stefanbackius

This is about the three most important things standing out from course meeting 3, at least initially. Firstly, by large, the exercise ABC Learning Design workshop with Clive Young and Nataša Perović was useful and practical oriented and emphasized how the interaction between constructive alignment and designing learning activities can be a powerful tool for developing teaching. Secondly Carl Utbults presentation on assessment of competencies, within an artistic knowledge area where creativity and personal taste play an important role in the experience of the students’ achievements, were interesting and started some thought around subject knowledge within the creative arts. This is also relevant for several aspects of the subject history. Thirdly I started to think more about the knowledge area around feedback. Based on the course-presentation regarding video feedback by Elisabeth Olsson and the article “The power of feedback” by Hattie & Timberley (2007). The article aims to systematically investigate the meaning of feedback in classrooms with a conceptual analysis a synthesis of the evidence related to improve teaching and learning. Elisabeth Olssons example of video feedback displayed an increase in the students understanding of “the whole”, meaning meta reflections which is a very important aspect of student learning in writing thesis. Another effect of video feedback is that the student questions come afterwards, which means that the student does not have the same opportunity to ask questions about details current, the whole communication is then directed more towards overall aspects instead. This raises thoughts about how assessment affects learning activities.

Laurillard (2012 p54-57) identifies two types of formative feedback, extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic is for example guidance and comments from the teacher who, from a point of evaluation, acts in different ways to help the student. This is the most common way to understand feedback in learning situations I would say. But the intrinsic perspective on feedback is the most interesting. Laurillard (2012) describes it as feedback internal to the action and the environment in which the action take place. It implies what the result of the student activity is in reality ”the authentic consequence of the action in relation to the intended goal” (Laurillard 2012 p55). Out of this perspective I´m this semester about to try out, in my focused course,[1] an popular science examination which must be carried out based on a configuration or illustration of a selected cultural heritage in the form of a film, blog or debate article. It should then be presented in a “realistic” environment and then be evaluated in the classroom from the standpoint of implementation and response of the action outside the classroom. Consequently a direct feedback from the environment of the students actions. By this I want to try out what Laurillard (2012) calls intrinsic feedback and also get closer to “situated learning”, a concept described as a learner activity located in a situation which itself plays a role.[2] One of the advantages of this perspective on examination is that the teacher can more clearly plan the teaching from the perspective of achieving long time learning.

Boud & Falchikov (2006) calls for a focus on assessment as such and argues that lifelong  learning  priorities  must be signaled  in  assessment  practices to be seriously. The long time learning may appear more clearly when assessment and feedback are accomplished in an environment outside the classroom. Intrinsic feedback and situated learning has a clear lint to Boud & Falchikovs discussion on sustainable assessment.

“[…] sustainable  assessment  and  other  teaching  and  learning  and  assessment  practices that  actively  promote  the  skills  and  dispositions (sinnelag)  needed  for  long-term  learning must  be  given  priority  if  the  most  important  goals  of  higher  education  are  not  to be undermined.”

Already in 1938, John Dewey (1859-1952) formulated the importance of creating learning situations that allow for the individual pupil’s free growth and development. He emphasized the necessity of abandoning an obsolete subject-based teaching material for the benefit of work on the practical problems that students would face in society. The school must be brought closer to the society whose purposes it serves, something that traditional teaching failed to achieve Dewey argued. The experiences, in the sense of the pupils (and teachers), were sacrificed for a distant and more or less unknown future. The connection between the present and the future is central and those who should have an idea of ​​these relationships are those who have attained maturity, i.e. educators. Experience in the present has a positive impact on the future. (Dewey 2004/1938) Perspectives that need to be operationalized in designing learning activities based on lifelong learning.

References:

Boud, David  & Falchikov, Nancy (2006) Aligning assessment with longterm learning, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31:4, 399-413, DOI:10.1080/02602930600679050

Dewey, John (2004 [1938]). Erfarenhet och utbildning [Experience and Education] in Hartman, Lundgren & Hartman (ed) Individ, skola och samhälle: utbildningsfilosofiska texter. 4., [utök.] utg. Stockholm: Natur och kultur

Hattie, John & Timperley, Helen (2007) The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research March 2007, Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 81–112 DOI: 10.3102/003465430298487

Laurillard, D. (2013) Teaching as a Design Science. Routledge.

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[1] Course name: Cultural heritage, 15hp, HIG650. Given by the History department at KAU.

[2] Laurillard (2012) refers to Brown, Collins & Duguid (1989) Situated cognition and the cultural of learning. Educational Researcher 18(1).

An important point for understanding how learning takes place is to focus on the environment in which it occurs. The digitization of learning processes and the development of online learning platforms implies a broadened definition of physical learning environments also to include digital environments. Digitalization certainly does not offer physical spaces in the traditional sense but the equipment and technology are highly physical, both to their apparent presence and through its effects in the room.

Actually, they do not replace the physical presence but rather change it. I would like to describe the change as from a one-dimensional presence to a multidimensional one. The students who are in the physical room are also in the digital sphere, either on the learning platform, in different social media or on the internet in general. Moreover, the technical improvements have made the physical presence via the learning platforms increasingly resemble a physical presence without learning platforms. The multidimensional physical presence I describe is equally relevant regardless of the type of participating physics or digital, what we at the university divide into campus and distance courses.

In the literature for the course, there are two interesting positions regarding learning environments. Firstly, Bates underlines that learning environments are broader than just the physical components described as classrooms, lecture theatres, labs and technologies used to create online personal learning environments. Learning environments are broader than just these physical components. He concludes that it is also important to consider learning environments from the learners’ perspectives. (Bates 2015).

Secondly Laurillard conducts an interesting discussion where she makes a point of distinguishing between different types of knowledge/skills, firstly the “specific knowledge in a discipline” and secondly what is called “c”. From four different points[1] Laurillard throughout chapter two implies that fostering high-level generic cognitive skills is more important than the specific professional knowledge base area. Specific knowledge will be peculiar to the discipline, but generic skills are widely applicable across the disciplines. (Laurillard 2012)

My point here is that there is a tendency that teachers focus mainly on the first type of knowledge, specific disciplinary knowledge. But the most important for the learners is the second generic cognitive skill. The learning environment from the learner’s perspective is therefore much broader than the teacher’s perspective. It also covers the societal or cultural context where students are supposed to learn.

But what does societal or cultural contexts contain from the perspective of a student I my discipline, history? I think tentatively about two types of cultural Learning Environments here. The first relates to studying history at the University and the second relates to why History Matters in society.

Laurillard describes History is a “highly contested discipline” What I interpret in this is that the history discipline can be perceived unclearly in learning content as it is in the borderland between humanities and social science. This can affect the status of the subject/program/course a history student is part of which can result in the pursuit of legitimacy and disciplinary identity building. Other perspectives that constitute the cultural learning environment are issues such as – should I becoming a history teacher or not? – what skills do I need to develop to pass university?

The second cultural learning environment “why history matters in society” is currently under a significant change pressure. Serious assessors emphasize that the “public interest in history is not simply rising; it´s skyrocketing.” (Hunt 2018) Giving examples of how the use of history in society is clarified and utilized means that the importance of history in society increases. “Fake news” and obscurities around what is truth whilst ”Memory Wars” is made clear all over the globe which leads to an increasingly charged issue of inclusion and exclusion around imagined Cultural heritage. (Hunt 2018)

Our time needs an education system that even more emphasizes generic cognitive skills on the sense of abilities to manage large amounts of information and distinguish the essentials. Students need to develop their critical thinking and an ability for identification of power structures that consolidate inequality. This is a challenge for our thinking and development of cultural learning environments in higher education

[1] They are: 1) from the point of the educational establishment 2) from the point of view of the workplace 3) from the point of educational theorists’ 4) from the point of a teacher.

Litterature:

Bates, A. W. (2015). Teaching in a Digital Age. Read Appendix 1: Building an effective learning environment. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-2-what-is-a-learning-environment/)

Hunt, Lynn (2018).
History: why it matters. Cambridge: Polity Press

Laurillard, Diana (2012). Teaching as a design science [Elektronisk resurs]
building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. 3. ed. New York: Routledge.

Academic teaching is a highly complex activity. It draws on many kinds of knowledge, embracing the latest developments in the subject area, appropriate knowledge about the students preunderstanding derived both from the societal context and individual skills and preconditions and last but not least technology competence. Subject education and pedagogical knowledge are areas that have been increasingly problematized and developed.

Especially how the interaction between the two knowledge fields content and pedagogy has been described, a new pedagogical field has been theoretical developed where general pedagogical knowledge has been dimmed and subject-specific pedagogical knowledge is highlighted by introducing the term “Pedagogical Content Knowledge”, shortened PCK. The term is derived from a seminal article from 1987 by Lee S. Schulman, “Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform”, even though the term is not used there. (Schulman 1987) Especially in my subject area, modern history, there has been increasingly development processes around PCK within the term “Historiedidaktik” where pedagogical and content related development around students learning is under development by researchers, some educators and some with his postgraduate education in history. (Schüllerqvist 2005; Karlsson 2008). But the theoretical perspective on PCK within history does not include digital competence to any greater extent.

In the article “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge.” the authors integrate technology knowledge into the framework derived from Schulman. The theoretical perspective expands the discussion from, what you could call, a two-field area to a three-field. (Mishra & Koehler 2006 figure 3 and 4) The authors discusses the challenges in the overlapping fields between each and one of them and systematically underlines the importance of knowledge in the field of technology by equating the technological knowledge (and pedagogical) with content knowledge. They formulate a more technologically adapted theoretical term “Technological content knowledge” (TCK) pinpointing how technology and content reciprocally relate.

“Thus, our model of technology integration in teaching and learning argues that developing good content requires a thoughtful interweaving of all three key sources of knowledge: technology, pedagogy, and content. The core of our argument is that there is no single technological solution that applies for every teacher, every course, or every view of teaching. Quality teaching requires developing a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships between technology, content, and pedagogy, and using this understanding to develop appropriate, context-specific strategies and representations. Productive technology integration in teaching needs to consider all three issues not in isolation, but rather within the complex relationships in the system defined by the three key elements.”
(Mishra & Koehler 2006 pg. 1029)

Acquisition of these technological content skills drawn by the authors are what I  will focus on in the AUPU2 course.

The course I choose to work with
What I bring with me from the discussion above is the great importance of integrating the technological knowledge with content and pedagogical knowledge. This must go into planning and course design from scratch. I intend for future in my continuing work to develop three courses within my subject along with this concept. In this course, AUPU2;  I intend to use the KAU-course “Cultural Heritage Studies HIG650” to meet the challenge technological knowledge implicate. The course is given by the history department both within our master’s program in history and as a free course. It covers 15 ECTS credits, runs at 50% speed for a semester and is given at the undergraduate level. The course focuses on how cultural heritage is constructed and formed from a historical as well as social perspective with the aim to critically investigate cultural heritage and the various environments or contexts where cultural heritage is produced reproduced, transmitted and applied. The learning outcomes of the two parts in the course are:

Part 1, Cultural Heritage ideas (7.5 hp)
After completion of Part 1 of this course students will be able to
1. Identify and analyse historical and social ideals, ideas and preconceptions about cultural heritage,
2. Give an account of the central methods and theories of the study of cultural heritage.

Part 2, Cultural Heritage Environments (7.5 hp)
After completion of Part 2 of this course students will be able to
1. Critically reflect on different forms of cultural heritage environments and
2. Apply different perspectives of the meaning of cultural heritage for the identity creation.

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References:

Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1–22.

Karlsson, Klas Göran. (2008) “Historiedidaktik och historievetenskap – ett förhållande I utveckling”. I: Historien är nu. Red. Karlsson, Klas Göran & Zander, Ulf. Lund: Studentlitteratur AB,

Mishra & Koehler (2006) Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge. Teachers College Record 108(6), pg 1017-1054.

Stolare, Martin & Wendell, Joakim (red.) (2018). Historiedidaktik i praktiken: För lärare 4–6. Första upplagan Malmö: Gleerups

Schüllerqvist, Bengt (2005). Svensk historiedidaktisk forskning. Stockholm: Vetenskapsrådet

http://www.kau.se/sites/default/files/Dokument/subpage/2009/12/svensk_historiedidaktisk_forskning_pdf_35866.pdf

190310

It took a while until I understood the assignment/ask. I still wonder why. Maybe because “Learning environments” are, in my opinion, a difficult-to-handle concept that cannot be caught by the immediate. But on reflection, I realized that it could be so much more than physical or digital environments. I think it was there that I got stuck initially.

If one considers learning environments as a kind of culture, in an anthropological sense, then learning and teaching are contextualized in a necessary way. If we do not handle the discursive perspective (sorry for the use), I do not think we can fully understand the complicated process that learning and education constitute. I believe that we, who work as a university teacher and who try to familiarize ourselves with the mysteries of teaching, need to realize that even in the latest pedagogical research, it is still far before we understand what actually happens when learning is activated and what is a “learning environment”. Will we ever fully understand? I hope not! Perhaps it is also that it is precisely the unresolved mystery of learning that makes the task so attractive and stimulating.

190202

The reasoning about academic teachership/Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is important, relevant and motivates me to participate in this course. I really believe in emphasizing the teaching and understanding of in-depth knowledge about teaching in a similar way to research. This perspective makes sense and it become more interesting for me to engage in my own and others’ educational development. The clarification between “Teaching excellence” and “Teaching expertise” is also relevant and inspiring. I think and hope that our course AUPU2 is about developing the latter.

The big challenge concretising the policy for quality work is, from my opinion, within “Area 2 Cultural/Collective” according to Figure 1 (Elements of an integrated quality culture). By focusing on shared values, participation and trust, highlights the challenge of how a quality assurance system must be perceived both as relevant and important for the organization and as something that improves for the individual. It´s also worth noting that the majority of the quality assurance work is delegated to the faculties which probably means different actions in different faculties.

According to the figure 2 (Mozelius & Hettiarachchi 2017) I consider myself teaching in a face to face manner with minimal technology/media ingredients. As a historian teaching mainly at advanced level and being trained in the humanistic/social science tradition I have found myself in a context where the technology, as it is described in the articles, has not always found its way into teaching. The subject of History’s focus on sources, theories and analysis of texts may have made the entry of new technology difficult. (At the same time, there may be some of a healthy skepticism here.) And at the same time many courses is “blended with distance students”, not always with best results. One reason for the more traditional teaching is probably that one may not always feel comfortable with the digital tools and cannot see their possibilities.

I want to develop a new course I´m in charge responsible for this semester focusing on Heritage studies where I, so far, want to develop a new way of assessing with video. But there is of course more possibilities. After this course I would like to find myself in the middle of the box, that is, I can maneuver freely in the various pools in Picciano’s conceptual multimodal model. All this in order to be able to offer the students additional opportunities to deepen their critical thinking and create opportunities to meet materials and perspectives that they would not otherwise have acquired and make interpretations that give new insights.

According to my digital experience in teaching I would consider myself as an explorer (A2). Correctly I´m one that need more insight and inspiration to expand my competences.