Search Results for
"Teaching"

Traditional lecture-based teaching methods are being replaced or supplemented by approaches which call for reframing the roles and identities of teachers and learners. Enquiry-Based Learning (EBL) is one such approach. This paper reports on a study investigating the perceptions of staff and students (N=25) involved in an EBL capacity building project in the north-west of England. Q methodology was used to investigate the subjectivities of the participants. The findings are discussed using sociocultural learning concepts relating to activity theory and communities of practice. The paper concludes that EBL may improve the quality of teaching and learning in higher education, but careful consideration should be given to the dynamics of the specific context in which it is introduced.

Whilst current research into teaching and learning offers many insights into the experiences of academics and students in higher education, it has two significant shortcomings. It does not highlight the dynamic ways in which students and academics impact on each other in teaching-learning interactions or the ways in which these interactions are shaped by wider social processes. This book offers critical insight into existing perspectives on researching teaching and learning in higher education and argues that alternative perspectives are required in order to account for structure and agency in teaching-learning interactions in higher education. In considering four alternative perspectives, it examines the ways in which teaching-learning interactions are shaped by teaching-learning environments, student and academic identities, disciplinary knowledge practices and institutional cultures. It concludes by examining the conceptual and methodological implications of these analyses of teaching-learning interactions and provides the reader with an invaluable guide to alternative ways of conceptualising and researching teaching and learning in higher education. © Paul Ashwin, 2012.

Vocational teacher education is explored and distinguished from other forms of teacher education. The many varieties of vocational education, ranging from state controlled to market oriented, are deeply intertwined with national traditions and culture. Different admission requirements and a complex steering system set it apart from conventional teacher education because of its origin in a work context, whereas subject-specialist teaching emerges from a scientific knowledge area. This factor, which affects learning material and place of training, requires vocational teacher education to be multidisciplinary, activity- and problem-oriented, while posing unique challenges in grading and quality control. A hidden work-cultural transfer also occurs. Two trends are indicated: an increasing academization and a resurgence of the apprenticeship model. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This article examines the nature of employability skills in the context of broader notions of generic skills, and the ways in which employability skills can be developed, assessed, and reported. The issues, which are similar in all developed countries, are illustrated primarily with examples from Australia. The article concludes with some issues for future consideration. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We report on descriptive analyses of classroom observations of the instruction and classroom interactions that took place over four days of a high school pre-engineering class, Project Lead the Way, as participants engaged in project-based learning. Our objective was to study the enacted curriculum and determine how class time was apportioned, the extent to which time was distributed between developing technical skills and fostering conceptual understanding in engineering and mathematics, and the degree to which mathematics concepts were implicitly embedded within the engineering activities or made explicit for students, and therefore more supportive of transfer of learning. Our coding of the video data support the following three main descriptive results: (1) more of the instructor's time was spent on class management (non-instructional) tasks than on any other classroom activity, (2) a greater proportion of the total observed instruction time was devoted to skills rather than concepts, and (3) only a small fraction of instruction that linked math concepts to engineering coursework made those links explicit, while the large majority were implicitly embedded in the activities and the CAD software used in the class. Both positive and negative examples of explicit integration are provided to illustrate these events. We relate these results to prior research on the intended curriculum used to convey the idealized pre-engineering program, and discuss the implications these findings have for fostering deep learning of engineering concepts and supporting the transfer of knowledge to novel tasks and situations. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.

The Center for Water Resource Studies and the Bowling Green Community College of Western Kentucky University formed a partnership to address an anticipated Water & Wastewater Operator/Technician shortage over the next five to seven years. The Water and Wastewater Technician Training Institute (WTTI, pronounced "witty"), is a joint initiative with the employment sector (a number of water & wastewater utilities/municipalities/districts), state primacy agencies and technical assistance/trade associations to refine an industry needs driven curriculum that utilizes on-line course delivery to provide options for both traditional & nontraditional students. This partnership was presented at the 2008 ASEE annual conference. This paper will review the accomplishments and the lessons learned by this program over the first year of operation. The partnership has revitalized an existing Associates Degree program entitled "Water Utilities Management". The program requires sixty-seven (67) credit hours, including twenty-five (25) hours of General Education Requirements, twenty-one (21) hours of Business Technology Core courses, and (21) twenty-one hours of Operations Track courses. The Operations Track courses can be focused toward either Water or Wastewater Operations. The program is designed to be delivered entirely online, allowing students to pursue their degree with unparalleled flexibility. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2006-07, there were approximately 11,200 college-level programs that were designed to be completed totally through distance education; 66 percent of these programs were reported as degree programs and the remaining 34 percent were reported as certificate programs. Asynchronous internet-based technologies were cited as the most widely used technology for the instructional delivery of distance education courses; they were used to a large extent in 75 percent and to a moderate extent in 17 percent of the institutions that offered college-level credit-granting distance education courses. The WTTI courses are delivered through an open-source Course Management System (CMS) known as MOODLE (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment). The first Operations Track class, entitled Water Supply & Wastewater Control was offered/developed during the Fall semester 2008. This first course, as well as a second course entitled Water Distribution and Wastewater Collection Systems will be available during the Spring semester 2009. As courses are developed, approval is sought for Continuing Education/Contact Hours from Operator Certification Boards in the individual states. Academic content is being provided by core university faculty with support from adjunct faculty eligible staff. All instructors (academic and practitioner) involved in the program are undergoing collaborative professional development to ensure that they are receptive to the unique structure of the program. As a demonstrably functional framework is being put in place, the program is being extrapolated to address other regional policy, academic discipline and industrial sector issues beyond the initial Kentucky and Tennessee target area. University-offered Water and Wastewater Operator Certificate Programs are being developed to fast-track students into the industry and allow current operators to reach advanced certification levels at an accelerated pace. Partnering utilities and municipalities are developing internship and cooperative educational opportunities to ensure work-based experiences for students. Trade associations have committed to developing scholarship programs to lessen the financial burden for potential students. In addition, some individual utilities are offering tuition reimbursement for current employees who are pursuing academic degrees or certificate programs. Finally, an educational outreach program that integrates into high school science curricula is being developed. This program is aimed at recruiting young adults into the water and wastewater industry. © American So for Engineering Education, 2009.

Cultural-historical activity theory, an outcrop of socio-psychological approaches toward human development, has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past two decades but has yet to be appropriated into science education to any large extent. In part, the difficulties Western scholars have had in adopting this framework arise from its ontology, which is materialist dialectical and, hence, does not allow easy absorption into non-dialectical (classical logical) thinking underlying much of Western scholarship. Cultural-historical activity theory has tremendous potential because it sublates traditional dichotomies in everyday teaching-learning situations including individual/collective, body/mind, intra-/inter-psychological, cognitive/emotive and psychological/sociological. In this contribution, we not only review the existing literature that uses or develops this non-dualistic approach, but also articulate an intelligible explication of the theory that is more accessible to Western scholars and describe possible future curriculum work and research in science education as an expression of the fruitfulness of the theory. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

There is limited awareness and knowledge of how teacher pedagogical reasoning and practice develops when teachers use information and communications technology (ICT). This is particularly so in the vocational education and training (VET) sector, where there is only limited awareness and knowledge of this territory. As the VET sector moves increasingly to the use of ICT to address the policy shift to flexible delivery on and off the job, VET teachers are faced with huge challenges. The question is; in what ways can teachers be best supported to meet these challenges? This paper presents a teacher profiling instrument that identifies teachers' strengths and professional development needs. The data gathered through the use of the profiling instrument was used to analyse professional learning needs for a group of trade teachers teaching in three regional areas in a public technical and further education institution. The profiling instrument is explained, and the following professional development is outlined to illustrate the value of the profiling instrument. © 2009 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

Tangaza College in Kenya, Mekelle University in Ethiopia and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands are working together in a new format of teaching and learning, namely the so-called Intercultural Virtual Seminar. By means of virtual communication, e-mail, MSN, Skype, SMS and a common website for shared documents and forum discussions students from the three partner institutions work together on sociotechnical problems, taking into account differences of culture and context. Despite low connectivity to Africa and the need to overcome cultural misunderstandings the experience is tremendous and very motivating for all parties involved. The Intercultural Virtual Seminar is being embedded in an innovation system in which technological expertise mainly from Delft University of Technology (but in exchange with the other partners) and contextual demands mainly from Africa (but in exchange with ideas from the Netherlands) are explored, new technological devices, and social institutions, procedures, skills are developed which can find their way into vocational training and small businesses and NGOs. Such an innovation system functions as an incubator for technology transfer and exchange. Internships, master theses, common research by the staff and in cooperation with third parties can make a difference.

Experiential learning is learning by doing and participating in activities that result in hands on approach to the transfer of knowledge. Experiential learning can be defined as a process by which the learner creates meaning from direct experience. Experiential-learning has been around for ages. It was one the first methods of educational instruction. Modern day experiential-learning theory has been mostly attributed to the works of John Dewey and David A. Kolb, but there have been contributions to the field made as far back as the French philosopher Rousseau in the early 19th century. (Kraft,1995). There are students who do not have the opportunity to participate in an off-campus internship or cooperative program due to various reasons, but there is an alternative option for students to enroll in an experiential-learning opportunity by registering for a course with an experiential-learning centered approach. The purpose of this paper is to determine the educational impact of experiential learning on the attitude and the performance of students in an "International Business unit". The paper presents a teaching model based on experiential learning in the "International Business" unit at undergraduate level. Preliminary analysis of 92 student evaluations determined the efficacy of experiential learning. To evaluate the cognitive (whether they learned from the experiential activity) and affective (did they like participating in this activity) impact on student learning. To evaluate the impact of experiential learning on ones own life. © Common Ground, Meena Chavan, All Rights Reserved.