School of Education

Research Seminar Series 2008-2009

Room 7.02 from 12.15 pm to 1.30 pm

Research Seminar Series 2008-2009
23rd Sept 08 / Cathy Nutbrown
Arts Based Learning in the Early Years: An evaluation of an arts intervention project
This seminar reports an evaluation of an arts-based learning project which took place in six early years setting in a large town in Northern England. Funded by Creative Partnerships/Arts Council England, two artists worked with children and practitioners in six early years settings; two Foundation Stage classes, two Sure Start settings and two independent day nurseries. Children were aged from six months to five years. The seminar will focus on use of evaluation methodologies, within an original analytical framework (ORIM-Arts) to illuminate arts based learning in terms opportunities, interaction, recognition and a model. Outcomes of the evaluation include: an analysis of children’s arts-based learning experiences and viewpoints of the artists and practitioners. The seminar will be an opportunity to reflect on the role of the Arts across all areas of young children's learning and consider how, when artists and early childhood practitioners combine their roles, something distinctive in terms of curriculum and pedagogy can occur.
21st October 08 / Julia Davies
Dudes, Geeks, Street-art and the City OR Explorations of Identity, Space and New Literacies
The convergence of Web 2.0 technologies with everyday life is affecting our sense of ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. In this seminar I present data from research investigating the on and offline practices of individuals and groups who have been active in a photosharing website, Flickr.com. I reflect on how Web 2.0 activities within Flickr have been transformative in how participants read the world and present themselves and at how the boundaries between online and offline spaces become fluid.
I use examples taken from streetart, as well as from the unlikely images taken of cupcakes (the sugar dudes) in a New York bakery. The interactions on Flickr are presented as instantiating both learning and literacy as a social practice (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Lave & Wenger, 1991) within a context that can be conceptualised as simultaneously global and local. I finally come to
discuss how some of the practices and events I describe in this presentation might be considered to instantiate what is meant by the term ‘New Literacies’ (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006).
Geeks and non-geeks, Dudes and non dudes, all welcome.

References

Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and w iting in one community. London: Routledge.
Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006) (2nd edition) New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning. London: Open University Press.
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
18th Nov 08 / Tim Corcoran
Heterotopics
The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends (Rorty, 1999, p. xxv)
In our ongoing attempts to understand human being, obstacles regularly present which thwart agreement and consensus. These obstructions are fundamental to our knowledging practices because they exist in the language games (Wittgenstein, 1953) through which understanding is performed and attained. The aim of this seminar is to canvass an alternate approach – an approach which creates a way to discuss next possible actions and consider the most appropriate ways to go on. Heterotopic inquiry looks to do just this by prying open dialogic space so that differing viewpoints can be acknowledged and heard in processes of contestation and negotiation. This discursive move is particularly relevant for debating the kinds of relationships suggested to exist between knowledging practices and social action. Whether or not total agreement is possible or necessary is not at issue here and is more likely to be of importance to monologic or homotopic orientations. Rather, the crux of the matter is the provision of and our accessibility to inclusive and adaptable means through which dialogue can engage the complexities of human being.
16th Dec 08 / Mark Payne
An investigation of Japanese communicative language pedagogy
As uncovering of language teachers’ beliefs, personal ideas, and experiences rather than just their behaviours has become more prominent in teacher education, so too has a reformulation of our conceptualizations of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and an increased emphasis on teaching context (see Sato & Kleinsasser, 1999; Bax, 2003). Taking stock of language teacher education now involves investigating how individual teachers interpret the methodologies presented to them in pre- and in-service training and translate this to their teaching environment.
The aim of this paper is to present recent results of a study documenting how two teachers of Japanese, one of British origin and one of Japanese origin, filtered the CLT methodology they encountered on a PGCE course through their cultural backgrounds and learning experiences and how this translated to their classroom teaching. Preliminary results indicate that both teachers held differing, sometimes conflicting views of CLT which points to the difficulties of defining CLT or offering it as a methodological choice. Incorporating examples from data in the form of classroom observation field notes and semi-structured interviews, this presentation seeks to add to the discussion surrounding the importance of teacher education programs which prioritize teachers’ background and teaching context in course content.
Bax, S. (2003). The end of CLT: a context approach to language teaching. ELT Journal 57(3): 278-287.
Sato, K. & Kleinsasser, R. C. (1999). Communicative language teaching (CLT): Practical understandings. The Modern Language Journal 83: 494-517.
20th Jan 09 / Kate Pahl
Every object tells a story: family learning through artefacts
This presentation describes a series of research projects funded by MLA Yorkshire and the Knowledge Transfer Opportunities Fund. Following on from the ‘Every object tells a story’ family learning pack, a project was funded to work with the World of James Herriott museum in North Yorkshire. The aim was to work with a group of families to create a family book of stories. The focus was to look at the relationship between parental interaction, objects in the home and stories and show how these activities can support literacy in school. The project involved creating a family collection of objects, photographing home objects as stimulus for writing, creating a box of objects and talking about the objects to others, writing stories collaboratively about home objects and stories and finally producing a film on CD Rom of family stories. The research aimed to trace the processes and practices of producing the stories using digital cameras and also use disposable cameras going home to trace this and provide a research record of the project. Another project with Shandy Hall, where Sterne wrote Tristam Shandy, worked with a visual artist to look at the relationship between place, space and non-linear narratives with a particular focus on boys writing at KS3. In both project the focus was on how the museum could stimulate writing and how artefacts can support literacy learning in informal settings. The presentation will consider how this kind of work can be developed further in the context of museum and family education.
24th Feb 09 / Bob Toynton
I am what I think: The pitfalls, the pratfalls and the point of auto-ethnography"
What tempts, leads or even forces a researcher to ‘indulge’ in auto-ethnography; to put out in the literature not only evidence of scholarship (hopefully), but also core aspects of the self and of the very personal? The aim of the research was to bring out into the literature the issues raised in teaching and learning with people who identify themselves as being different, but where the difference is secret: The invisible Other.
Justifying to the self the need for auto-ethnography and the validity of the approach became just as important as the approach itself. Here the concept of case study as artefact (as opposed to artifice) was central.
True to the topic, this seminar explores the experience of an individual recognising the necessity for auto-ethnography, and exploring ways of ensuring the emotional and the objective, the individual and the general, the lived and the theoretical all co-exist and survive from first thoughts to post-publication. Here the focus is on methodology rather than outcome, and the process through which the particular approach adopted, gradually evolved.
24th March 09 / Jackie Marsh

Parents as co-researchers of children’s multimodal communicative practices

This paper outlines a study (conducted by Peter Hannon, Jackie Marsh, Margaret Lewis and Louise Ritchie) in which four parents played an active part in data collection for a project in which their young children’s multimodal, multimedia practices in the home were the focus. The project’s aims were to identify the range and nature of young children’s engagement in multimodal practices mediated by new technologies and to identify ways in which parents/carers could be involved as co-researchers in the research process. The study involved the development of in-depth case studies of four children, two girls and two boys, aged from two to four years. Parents were involved in the collection of data relating to children’s digital literacy practices over the period of one month and were interviewed a number of times about the data they collected This paper draws on the visual data collected by parents, their diary entries, the interview data and the reflections of the researchers who visited the parents in an analysis of the opportunities and challenges presented by engaging with participants in the research process in this way. The paper reflects on the various roles and responsibilities embedded within research projects, such as initial conceptualisation, identification of research questions, research design, data collection, data analysis, writing up and dissemination and reflects critically on the different roles played by researchers and parents in this project. The notion of ‘co-researchers’, it is argued, signals active participation in the research process by parents but the differential levels of involvement and engagement in the research need to be recognised. The implications for future collaborative projects with parents/ carers are identified.
21st April 09 / Jason Sparks
Transnationalizing Professional Identity
This seminar reports on my research of five Vietnamese university
teacher-educators working in the area of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) who did MA and PhD degrees in English-speaking countries, namely Australia, the United States, and New Zealand. All five educators reported that their overseas experiences, facilitated by national educational policies aimed at adopting “key global achievements and international approaches,” resulted in dramatic professional identity transformation around the practices of teaching and doing academic research in a ‘Western’ academic context. Using primarily interviews and participant observation, and drawing on Aihwa Ong, Anthony Giddens and James Paul Gee as theoretical resources, this research explored the ways the professional identities of these five educators were forged and sustained through their engagement with the spaces and practices of what I am calling the ‘emerging transnational academic TESOL community.’ Significant to the discussion are the ways these educators navigated a range of critical obstacles to sustaining and developing their identities as teachers and academic researchers upon return to Vietnam, as well as the tensions that emerged working simultaneously in transnational and national academic contexts. This presentation may suggest a range of issues of interest to us in the School as we consider what it means to ‘internationalize’ our practice, and specifically, what it means to develop researchers from the UK and abroad to work in the emerging transnational academic communities we
share.
19th May 09 / Gareth Parry
Why do the English value sectors?
At the same time that England abandoned a binary division in higher education, it legislated for a two-sector system of further education and higher education. Such arrangements assume that higher and further education stand for different levels of learning and, for this reason, should be provided by separate types of tertiary organisation. However, government policy in recent years has looked to expand higher education in further education colleges and support mergers between universities and colleges that widen participation and enhance progression. These measures form part of a larger policy experiment to change the pattern of future demand for undergraduate education, with implications for the significance and survival of sectors. In analysing and discussing these developments, the seminar will draw on the findings of a two-year ESRC-funded study of Universal Access and Dual Regimes of Further and Higher Education (the FurtherHigher Project).
23rd June 09 / Jools Page
Who’s crying now? : Life-stories of six mothers of young babies
Key policies in England (DCSF, 2008) are beginning to embrace the notion of strong attachments with significant adults (key persons, Elfer et el. 2003) to support the personal, social and emotional development of babies and children in day care settings. But what is it really like for a mother to leave her young baby in the arms of a practitioner in a childcare setting and return to work? Even if she wants there to be a strong bond between the practitioner and the child how can she be sure that her relationship with her baby is not threatened, moreover that she is not replaced by the practitioner? This seminar presents some findings of life-historical research with six mothers who took decisions about returning to work after the birth of their first baby. As well as outlining the complexity of a research design to learn about these issues the seminar will highlight the complex issues of attachment faced by them when their babies (all under a year old) were cared for outside of the family.

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