Using Visual Technology in Educational Ethnography: Theory, Method and the Visual
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Purpose
This study aims to depict how a change laboratory (CL) promotes sustainable professional practice at the workplace to tackle unequal access to educational success.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical findings are from a CL focusing on school professionals’ agency and a follow-up study one year after the CL.
Findings
The study shows how the staff gained insight that professional agency is a collective and relational practice. Furthermore, the staff explored how to make a difference with viable means to create new workplace models for students’ success despite experiencing a conundrum.
Research limitations/implications
This study examined participants’ perspectives in workplace change and provided support for further research examining how professionally and collectively designed models gain sustainability in schools.
Practical implications
This study provides empirical data of how professional agency for change driven by collective visions can be accelerated with the interventionist method CL among school professionals.
Social implications
This study emphasizes the value of professional collective learning at the workplace, driven by several professional groups in school, and the need to follow up to detect sustainable change.
Originality/value
This study emphasizes the value of professional collective learning at the workplace, driven by several professional groups in school, and the need to follow up to detect sustainable change.
Graffiti and street art research (GSAR) has become more acknowledged within the academic discourse; however, it has much to gain from theorising its methodological aspects. As a multidisciplinary field, GSAR has mostly used qualitative research methods, exploring urban space through methods that range from visual recordings to ethnography, emphasising the researchers’ reflexivity. This qualitative approach has, however, paid little attention to the role of embodied practices. In this paper we discuss how embodied methodologies provide multisensory research results where the experienced moments, the participant’s and researcher’s senses, cognition and mobility in urban spaces are connected. Our discussion draws on the authors’ fieldwork experiences of walking and edge working, and on the literature concerning embodiment and embodied methodology related to the context of GSAR.
The theory of Expansive learning and the change laboratory (CL) methodology has been developed and applied in many studies on workplace learning and educational change. There are fewer studies made on small-scale interventions, exploring the longitudinal development of expansive learning in an educational change effort. This article examines a CL intervention performed in an upper secondary school in Sweden, with a small group of teachers engaged in a participatory design project. By identifying and analysing the relationship of the seven learning actions posited by the theory of expansive learning, the aim was to contribute to the discussion of the CL methodology and the empirical usability of the theory. The results showed that the seven expansive learning actions functioned as analytical tools to map the teachers learning and development, but the analysis also showed many deviations, disruptions and occurrence of practical actions of design in the process. This challenge the notions of cyclicity and ascension in the theory of expansive learning. Cyclicity might be desirable but not necessary for expansive learning which questions the need to first grasp the problem at a conceptual level before generating concrete solutions. The Findings in this study suggests the opposite; that the entanglement and parallel movement between the abstract and the concrete was a driving force for the teachers expansive learning and the design of new curricular units.
The article examines the potential of the dialectical principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete for transforming practices of learning. It is shown that V.V. Davydov’s work has created a foundation for such transformation. The theory of expansive learning builds on Davydov’s legacy and brings the principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete into learning and concept formation outside schools, “in the wild.” Three studies investigating different scales of expansive learning are discussed, focusing on the internally contradictory germ cells discovered and used in those studies. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to integrate Davydov’s revolutionary pedagogy and the broader agenda of school transformation as part of societal transformation.
In the 1980s, Yrjö Engeström took up Leontiev’s activity theory, extending and modifying it extensively to apply it to learning in organizations. Whereas the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev represented a cultural psychology, this “third-generation” activity theory (3GAT) was arguably closer to an organizational sociology. This organizational sociology is specifically oriented to interventionist research: i.e., the consensus-driven codesign of systems of collective action. This underdiscussed orientation explains 3GAT’s descriptive organizational modeling and triangle heuristic. Understanding this orientation is crucial for understanding how 2GAT was translated into 3GAT, as well as how a 4GAT might emerge in turn.
Background
The wide range of ability and disability in ASD creates a need for tools that parse the phenotypic heterogeneity into meaningful subtypes. Using eye tracking, our past studies revealed that when presented with social and geometric images, a subset of ASD toddlers preferred viewing geometric images, and these toddlers also had greater symptom severity than ASD toddlers with greater social attention. This study tests whether this “GeoPref test” effect would generalize across different social stimuli.
Methods
Two hundred and twenty-seven toddlers (76 ASD) watched a 90-s video, the Complex Social GeoPref test, of dynamic geometric images paired with social images of children interacting and moving. Proportion of visual fixation time and number of saccades per second to both images were calculated. To allow for cross-paradigm comparisons, a subset of 126 toddlers also participated in the original GeoPref test. Measures of cognitive and social functioning (MSEL, ADOS, VABS) were collected and related to eye tracking data. To examine utility as a diagnostic indicator to detect ASD toddlers, validation statistics (e.g., sensitivity, specificity, ROC, AUC) were calculated for the Complex Social GeoPref test alone and when combined with the original GeoPref test.
Results
ASD toddlers spent a significantly greater amount of time viewing geometric images than any other diagnostic group. Fixation patterns from ASD toddlers who participated in both tests revealed a significant correlation, supporting the idea that these tests identify a phenotypically meaningful ASD subgroup. Combined use of both original and Complex Social GeoPref tests identified a subgroup of about 1 in 3 ASD toddlers from the “GeoPref” subtype (sensitivity 35%, specificity 94%, AUC 0.75.) Replicating our previous studies, more time looking at geometric images was associated with significantly greater ADOS symptom severity.
Conclusions
Regardless of the complexity of the social images used (low in the original GeoPref test vs high in the new Complex Social GeoPref test), eye tracking of toddlers can accurately identify a specific ASD “GeoPref” subtype with elevated symptom severity. The GeoPref tests are predictive of ASD at the individual subject level and thus potentially useful for various clinical applications (e.g., early identification, prognosis, or development of subtype-specific treatments).
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1186/s13229-018-0202-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
This paper reports a small-scale study on the websites of 12 K-9 schools from four municipalities in Sweden. The purpose of the study is to explore, describe, and compare what and how information relevant for parental use is presented by local schools on their websites, which reflect the schools’ perceptions, intentions and strategies of communicating and cooperating with families. Epstein’s six key components regarding parental involvement are used as a theoretical framework in order to examine and analyse the content of school website settings. To evaluate the website design features, the website evaluation metrics suggested by Parajuli are adapted and applied. The results indicate that information on school websites for parental use is generally limited. It seems that schools’ expectations for parental involvement in education are based mainly on the social aspects of student development, rather than on pedagogical issues. In general, the websites of independent schools are more attractive than most public schools’ websites in terms of information richness and freshness, variations and friendliness. There is a need to develop websites that are more accessible for parents with immigrant backgrounds and non-Swedish speakers.
This paper examines an experimental technique that uses visual narrative methodology and dialogue commentary to create an effective research methodology for a pilot project studying babies and toddlers in long day care centres and family contexts. Researchers from different cultural backgrounds using video technology, formed the team of chief investigators (led by xx). One video clip was chosen to make independent descriptions, comments and interpretations of what was noticed. Later, initial visual narrative descriptions were shared and extended after reading one another's responses. This process created a dialogue commentary that enabled data overview, interpretative analyses and synthesis supported by snapshot moments taken from video clip. One aim of the project was to visually capture the cultural worlds and transitory relationships of babies and toddlers. Researchers showed the selected video clip separately to babies' room educator, centre director, and parents recording their responses. Using visual narrative methodology, dialogue commentary, and a shared cultural historical theoretical framework, revealed useful contradictions that raised social and cultural questions such as: How do educators recognize cultural worlds and transitory relationships of babies and toddlers? How are transitory moments related to pedagogically by educators? Integrating researchers' personal, cultural and affective responses, affords new critical cultural perspectives. This paper draws on screen capture snapshot moments from one video clip, taken from babies' pilot project data. These offer small windows into methodological approaches used to research the cultural world and transitory moments of three infants and their educator, located in the babies' room of an Australian long day care (LDC) site.
The article examines formative interventions as we understand them in cultural-historical activity theory, and reflects upon key differences between this intervention research tradition and design-based research as it is conceived in the learning sciences tradition. Three projects, including two Change Laboratories (CL), are analyzed with the help of conceptual lenses derived from basic epistemological principles for intervention research in activity theory. In all three interventions, learners expansively transformed the object of their activity. The CL cases, however, show that this learning process included productive deviations from the researchers’ instructional intentions, leading to significant outcomes, both practical and theoretical, that were not anticipated by the interventionists. Together, these cases illustrate that an activity-theoretical formative intervention approach differs from design based research in the following ways: 1) formative interventions are based on design done by the learners; 2) the collective design effort is seen as part of an expansive learning process, including participatory analyses and implementation phases; 3) rather than aiming at transferable and scalable solutions, formative interventions aim at generative solutions developing over lengthy periods of time in both the researched activities and in the research community.
This paper outlines a dialectical conceptualization of children’s agency for the purposes of multidisciplinary educational theory and practice. We illuminate five contradictory but connected dimensions of children’s agency, or the dialectics of agency, identified from theoretical debate between sociologically and psychologically oriented educational literature: Agency as (1) enacted and imagined; (2) as situatively emergent and progressively developmental; (3) as dependence and separation; (4) as mastery and submission; and (5) as control and freedom. We examine these contradictions “at work” in an ethnographic early education case study. We argue that the children’s struggles towards agency and adults’ efforts and failures to support children in their struggles, can be conceptualized as a dialectical movement that has a potential to develop the educational practice itself. Our dialectical reading of both data and theory helps to highlight the challenges the practitioners face when supporting children’s agency and the solutions they implement when doing so.
The growing interest in researching and documenting young children’s perspectives and experiences, has led to an increasing use of visual methods, such as photograps and videos. Studies to date, however, have seen artifacts as neutral tools, and have not revealed the differences between the functions of visual artifacts in the research process, and their functions in children’s lives more broadly. In view of this, we scrutinize the function of visual artifacts, using Wenger’s notion of reification, Vygotsky’s idea of mediation, and Wartofsky’s historical epistemology. We enliven the theoretical discussion by featuring illustrative vignettes from our previous study conducted at a Finnish preschool. We then discuss the consequences of our analysis in terms of documentation, and joint reflections that capture and construct the children’s experiences. A number of educational implications are highlighted.
This article focusses on the lessons learnt from the collaborative design of guidance for new build schools in England about the processes of school design, construction and occupation. The study involved headteachers, school building commissioners, teachers and wider school communities thinking about the pedagogic implications of the production of new school buildings. Professionals who had been involved with the development of new school buildings, and those currently involved, engaged in workshops to discuss their experiences of the process and designed guidance for those who would be involved in the future. This collaborative process pointed to possibilities but also significant potential risks involved in innovative school design. Theoretically, an activity theory framework was adopted to explore patterns of interaction and contradictions in the collaborative processes of the design, construction and occupation of new school builds and how these should be captured in a guidance document. We problematise the concept of innovation in the design of new build schools and the related risks. We suggest that collaborative school design calls for a new conception of collective action.
In this paper we propose that posthuman and decolonizing perspectives on difference might provide a foundation for English as an additional language (EAL) teacher education programs. We briefly examine current outcomes of schooling for EAL students and current teacher education in Canada, showing the necessity and urgency of developing practices for equity. We then discuss posthuman perspectives on difference and their intersections with decolonizing scholarship. Finally, we speculate that EAL teacher education that employs posthuman and decolonizing views might aid us in reconceptualising language education, de-centre Whiteness, ‘native speakerism’ and the white gaze around which concepts of difference and diversity have been assembled.
Our research community has limited understanding about the potential of video. This paper uses double stimulation and transformative agency to analyse two video modalities, extraction, and reflection; in a study about learning as it develops through family interactions. As researchers we were interested in children’s motives. However, the children were young; therefore, posing a methodological problem. Drawing on video footage and 24 film elicitation interviews with children and fathers from 12 families in Norway, England, Hong Kong and Mumbai, India; we present case study examples using double stimulation to analyse video. We gathered between 5-10 hours of footage about father-child interactions from each family. To analyse video modalities through double stimulation, we identified the first stimulus, second stimulus, and manifestations of transformative agency. We found by combining double stimulation with video for the purposes of extraction, the non-visible becomes visible. The combination indicates opportunities for development that generate the kind of qualitative transformations, which imply child development can be seen in a new way. By combining double stimulation with video for reflection, researchers can trace outward affective and cognitive consequences of the ‘mirror effect’, back to children’s conflict of motives, and how they decide to interpret what they see. Double stimulation therefore widens the potential of video. It shows video as an effective auxiliary stimulus to address the problem of researching young children’s motives.
In the past 30 years ethnography has grown from an emerging tradition in education research to one of the important research methods in the field. Impulses in this development have come from different national directions and disciplines. Predominant amongst them, however, have been influences from the UK and the USA and the disciplines of sociology (in the UK) and anthropology and sociology (in the USA) respectively. Following this, as discussed by Paul Atkinson (2005), the position has changed significantly. Ethnographic research has flourished; methodological reflection has grown. There is now extensive writing around matters of research methods and a need to return to some fundamental principles of ethnographic inquiry, along with a desire to describe and analyze the many modalities of ethnography that now exist. These developments have led to Wiley-Blackwell's interest in creating the present volume and our desire to edit it.
Cambridge Core - Organisational Sociology - Expertise in Transition - by Yrjö Engeström
To cope with the rapidly changing higher education climate, teachers need agency to act proactively in initiating and steering changes in practice. This paper describes an academic development activity in the form of a Change Laboratory, an intervention method based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, to facilitate agency among teachers. The results of the study indicate that transformative agency emerges when teachers are given the opportunity to analyse, envision, and redesign their practice collaboratively. This has implications for academic development, suggesting that activities facilitating discussion, analysis, and criticism of current practices are needed to support the development of agency.
This book makes an original contribution to researching child-community development so that those with specific interests in early childhood education have new theoretical tools to guide their research practices. The book explicitly theorises the use of digital visual tools from a cultural-historical perspective. It also draws upon a range of post-structuralist concepts for moving research and scholarship forward. Examples of visual technologies from research in different cultural communities are foregrounded. In particular this book introduces contemporary methodologies for researching child and community development with a focus on visual methodology so the dynamics of development can be captured over time and analysed historically, culturally, socially, ecologically and psychologically through a range of iterative techniques. Visual technology was not freely available in Vygotsky's time for example, and therefore potentially represents an extension of his genetic experimental approach to researching child development. The book presents a range of methodological arguments about research into child and community development through which new conceptions for research centred on young children have been created. The authors of the chapters also discuss why a more holistic, dynamic and ethical view of research is needed for generating new knowledge about child development in a range of cultural contexts. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. All rights reserved.
First published in 1967, Visual Anthropology has become a classic in its field, invaluable not only for anthropologists but for anyone using photography, film, and video to understand human behavior and culture. This completely revised and expanded edition brings the technical information up to date and includes the insights the Colliers have gained from nearly thirty-five additional years of collective teaching and research experience since the first edition.
The concept of double stimulation provides a framework for understanding the promotion of volitional action. In this article the concept is applied "in the wild", to analyse professional practice in parenting services for parents with young children at risk. We answer questions about (i) how concepts of double stimulation account for features of professional-parent interactions and what new insights are offered by this, and (ii) how double stimulation in the wild relates to the processes specified in a recently articulated model of double stimulation, and wider concepts of expansive learning. Examples of interactions between a professional (nurse) and a new mother illustrate how an absence of auxiliary stimuli may trap parents in conflicted situations. We found that in promoting double stimulation, professionals work simultaneously in two dialectically related fields: getting the parent to act using new auxiliary stimuli and getting them to think differently about the object. Such work may unfold in non-linear and discontinuous fashion and places complex demands on professionals.
In this chapter it will be argued that digital visual tools when conceptualized from a cultural-historical perspective and applied to the study of child development will allow researchers to document and analyze a child’s intentions and engagement across a variety of activity settings. As children move between home, community, preschool, and school, different practice traditions create conflicts and demands that create different conditions for children’s development which can be captured in motion using digital video observations (Fleer, Interpreting research protocols – the institutional perspective. In: Hedgeaard M, Fleer M (eds) Studying children: a cultural-historical approach, pp 65–87. Open University Press, Berkshire. 2008a; Interpreting research protocols – the child’s perspective. In: Hedegaard M, Fleer M (eds) Studying children: a cultural-historical approach, pp 88–103. Open University Press, Berkshire, 2008b;Using digital video observations and computer technologies in a cultural-historical approach. In: Hedegaard M, Fleer M (eds) Studying children: a cultural-historical approach, pp 104–117. Open University Press, Berkshire, 2008c). How these shape children, and how children contribute to these demands, conflicts, and transitions, can be studied in new ways and theorized differently when using digital video tools conceptualized by cultural-historical theory.
This article explores the emergence of the children's rule negotiation, while they play hide-and-seek during school break times, and how it transforms the playing. Break times refer to the free-time interspaces between organized scheduled lessons during the school day and are settings among others in children's everyday life where they are able to play and explore. Usually, in Swedish primary schools, there is a morning break, lunch break, and shorter pauses between lessons. Usually children are allowed to spend the break times in a schoolyard. The article provides a micro-level insights of a group of 10 and 11. years old children's negotiation process regarding rules to be followed while playing hide-and-seek, in Sweden the game is called "the jar". Observational data was produced during 11 break periods and was analysed through the lens of cultural historical activity theory (Leontiev, 1978; Vygotsky, 1978). The analysis indicates that the children's negotiation process is a collective embedding of agency. Negotiation concerns children broadening the collective interpretation of rules and making micro-adjustments in their courses of action in order to align them. The negotiation of rules is a collectividual (Stetsenko, 2013) enterprise of producing and using negotiagency in changing the circumstances in play.
In this interview, Gunther Kress proposes how English needs to expand beyond its traditional linguistic frame into a semiotic frame which recognizes not only the visual but other modes. He argues also for a shift to forms of production in which the acts of reflection and meaning-making are fused, rather than separating the production of new meanings from a retrospective critical process. These and other changes, he suggests, will make possible new, more profound understandings of language, as partial and as one mode among many. AB: I thought we might start with the idea of the English literary tradition, because the turn to the visual is a phenomenon of the contemporary moment but it's also a historical fact that text and image are closely implicated in the body of texts that English constitutes as part of its domain. So I wondered what you thought about that implication and about how new semiotic approaches or multimodal approaches might encourage teachers to look differently at the ways in which text and image are configured in that history. GK: I thought back over my own education in English literature and thought where I had seen the use of image directly, other than in, say, Alice in Wonderland and texts of that kind and I thought back to 16 th Century texts like Spenser's Faerie Queene, but also to printers and book-sellers of that time, who must have been feeling very close to the traditional illustrated book, attempting to use layout and font in a similar way – in the 17 th Century, I'm thinking of iconic layouts of poems, for instance, by poets such as Herbert. In German picaresque novels of the 17 th century – such as Simplizius Simplizissimus – you have what must have been "lavish illustrations" in the form of many woodcuts, as you do, in a much lesser way of course, in the Faerie Queene.
In this 'new media age' the screen has replaced the book as the dominant medium of communication. This dramatic change has made image, rather than writing, the centre of communication. In this groundbreaking book, Gunther Kress considers the effects of a revolution that has radically altered the relationship between writing and the book. Taking into account social, economic, communication and technological factors, Kress explores how these changes will affect the future of literacy. Kress considers the likely larger-level social and cultural effects of that future, arguing that the effects of the move to the screen as the dominant medium of communication will produce far-reaching shifts in terms of power - and not just in the sphere of communication. The democratic potentials and effects of the new information and communication technologies will, Kress contends, have the widest imaginable consequences. Literacy in the New Media Age is suitable for anyone fascinated by literacy and its wider political and cultural implications. It will be of particular interest to those studying education, communication studies, media studies or linguistics.
The 21st century is awash with ever more mixed and remixed images, writing, layout, sound, gesture, speech, and 3D objects. Multimodality looks beyond language and examines these multiple modes of communication and meaning making. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication represents a long-awaited and much anticipated addition to the study of multimodality from the scholar who pioneered and continues to play a decisive role in shaping the field. Written in an accessible manner and illustrated with a wealth of photos and illustrations to clearly demonstrate the points made, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication deliberately sets out to locate communication in the everyday, covering topics and issues not usually discussed in books of this kind, from traffic signs to mobile phones. In this book, Gunther Kress presents a contemporary, distinctive and widely applicable approach to communication. He provides the framework necessary for understanding the attempt to bring all modes of meaning-making together under one unified theoretical roof. This exploration of an increasingly vital area of language and communication studies will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of English language and applied linguistics, media and communication studies and education.
Basil Bernstein: The Thinker and the Field provides a comprehensive introduction to the work of Basil Bernstein, demonstrating his distinctive contribution to social theory by locating it within the historical context of the development of the sociology of education and Sociology in Britain. Although Bernstein had a particular interest in education, he did not see himself as a sociologist of education alone. By exploring Bernstein's intellectually collaborative character and the evolving system of ideas, drawing upon anthropology and linguistics, the originality of Bernstein's contribution to the social sciences can be truly identified.
In this digital age the use of video in social science research has become commonplace. As sophistication has increased along with usability, as spiralling staff costs push out direct observation, the researchers training today are grasping video as a means of coming to terms with the continued pressure to produce accessible research. However, the ‘fit’ of technology with research is far from simple.
Lev Vygotsky has acquired the status of one of the grand masters in psychology. Following the English translation and publication of his Collected Works there has been a new wave of interest in Vygotsky accompanied by a burgeoning of secondary literature. Ronald Miller argues that Vygotsky is increasingly being ‘read’ and understood through secondary sources and that scholars have claimed Vygotsky as the foundational figure for their own theories, eliminating his most distinctive contributions and distorting his theories. Miller peels away the accumulated layers of commentary to provide a clearer understanding of how Vygotsky built and developed his arguments. In an in-depth analysis of the last three chapters of Vygotsky's book Thinking and Speech, Miller provides a critical interpretation of the core theoretical concepts that constitute Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, including the development of concepts, mediation, the zone of proximal development, conscious awareness, inner speech, word meaning and consciousness.
INTRODUCTION. This chapter examines Vygotsky's method of double stimulation as a basis for formative interventions in the workplace. I argue that double stimulation is radically different from such intervention approaches as the design experiments currently discussed in educational research. Double stimulation is, above all, aimed at eliciting new, expansive forms of agency in subjects. In other words, double stimulation is focused on making subjects masters of their own lives. First, I will present Vygotsky's double stimulation as a theoretical and methodological idea. I will then examine recent notions of “design experiments” and point out some serious limitations in these experiments. Second, I will introduce the Change Laboratory method developed in the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research and used for ten years in formative interventions in workplaces. Third, I will discuss this method as an application and expansion of double stimulation. Fourth, I will demonstrate the practical implementation of Change Laboratory with an example from a project carried out in Finnish post offices. Fifth, I will conclude the chapter with a discussion of some methodological and theoretical implications of the Change Laboratory method for further development of Vygotskian research, especially as it is applied in the context of the workplace and organizations.
This paper considers the role of schools, place and national identity in shaping the ways in which young people make sense of the geography of higher education choice in the Welsh context. Drawing on two qualitative studies, it illustrates how attachment to nationhood and localities, as well as the internal processes of schools, bear upon the geographical mobility of young people living in Wales. The analyses suggest that this choice-making process, and the ways in which young people rationalised these decisions about where to study, varies according to where they lived and which school they attended. The paper illustrates the importance of moving beyond exclusively social-class based analyses of university choice making and embracing the significance of school and place in young people's geographical mobility.