Using Text via Dialectical Journals to Nurture Liminal Spaces in Teacher Education

This article shares the findings of a study examining the use of dialectical journals as liminal spaces for the development of critical reflection in practicing teachers. In an online graduate course on critical teacher inquiry designed to foster teachers as antiracist multicultural educators, teachers engaged in dialogue with themselves as they responded to self-selected text segments in assigned readings throughout the course. Using Mezirow’s theory of transformation and specifically the typology of critical reflection of assumptions and critical self-reflection of assumptions, we analyzed the online dialectical journals of 23 teachers to better understand how their engagement with key texts both represented and influenced their reflective development and engagement in transformational learning. We conclude the journals to be powerful liminal spaces for teachers to engage in reframing of their assumptions.

Elementary school children’s speech skills in interdisciplinary ICT communication

An analysis of the state of pedagogical practice and scientific and methodological literature speaks of shortcomings in solving the problem of the formation of elementary schoolchildren’s speech skills. This article is devoted to the formation of elementary schoolchildren's speech skills in interdisciplinary communication. The purpose of our experimental work is to verify the effectiveness of our methodology for the sustainable of speech skills in interdisciplinary communication. In preparation for the experimental work, the following objectives were set; to identify the level of formation of speech skills (motivational, informative, reflective), development of a complex of diagnostic methods: observation, questionnaires, diagnostic methods, assessment, self-esteem, etc., on the basis of the data obtained to determine the level of formation of speech skills in interdisciplinary ICT communication. Therefore, the aim of our study is to analyze the state of formation of elementary schoolchildren’s speech skills in interdisciplinary communication. The theoretical significance of the study allows clarifying knowledge on the issue of the formation of speech skills; practical significance lies in the presentation and testing of a set of productive exercises aimed at developing learners' speech skills in interdisciplinary communication. According to the developed diagnostic technique, the formation of speech skills in interdisciplinary communication consists of three components: motivational, substantive and reflective. Based on these components, indicators and levels characterizing the formation of elementary schoolchildren’s speech skills in interdisciplinary communication are distinguished. During the study, the results of a verifying, forming and control experiment were presented. According to the study, we can say that it is necessary to pay attention to the development of meaningful speech, because it is for this indicator that most children are at a low level of formation. On the whole, our study proved that systematic work is needed to form elementary schoolchildren’s speech skills. Keywords: speech skills, interdisciplinary communication, integration, elementary school, formation, criteria, indicators, levels.

Media jak z Matrixa. Niewidoczne maszyny w komunikacji społecznej w ujęciu teorii systemów

With reference to the assumptions of the sociological theory of communication of social systems, its understanding of society and its media, the article deals with the issue of how the change of social communication dictated by the digitalization of media changes society. Society accepts the presence of digitization but looks for fields to criticize the non-reflective development of its routine. An example is the movie The Matrix, to which the analysis relates. The examples show what the technology of technical communication and self-learning (artificial intelligence) is already able to do today. The article summar-izes that the introduction of media 4.0 to communication — with their example of invisible machines — is consent to their “participation” (in an automated but effective form) in the creation of society. This influences the autopoietic notion of society developed by systems theory.

Undergraduate Accounts of the Impact of Lockdown on Their Self-Managed Reflective Development of Graduate Abilities

This account is mostly written by students in the first year of their discipline-based study of civil engineering. It features their self-managed development of graduate abilities in the second semester of an undergraduate Irish course in problem-based civil engineering. The principal abilities were creativity, problem-solving, presentations and teamwork. The case-study paper concentrates upon four students’ reports and reflections on their experiences concerning their second (partially locked-down) semester. Their accounts complement the review of the early weeks of their first semester experience, that has already been published elsewhere. They are joined by the tutor who was an external facilitator of their early drafts of reviews. He suggested the compilation and structure of this paper, and has assisted with the assembly of the condensed individual contributions.

Developing Reflection with the Use of a Teacher Journal

If the educators are willing to develop their reflectivity on what they have habitually considered genuine, the teaching may transform them into professionals who are vitally open to the students and to the world. For that reason, the first part of the chapter concerns the process of becoming reflective educators whereas the consecutive section introduces teacher journal as a means of developing reflectivity. The next part of the chapter comprises a study which is an attempt to analyze and describe the data gathered from the entries in teacher journals. An additional effort will be made to examine which elements of the classroom interaction are influenced and which are ignored by teachers during the process of reflective development. The chapter ends with conclusions and suggestions for further research directions.

A Journey Toward Cultural Competence

This article highlights the personal journey of reflective development that a non-Aboriginal White researcher and health professional underwent to be “fully positioned” in the everyday lives of a rural Australian Aboriginal community in Western Australia. The article explains the researcher’s personal development in areas important to building respect, building relationships, and ensuring reciprocity while undertaking Aboriginal research. The researcher reports on the reflective evaluation of her worldview. Understanding that judgment is a natural tendency, the researcher used reflexivity as a tool to examine and contextualize her judgments, presumptions, and preconceptions, which positioned her to be open to differing viewpoints and actively explore alternate perspectives. The researcher explores her evolutionary understanding that cultural competence is not a destination but a continual journey, and she details her knowledge development regarding the Aboriginal research paradigm, which requires that all the learning, sharing, and growth taking place is reciprocal and engages all parties actively.

Reflection for learning, learning for reflection: Developing Indigenous competencies in higher education

Reflection is an essential part of students’ critically reflective development within experiential-learning contexts; it is arguably even more important when working cross-culturally. This paper reports from a national, arts-based service-learning project in which students in creative arts, media and journalism, and pre-service teachers worked with Aboriginal people in urban and rural areas of Australia. The paper uses Ryan and Ryan’s (2010) 4Rs model of reflective thinking for reflective learning and assessment in higher education to ascertain the effectiveness of the project work toward engendering a reflective mindset. The paper discusses how students learned to engage in critical self-monitoring as they attended to their learning experiences, and it describes how they “wrote” their experiences and shaped their professional identities as they developed and refined the philosophy that related to their developing careers. Examples taken from the narratives of students, community partners and academic team members illustrate the principal finding, which is that through a process of guided reflection, students learned to reflect in three stages: a preliminary drawing out of existing attitudes and expectations; a midway focus on learning from and relating to past experiences; and a final focus on reciprocal learning, change and future practice. The three stages were apparent regardless of program duration. Thus, program phase rather than academic year level emerged as the most important consideration when designing the supports that promote and scaffold reflection.

The Structure of Reflective Development of a Person in the Age Dynamics as the Basis of Psycho-pedagogical Design

The main purpose of this article is to construct and justify a working hypothesis of the structure of the “reflection” concept in the age dynamics of human development. This is the foundation for understanding the content of developmental education and the creation of new modern educational technologies. The main task is developing a theoretical construct of the research object – the structure of reflective human development in the age dynamics. The main criteria are the logic and results of studies by leading psychologists, educators, philosophers. The first step for us is experimentally proven framework of the reflective development in middle childhood of V.I. Slobodchikov and G.A. Zuckerman, named as “defining reflection”. We build such structures for other ages: teen, youth, student age, as forerunners of adulthood. We use the established structure of the reflective development in student's age is used in experiments during developmental education teachers’ training in elementary school, which may be useful also for other psychological and pedagogical development practices.