del profesor de educación física respecto al nuevo modelo educativo en México (Physical education teacher's perception of the new educational model in Mexico)

La educación en México ha transitado por distintos modelos educativos en ocasiones como consecuencia del cambio de legislatura, y en otras, debido a las tendencias de organismos educativos internacionales, lo que ha impactado de manera específica al currículum de Educación Física, dificultando asi la evaluación de su pertinencia por parte del profesorado. Por lo tanto, el presente estudio tiene como objetivo, evaluar la percepción del docente de Educación Física respecto al Nuevo Modelo Educativo en México. Se presenta un diseño no experimental transversal, con un muestreo no probabilístico por conveniencia. Participaron 351 profesores de Educación Física en activo, de los cuales 152 (43.3%) son hombres y 199 (56.7%) mujeres. Se utilizó un cuestionario diseñado ad hoc para esta investigación que consta de 33 ítems agrupados en cinco factores: Fundamentación teórica, Bases conceptuales, Intervención docente, Planeación, y Satisfacción, contando con un proceso de validación mediante un análisis factorial exploratorio y confirmatorio. Se puede afirmar que el cuestionario posee propiedades psicométricas satisfactorias y de fiabilidad estimada a través de la consistencia interna. Los hallazgos muestran diferencias significativas en la percepción del docente entorno a los contenidos que agrupan el Nuevo Modelo Educativo donde las mujeres dan una puntuación más alta respecto a los hombres, al igual que los profesores de nivel secundaria respecto a los de preescolar y primaria. La principal conclusión es que el docente de Educación Física muestra una baja satisfacción respecto al Nuevo Modelo Educativo. Abstract. Education in Mexico has gone through different models, sometimes because of the change of government, and other times, due to tendencies of international educational organizations, which has specifically impacted the Physical Education curriculum, making it difficult for teachers to evaluate its relevance. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate the perception of the Physical Education teacher about the New Educational Model in Mexico. A non-experimental transversal design is shown, with a non-probabilistic sampling for convenience. 351 active Physical Education teachers participated, with 152 (43.3%) men and 199 (56.7%) women. A questionnaire was designed ad hoc for the population and consists of 33 items grouped in five factors: Theoretical argumentation, Conceptual bases, Teaching intervention, Planning, and Satisfaction, having a validation process through an exploratory and confirmatory factorial analysis. It can be stated that the questionnaire has satisfactory psychometric properties and reliability estimated through internal consistency. These findings show significant differences in the teacher's perception about the contents included in the New Educational Model according to gender, grade of studies, initial training school and educational level where they work. The main evidence is that Physical Education teachers show low satisfaction with the New Educational Model.

Modification of Robotics Curriculum for Project-Based First Year Engineering Design Course

Texas Instruments (TI) currently offers a comprehensive curriculum to supplement their Robotics System Learning Kit MAX (TI-RSLK MAX). While designed for all college students, TI would like to provide a modification of the curriculum specifically for first-year engineering design courses. The goal of this project was to modify the current TI-RSLX MAX curriculum, making it easier to digest for first-year engineering students and more applicable to shorter duration projects (∼8 weeks), while still being information dense. To better understand the user experience of the current TI-RSLK MAX curriculum and determine what users would want from a modified curriculum, user interviews were conducted and analyzed using inductive qualitative analysis techniques. Results showed that while the current TI robotics project has many positives, first-year students primarily struggled with the coding aspect of the project. These results directed and informed the prototype development of a modified curriculum module focused on teaching students code. Low- and medium-fidelity prototypes were developed and tested with users. Data from the usability study were analyzed using descriptive analysis techniques and results indicate that the medium-fidelity prototype helped students learn robotics coding. This research has implications for a high-fidelity modified TI-RSLX MAX curriculum and robotics education for first-year engineering design students.

Composing Lives Alongside

Drawing on a broader narrative inquiry into the curriculum making of participants who compose identities dissonant with dominant stories of gender and sexuality, this article explores the shaping influence of the social (relationships, communities, and contexts) in one participant's life story around sexuality from a curricular perspective. The term curriculum making represents an ongoing process through which individuals make sense and meaning of experience, position curriculum broadly as a course of life, and shift notions of curriculum and curriculum making beyond the bounds of school. Individuals engage in identity making as they make sense of themselves in relation to their curriculum making, narratively understood as the composition of stories to live by. This inquiry highlights the ways that life stories are composed alongside, connected to, and shaped by other people and draws the attention of educators to the complex lives unfolding in schools.

Gravity

Einstein's theory of general relativity is a cornerstone of modern physics. It also touches upon a wealth of topics that students find fascinating – black holes, warped spacetime, gravitational waves, and cosmology. Now reissued by Cambridge University Press, this ground-breaking text helped to bring general relativity into the undergraduate curriculum, making it accessible to virtually all physics majors. One of the pioneers of the 'physics-first' approach to the subject, renowned relativist James B. Hartle, recognized that there is typically not enough time in a short introductory course for the traditional, mathematics-first, approach. In this text, he provides a fluent and accessible physics-first introduction to general relativity that begins with the essential physical applications and uses a minimum of new mathematics. This market-leading text is ideal for a one-semester course for undergraduates, with only introductory mechanics as a prerequisite.

Culturally Responsive Teaching in Urban Secondary Schools

Demographic data show an increasingly diverse student population in all urban settings. On the other hand, there continues to be a discrepancy about the student population and the teacher force, as the majority of the US teachers are predominately middle class, female, monolingual, and of European ancestry. This discrepancy adds complexity to an already complex profession. To bridge this cultural gap, researchers advocate for a change in the teaching paradigm, in which teachers understand the relationship between students’ culture and learning. This paradigm is called Culturally Responsive Teaching. This study followed 22 secondary mathematics and science teachers. The goal was to analyze some of the strategies used in urban schools, while at the same time determining whether these strategies were culturally responsive. Results show that teachers incorporated their students’ interests into the curriculum, making connections with real-life and allowing students to make many choices.

Remaking Science Teaching: Border Crossing Between Home and School

In this case study, we explore ways to prepare preservice teachers to translate theory into practice and make science curriculum accessible through familial curriculum. Using her “Family Science Lesson Planning” assignment sequence, Sumer taught preservice teachers the theory of transformative curriculum making (Seiki, 2016), and guided them to recognize, articulate, and translate their own familial curriculum into science lessons. As a result, the three participant preservice teachers’ own histories and familial knowledge were repositioned and valued alongside science. Our findings show how to use science curriculum and instruction to border cross between home and school, thereby making science more accessible.