Emerging Researchers' Group Archives - Page 3 of 4

How Broadening Horizons leads to the Development of Intercultural Competences

by Dr Maja Wenderlich | Emerging Researchers' Group, NW 24 Mathematics Education Research

I would like this post to inspire emerging educational researchers. That’s why I’m going to include a lot of my own experiences.

Currently, in Poland, intercultural competences are developed only during philological studies. While learning a foreign language, we can understand what these competences are and how they are supposed to work. What about the rest of society? Should only foreign language students be ‘citizens of the world’? There are Erasmus type programs that allow all students to study abroad. However, not everyone knows how to take advantage of them.

From an early age, children should be accustomed to diversity and taught that nothing is better or worse. Everyone deserves respect and love. We all have similar needs, despite the colour of our skin. Meanwhile, there is still not enough content like this in the educational programs for the youngest students. When it appears in older classes, it is associated only with the culture of the country whose language they are currently learning.

Beginning my intercultural journey

I started my adventure with interculturalism by volunteering in Vietnam in the small village of Sapa. I taught English there and conducted art classes. A young Vietnamese Hmong couple ran the Homestay. In exchange for working with the local children, I spent quality time with their family, participated in all celebrations, and had meals with them. I met people from different countries and even continents every day. It was an extraordinary and fascinating experience for me.

After a month’s stay, I returned to Warsaw. Nothing was the same as it was before I had left. Even the tea lost its flavour. I felt a huge thirst for travel, and I was hungry to discover, taste and admire new things. I felt a terrible hunger for knowledge. Only then did I understand how much we lose by closing doors and surrounding ourselves with people from the same cultural circle. If it weren’t for this trip, I would not have realized how diligent and hungry for knowledge these children are and how much they care about learning. They can truly appreciate it. Unfortunately, the region lacks English teachers with intercultural experience. The teachers I encountered had little awareness of the use of English in different cultural contexts.

Thanks to my stay in Vietnam (apart from trying durian, drinking fresh coconut juice, making my own spring rolls), I experienced Milton Benett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity myself. I have gone through all the phases, from Denial (Ethnocentric stages) to Integration (Ethnorelative stages). I believe that I will remember this process for the rest of my life.

Exploring the Concept of Intercultural Sensitivity

It was the beginning of my doctoral studies, and I was eager to explore this concept. So I started looking for universities that interested me in terms of the research they conduct, hoping to complete a short internship or a study trip.

I was able to find a university that not only suited my needs scientifically but was also willing to accept me for a short stay – the first Center for Cultural Psychology in Europe, which was then at the University of Aalborg in Denmark.

The stay in Denmark exceeded my expectations. I cooperated with scientists from all over the world in meetings, seminars, conferences and workshops, which provided a lot of inspiration. At that time, I also had the opportunity to communicate in English on a higher level than before. I met people not only from Europe but also from South America, Asia and the United States. Every Wednesday, a ‘kitchen seminar’ was organized. That was the name of the meetings of scientists from around the world where we discussed one given topic every day.

Imagine discussing one specific scientific topic from different cultural perspectives. This experience enriched me scientifically. I am still very grateful to the scientists who are developing this Center, who took me under their wings. I think that was a milestone in my scientific development.

ECER and the Emerging Researchers’ Group

Shortly after defending my doctoral dissertation, I learned about the opportunity to participate in the European Educational Research Association Conference (ECER). The Emerging Researcher group was of particular interest to me. I imagined how wonderful it would be to be among young scientists from all over the world. Those are the young people who want to change the educational space. They are brave, and they look at the world with trust and openness. They have broad horizons, and they want to keep learning and improving.

I learnt that there was an opportunity to receive a conference scholarship. I decided to apply. I was happy to find out that my application was accepted and that I could go to Hamburg!

The organization of the entire conference was excellent, starting with critical, interesting comments that I had the opportunity to hear, to various workshops and events that were organized to fill the time fruitfully. Everything was arranged on a world-class level. During the ERG and EERA conference, I had the opportunity to meet fantastic people from all over the world. We were all one big family.

One of the most interesting events for me was the exchange of personal experiences with women of my age in a similar scientific situation (facilitated by the ERG). Long conversations about our experiences during meals or while sightseeing around the city provided an excellent opportunity to reflect on our lives and goals. The exchange of scientific understanding is always invaluable. Communicating with people so culturally different teaches us humility and greater self-awareness.

It also allows you to understand your location on the map of the world and in space. Finally, it teaches that what is objectively good is not always good in reality. And what’s bad is not only bad. Indeed, there is more than just gray.

Forging lasting friendships through intercultural experiences

What is the result of all these experiences? First, I teach Intercultural Competences at my university, The Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw. It is in the form of workshops and is aimed at students of education of all years and nationalities.

Apart from fruitful intercultural cooperation, I have gained unforgettable experiences and friendships. I discovered that there is more than a Polish educational space, that dumplings are not only eaten in Poland because they can also be eaten in Argentina (as Empanadas). The concept of marriage can vary between continents and countries, and collective memory has become an inspiring research topic.

It is impossible to develop intercultural competences without experience with OTHERS. We will never know who we truly are without exposure to foreign cultures. We will never appreciate our country and culture without knowing others. If you want to be an outstanding teacher or scientist, you must have intercultural experience.

Developing intercultural competences through communing with others is a beautiful relationship. Maybe a bit turbulent at first and bringing a bit of fear, but in the end, giving a great sense of satisfaction, security, and fulfilment.

References and Further Reading

What is Erasmus+? European Commission: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/about_en (05.06.2021)

Curriculum for Primary School in Poland: https://podstawaprogramowa.pl/files/D2017000035601.pdf (09.06.2021)

R. Flowers, Ethnic minority education in Viet Nam: challenges and opportunities during COVID-19 outbreak, https://www.unicef.org/vietnam/stories/ethnic-minority-education-viet-nam-challenges-and-opportunities-during-covid-19-outbreak (04.06.2021)

E. Pachina, My Vietnamese Experience: Challenges for English Learners in Vietnam,

https://www.teflcourse.net/blog/my-vietnamese-experience-challenges-for-english-learners-in-vietnam-ittt-tefl-blog/ (05.06.2021).

M. J. Bennett, 1986, 1993, 2002, 2005, 2011, A Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, The Intercultural Development Research Institute: https://www.idrinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/FILE_Documento_Bennett_DMIS_12pp_quotes_rev_2011.pdf (05.06.2021).

AAlborg Univeristy, Denamark: https://www.ccp.aau.dk/ (05.06.2021).

Promoting Emerging Researchers: https://eera-ecer.de/about-eera/promoting-emerging-researchers/ecer-conference-bursaries/ (05.06.2021)

M. J. Bennett, Becoming interculturally competent. (In): J.S. Wurzel (Ed.), Toward Multiculturalism: A Reader in Multicultural Education. Newton, MA: Intercultural Resource Corporation, 2004.

Gu, Intercultural Experience and Teacher Professional Development, (in:) RELC Journal; Volume 36, Issue 1, April 2005, pp. 5–22.

Further Reading

Bennett, M. J., & Wiseman, R. (2003). Measuring intercultural sensitivity: The Intercultural Development Inventory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 27(4), 421-443.

Koester, J., & Lustig, M. W. (2015). Intercultural communication competence: Theory, measurement, and application. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, 20-21

Martin, J. N. (2015). Revisiting intercultural communication competence: Where to go from here. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, 6-8.

Minzaripov R. G., Fakhrutdinova A. V., ,Mardakhaev L. V., Volenko O. I., ,Varlamova E. Y. (2020) Multicultural Educational Approach Influence on Student’s Development. International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 9, 1-5.

Savicki V. (2008). Developing Intercultural Competence and Transformation: Theory, Research, and Application in International Education, Stylus Publishing; Illustrated edition.

Fostering Cultural Creativity in Foreign Language Classrooms

by Dilara Özel, Ayşegül Yurtsever | Emerging Researchers' Group

As language is one of the prominent ways in which people express their cultures, language classrooms cannot be isolated from the teaching of cultures. In addition to four basic skills of language, which are listening, speaking, writing, and reading, culture is suggested to be regarded as the fifth skill of language classroom (Kramsch, 1993). Culture can be defined as concepts carrying historical roots represented through symbols, characters, or interactions in the daily lives of people (Geertz, 1973).

Culture comes from the Latin word colere, meaning to cultivate, which implies developing and pursuing common goals. It entails being a part of a group that shares a mutual past, collective thinking, and a language (Kramsch, 1998).

Using language activities to help student develop a multicultural understanding

While the main emphasis of the language lesson is generally on the culture of the target language, providing a perspective through students’ own culture helps them to develop multicultural understanding. When the students recognize and evaluate the values of their own culture and the target culture, they can better adapt to cultural differences and do not have a sense of intimidation or alienation (Byram, Lloyd & Schneider, 1995; Byram, Holmes & Savvides, 2013).

UNESCO (2017) highlights culture as one of the key steps to consider while developing textbooks and materials. Knowing the culture helps the learner gain perspective and better communicate out of the classroom context. However, developing cultural awareness is not a task that can be handled quickly through a few activities, books, or exercises when limited exposure to language is taken into consideration during foreign language learning. Cultural diversity needs to be represented through content, images, depictions of genders, races, and religions. If teachers design materials themselves, they need to pay attention to such inclusive elements.

Using digital tools in foreign language lessons to improve cultural awareness

Increasing use of digital media positively affects learning about culture in language classrooms as students can work on the target language while practising their 21st-century skills. Language classrooms may not always have a multicultural structure if the students come from the same background. By integrating multimedia and web tools in the classroom, learners can reach out to peers from different countries, share their experiences in practising the language and overcome some of the challenges they face while learning. Interactions through social networking platforms, emails, web 2.0 tools, recordings, and video conferences with target language speakers are among contemporary ways to improve cultural awareness and connection (Murray & Bolinger, 2001;Wu, Marek & Chen, 2013).

Teachers can help the students get to know the culture and provide a network to make them witness a culturally diverse setting. Teachers should pave the way for creating a harmonious classroom, as is indicated in the photo above, welcoming all races, ethnicities, religions, gender identities, sexual orientations, abilities, and disabilities.

Practical tips for teachers to promote cultural diversity in foreign language classrooms

Nowadays, language teachers try to focus more on communicative techniques and blend them with process and product-based instructions (Richards, 2006). Projects, portfolios, learning journals, and collaborative works are popular in designing learner-centered lessons. While giving such assignments, teachers can encourage the use of authentic materials that represent different ways of life and communicative styles. Even if there is no access to technological resources, adapting lesson plans, curriculums, and materials to implement cultural teaching can be a good solution.

In addition to using coursebooks or teacher-made instructional materials, integrating different teaching resources allows student autonomy to have dynamic learning of culture in language classrooms.

Here are 12 simple ways of familiarizing students with cultures and fostering cultural creativity:

greeting each other in various languages in the morning
reading about or bringing realia like food, clothing, crafts or any kind of daily objects from different cultures
playing music from other cultures and doing some dictation activities with lyrics
bringing in authentic materials like newspaper or magazine articles, posters about the lesson topic of the week and creating a bulletin board in the classroom or a page on portfolio websites
encouraging students to display learning journals, diaries or making posters out of them to display on the bulletin boards or portfolio websites
inviting or video conferencing with a native speaker or a target language speaker who also has proficient knowledge about the culture
communicating online with penpals from the target culture
introducing and practising cultural etiquettes
practising non-verbal cues like facial expressions or gestures from the target culture
writing collaborative online blogs, recording podcasts or videos about cultural elements
celebrating the special days or festivals of target cultures along with the ones in local culture to embrace diversity and awareness
organizing a cultural day in which students introduce concepts or materials from the target cultures

Teachers often want to focus on teaching culture, but they may not know how to implement the cultural content in the lessons or may experience other constraints like lack of material, time, or planning (Castro, Sercu & Méndez García, 2004; Young & Sachdev, 2011). Taking simple steps to engage in activities like the ones suggested above can help boost interest in cultural topics and raise cultural awareness. Such a positive classroom atmosphere and the dynamic between students and teachers promote cultural awareness for improved interaction.

References

Byram, M., Holmes, P., & Savvides, N. (2013). Intercultural communicative competence in foreign language education: Questions of theory, practice and research. The Language Learning Journal, 41(3), 251-253. doi:10.1080/09571736.2013.83634

Byram, M., Lloyd, K., & Schneider, R. (1995). Defining and describing ‘cultural awareness’. The Language Learning Journal,12(1), 5-8. doi:10.1080/09571739585200321

Castro, P., Sercu, L., & Méndez García, M. C. (2004). Integrating language‐and‐culture teaching: An investigation of Spanish teachers’ perceptions of the objectives of foreign language education. Intercultural Education, 15(1), 91-104. doi:10.1080/1467598042000190013

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Murray, G. L., & Bollinger, D. J. (2001). Developing Cross-Cultural Awareness: Learning Through the Experiences of Others.TESL Canada Journal, 19(1), 62-72. doi:10.18806/tesl.v19i1.920

Wu, W. V., Marek, M., & Chen, N. (2013). Assessing cultural awareness and linguistic competency of EFL learners in a CMC-based active learning context. System, 41(3), 515-528. doi:10.1016/j.system.2013.05.004

Richards, J. C. (2006). Communicative language teaching today. New York: Cambridge University Press.

UNESCO. (2017). Making textbook content inclusive: A focus on religion, gender, and culture. Paris

Young, T. J., & Sachdev, I. (2011). Intercultural communicative competence: Exploring English language teachers’ beliefs and practices. Language Awareness, 20(2), 81-98. doi:10.1080/09658416.2010.540328

Tricky Physics: What’s Fun Got To Do With It?

by Emily Dowdeswell and Katherine Langford | Emerging Researchers' Group, NW 3 Curriculum Innovation

When Katherine Langford spoke to six GCSE Physics teachers about the challenges encountered by children in the classroom, they all mentioned the use of fun approaches to learning. Thanks to The Open University’s spaces for interdisciplinary conversations between doctoral students, this caught Emily Dowdeswell’s attention. Emily is currently researching children’s perceptions of ‘fun’ in learning within the RUMPUS research group. While fun is often mentioned in interview data, the concept itself is typically taken for granted, or at face value. Are education researchers and practitioners missing a trick by not engaging with “fun” more deeply?

Should studying Physics be more fun? Or is fun simply too inconsequential for ‘hard’ subjects like Physics? The teachers interviewed engage their students by making Physics more fun and approachable. One teacher said, “I feel strongly that if children aren’t enjoying a lesson, they’re not going to learn it. If the class are bored stiff by what you’re doing, nothing is going in”.

What Makes Physics Tricky?

Still taken from video by Katherine Langford

It’s no secret that some Physics topics are particularly tricky for students to understand. Mukesh Tekwani, a retired college teacher with 35 years of experience, discussed this in his 2020 blog post, arguing that once you know why students find topics difficult, you can work your way to make them easy, interesting, and useful. So, why is Physics often tricky to students?

All the teachers interviewed mentioned three topics – electricity, forces, and radioactivity – that students frequently find tricky. However, identifying why these topics are tricky was more problematic. Analysing the interviews revealed 55 interconnected and subtle factors that the teachers discussed as barriers to students learning Physics. These included:

Misconceptions are difficult to get rid of as students often reject scientifically accurate concepts in preference of keeping their own incorrect ideas
Many Physics concepts are abstract or difficult to picture
Past teaching (particularly at primary school) can cause misconceptions
Students do not have the Maths skills needed
Students often fail to make links between related concepts
Misconceptions can be caused by language (e.g., the nucleus of an atom being confused with the nucleus of a cell in Biology)
Misconceptions can be caused by popular culture, like films
Simple concepts can link to difficult concepts
Physics concepts are often counterintuitive and conflict with students’ everyday experiences
Even scientists don’t fully understand some concepts yet

Still taken from video by Katherine Langford

Several of the 55 factors related to students’ attitudes towards Physics. Two of the main attitude factors were that Physics is hard and that Physics is boring. According to one teacher, students who find Physics difficult sometimes “automatically think that they can’t do it”. Often students believe Physics is the hardest of the sciences. Some convince themselves Physics is difficult before they enter the classroom. Two teachers discussed how students switch off from learning if they do not see the point of the lesson. This attitude is particularly evident amongst students who have decided not to continue with Physics beyond GCSE.

Still taken from video by Katherine Langford

So, many complex and interrelated factors affect Physics learning. Student attitudes regarding Physics being difficult and boring negatively impact their learning. A study by Jennifer DeWit, Louise Archer, and Julie Moote explores what insights might be gained from students themselves. Their study confirms the influence of cultural assumptions around Physics leads many students to conclude that Physics ‘is not for me’. Highlighting that participation in post-compulsory Physics increasingly matters for both economic and equity reasons, they concluded that making changes to the way Physics is taught and experienced in the classroom was a priority.

Using Fun to Change Attitudes to Physics

The teachers interviewed use fun experiments and demonstrations to change how students experience Physics. Several teachers mentioned collecting resources – particularly videos and online materials – to aid student understanding in an enjoyable way. Another strategy involved offering real-life examples to demonstrate that Physics is relevant to their everyday life. The teachers invest in these practices– that are often time-consuming – because they feel student enjoyment is linked to their motivation which impacts their understanding. So, is their faith in fun approaches to learning justified by research? What evidence is there to show fun is having any impact at all?

Peter Gray noticed the concept of ‘fun’ emerging repeatedly during his time as Research Fellow of the Early Professional Learning (EPL) project. He described a broader trend to attach fun to Physics without any meaningful engagement into its usefulness as a concept to teachers. Gray argued that fun played a part in the classroom ecology of teaching and learning whether teachers invested in its creation or not. The study underlined that fun was missing from the language of educational policymakers, and that fun was often positioned as disruptive. Fun was linked to intrinsic motivation and could be combined with effective learning as the antithesis to boring, ineffective learning. Even typically hard subjects could be fun, so that the teaching rather than the topic was crucial.

The debate regarding the usefulness of fun is reflected in a 2020 study into fun in online learning. The majority of students agreed that enjoyment, happiness and fun were important to effective learning. Yet, 19% of students also agreed that fun activities can get in the way of learning. Like Gray, Ale Okada and Kieron Sheehy discussed how fun can be positioned as transgressive, embraced by some but seen as an unnecessary distraction by those who adopt traditional transmission views of learning. This highlights the need for further research to ensure that well intentioned attempts to make learning fun don’t backfire and cause students to become less engaged.

Image by Katherine Langford

All six teachers interviewed noted that student attitudes towards Physics influenced their learning. They are clearly aware of the importance of student enjoyment and its link to motivation and are prepared to invest in potentially time-consuming activities despite the pressures on their time.

However, fun is under-researched, as past classroom research has shown that what teachers think is fun is not necessarily the same as what students find fun. Nor do we know what the impact of fun is clearly. While the interviews are a preliminary study, the findings resonate with the wider literature. So what do these teachers now need from education research? How can we support them to change perceptions about Physics? Perhaps we need to challenge our perceptions of fun being frivolous and convince leadership and policymakers to allow teachers the time to invest in fun.

Emily Dowdeswell

2nd Year PhD Student

Emily Dowdeswell is approaching the end of her first year of doctoral research at the Open University’s Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS).

Her area of study includes the intersections between anthropology, the arts, creativity and education.

You can find out more about Emily’s research at http://wels.open.ac.uk/rumpus or on Twitter https://twitter.com/intracommons

Katherine Langford

PhD student at the Open University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS)

Katherine Langford, BSc (Hons), MBPsS, is a third-year

Katherine Langford

part-time PhD student at the Open University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). She is researching how secondary school students develop an understanding of especially tricky Physics topics including what intuitive theories, common problems, and misconceptions they have.
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0080-6023

References and Further Reading

DeWitt, J., Archer, L. & Moote, J. (2019) “15/16-Year-Old Students’ Reasons for Choosing and Not Choosing Physics at A Level”. International Journal of Science and Math Education 17, 1071–1087. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-018-9900-4

Gray, P. “Fun in theory and practice: new teachers, pupil opinion and classroom environments” in McNally, J., & Blake, A. (Eds.). (2009). Improving Learning in a Professional Context: A Research Perspective on the New Teacher in School (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203867020

Okada, A., & Sheehy, K. (2020). “Factors and Recommendations to Support Students’ Enjoyment of Online Learning with Fun: A Mixed Method Study During COVID-19”. Frontiers in Education (Lausanne), 5, Frontiers in education (Lausanne), 2020-12-01, Vol.5. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.584351

Taber, K.S. (2014) Student Thinking and Learning in Science: Perspectives on the Nature and Development of Learners’ Ideas. Routledge.

Chitson, S. (2014) “Why I won’t be studying physics at A-level”. The Guardian retrieved at https://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2014/jul/03/why-i-am-dropping-physics-a-level-student

If you want to find out more about teaching tricky topics, then you may be interested in this free OpenLearn course.

Artificial Intelligence in Student Assessment: What is our Trajectory?

by Dr Bengi Birgili | Emerging Researchers' Group, NW 9 Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement

Bengi Birgili is a Research Assistant in the Mathematics Education Department at MEF University in Istanbul. Here she shares her research and insights into the development of Artificial Intelligence applications in the field of education and explains the current trajectory of AI in the Turkish education system.

As a mathematics teacher and doctoral candidate in educational sciences, I closely follow the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in the field of education. Innovations in AI become outdated within a few months because of the rapidly increasing studies on image processing, speech recognition, natural language processing, robotics, expert systems, machine learning, and reasoning. With Google, Facebook, and IBM AI studies being open source, these companies help speed up developments.

If we think of education as a chair, the legs are the four essential parts that keep it standing: that is, the student, the teacher, the teaching process, and measurement-evaluation – the four basic elements of education. Key areas of AI for education are determining the right strategies, making functional decisions, and coming up with the most appropriate designs for the education and training process. I believe there are many areas in which teachers can work in cooperation with Artificial Intelligence systems in the future.

Human behaviour modelling

The main focus of AI studies worldwide is human behavior modelling. The relationship between how humans model thinking and how we can, therefore, accurately measure and evaluate students is still a subject of exploration. Essentially, the question is: how do humans learn, and how can we teach this to AI expert systems?

Presently, AI expert systems learn in three ways:

supervised learning
unsupervised learning
reinforcement learning

As an educator, whenever I hear these categories, I think of the conditional learning and reward-punishment methods we learn about in educational sciences. These methods, which are prevalent at the most fundamental level in the individual teaching and learning process, are central to the design of AI systems being developed today, which are developed on the behavioristic approach in learning theories.

Just as in the classroom environment, where we can reinforce a students’ behavior by using a reward, praise, or acknowledgment in line with the behaviorist approach while teaching knowledge or skills so that we can strengthen the frequency of the behavior and increase the likelihood that how the response will occur. In a similar vein, an agent or a machine which is under development learns from the consequences of its actions.

AI in the Measurement-Evaluation Process

One area for the use of natural language processing in the measurement-evaluation process is the evaluation of open-ended examinations. In Turkey, large-scale assessment consists mostly of multiple-choice examinations, chosen for their broad scope, objective scoring, high reliability, and ease of evaluation. On the other hand, open-ended examinations are more challenging because they measure students’ higher-level thinking skills in much more detail than multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, true-false, and short-answer questions.

Education systems in other countries make more use of open-ended items because they allow students to thoroughly use their reading comprehension skills. Also, students are able to demonstrate their knowledge in their own words and use multiple solution strategies, which is a better test of their content knowledge. But these open-ended items do not just measure students’ knowledge of a topic; at the same time, they mediate between higher-level thinking skills such as cognitive strategies and self-discipline. This is an area in which AI studies have begun to appear in the educational literature.

Countries using open-ended items in new generation assessment systems are France, the Netherlands, Australia, and, in particular, the United States and the UK. These systems provide teachers, parents, and policymakers with the opportunity to monitor student progress based on student performance as well as student success. The development of Cognitive Diagnostic Models (CDM) and Computerized Adaptive Tests (CAT) changed testing paradigms. These models classify student response models in a test into a series of characteristics related to different hierarchically defined mastery levels. Another development is immersive virtual environments such as EcoMUVE, which can make stealth/invisible assessments, evaluating students’ written responses and automatically creating follow-up questions.

AI in Student Assessment in Turkey

artificial intelligence education turkey

It is a very broad concept that we call “artificial intelligence [AI] in education”. To simplify it, we can define it as a kind of expert system that sometimes takes the place of teachers (i.e., the intelligent tutors) by making pedagogical decisions about the student in the teaching or measurement-evaluation process. Sometimes the system assists by analyzing the student in-depth in the process, enabling them to interact with the system better. It aims to guide and support students. To make more computational, precise, and rigorous decisions in the education process, the field of AI and Learning Sciences collaborate and contribute to the development of adaptive learning environments and more customized, inclusive, flexible, effective tools by analyzing how learning occurs with its external variables.

Turkey is a country of tests and testing. Its education system relies on selection and placement examinations. However, developments in educational assessment worldwide include individual student follow-up, formative assessments, alternative assessments, stealth assessments, and learning analytics, and Turkey has yet to find its own trajectory for introducing AI in student assessment.

However, the particular structure of the Turkish language makes it more difficult than in other countries to design, model, develop, and test AI systems – which explains the limited number of studies being carried out. The development of such systems depends on big data, so it is necessary to collect a lot of qualified student data in order to pilot deep learning systems. Yet the Monitoring and Assessment of Academic Skills report of 2015-2018 noted that 66% of Turkish students do not understand cause and effect relationships in reading.

In AI testing, students are first expected to grasp what they read and then to express what they know in answering questions, to express themselves, to come up with solutions, and to be able to use metacognitive skills. The limited number of students who can clearly demonstrate these skills in Turkey limits the amount of qualified data to which studies have access. There is a long way to go in order to train AI systems with qualified data and to adapt to the complexities of the Turkish language. In short, Turkey is not yet on a trajectory for introducing AI for education measurement and evaluation – we are still working to get ourselves on an appropriate trajectory. We are still oscillating through the universe. However, there are signs that the future in this area will be designed faster, addressing the questions I have raised.

The Outlook for AI in Student Assessment

artificial intelligence future education

While designing and developing such systems, it should be remembered that students and teachers also need to adapt to the system. Their readiness to do so will help us measure the quality of education in general as well as the level of students’ knowledge and skills in particular. Authentic in-class examinations and national and international large-scale assessments should serve the same purpose. In the future, we will need AI systems to play a greater role in generating and categorizing questions and evaluating student responses. And they need to do this is a system whose main goal must be to provide a learning process that positively supports the curiosity and ability of all our students

Bengi Birgili

Research Assistant in the Mathematics Education Department at MEF University, Istanbul.

Bengi Birgili is a research assistant in the Mathematics Education Department at MEF University, Istanbul. She experienced in research at the University of Vienna. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Sciences Curriculum and Instruction Program at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara. Her research interests focus on curriculum development and evaluation, instructional design, in-class assessment. She received the Emerging Researchers Bursary Winners award at ECER 2017 for her paper titled “A Metacognitive Perspective to Open-Ended Questions vs. Multiple-Choice.”

In 2020, a co-authored research became one of the 4 accepted studies among Early-Career Scholars awarded by the International Testing Commission (ITC) Young Scholar Committee in the UK [Postponed to 2021 Colloquium due to COVID-19].

In Jan 2020, she completed the Elements of AI certification offered by the University of Helsinki.

Researchgate:https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bengi-Birgili-2

Twitter: @bengibirgili

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengibirgili/

ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2990-6717

Medium: https://bengibirgili.medium.com

The Promise of Donna Haraway’s Philosophy: Knotting Together Better Educational Futures

by Taylor, Fairchild, Zarabadi and Moxnes | Emerging Researchers' Group, NW 13 Philosophy of Education, NW 33 Gender and Education

As we have grappled with critical questions in our research and teaching, all of us contributing to this blog have been energised by Donna Haraway’s work. This blog explores the promise of Haraway’s philosophy for knowledge, learning and education. Donna Haraway’s philosophy offers conceptual and practical resources for navigating the complexities of contemporary educational problems.

Reconceptualising knowledge, learning and education with Donna Haraway

Haraway’s major early intervention was to challenge traditional notions of objectivity – which she called ‘the God trick’ (Haraway, 1988). She argued that objectivity was a Western masculinist, patriarchal tradition, which presumed researchers could be impartial, observe and produce ‘Truth’. This damaging fallacy has conferred epistemological status on science delegitimizing many other ways of knowing. Haraway opposes ‘the God trick’ with the concept and practice of ‘situated knowledges’ which pose a feminist critique demonstrating that knowledge practices are ‘political’ and that some knowledges have been (illegitimately) disqualified by dominant science. Recognising that all knowledge is located and relies on partial perspectives allows for the inclusion of lived material realities and feelings that shape our educational experiences.

The concept and practice of learning is central to Haraway’s oeuvre. Learning happens in the world, attending to our being-in-relation with the world and other species. Learning is an enactment: she calls it a ‘corporeal cognitive practice’ (Haraway, 2016a: 277), a material semiotic co-composition of relational acts of thinking and doing. Learning comes about through specific, mundane, embodied acts of communication that forge partial connections across the differences (of race, class, geography or species) that divide us.

Haraway’s philosophy, and its promise for education, demonstrates the need to move beyond human exceptionalism. It is an urgent call for us to take responsibility for how humans have produced alarming natural-cultural conditions, and to take action to address these. The task of shaping better human/planetary futures has been recognised as core to education as an ethical-political project (Strand, 2020). Haraway’s philosophy offers an affirmative biopolitics that can be useful in extending curricula on global education (Barratt Hacking and Taylor, 2020). Her transdisciplinary thinking, feminist situated ethics, and situated politics of knowledge might be the basis for renewing educational approaches for composing more relational futures.

How has Haraway’s philosophy been influential in our research?

Carol has taken up Haraway’s philosophy outlined in When Species Meet (2008) to rethink what comes to matter in educational relations. Her work addresses the question: How can multispecies knowings and matterings give us hope to build a better world for the future? Haraway (2008: 134) uses multispecies thinking to argue for ‘compassionate action’ to promote well-being for individuals, species and communities. Carol has considered how such thinking can be the foundation for different forms of educative flourishing by fashioning education as a form of posthuman Bildung that bring new possibilities for knowledge/praxis (Taylor, 2016). Carol has also considered how nonhuman-human relations can centre around play and pleasure in ways which make consequential differences in our lives as academics (Taylor, 2017).

Nikki (Fairchild, 2017) has drawn on The Cyborg Manifesto (1991) to reconceptualise young children’s gender identities. Haraway uses the cyborg both as figuration and ontological position to explore the breakdown and fluidity of technological, natural and cultural bodily boundaries. Nikki’s research shows how the cyborg figuration ‘moves beyond traditional notions of the feminine body’ (Benozzo et al., 2019: 89). Her doctoral thesis considered how girls are expected to perform and act in certain ways (Fairchild, 2017) and how the cyborg can ‘produce[s] new articulations of gender at the same time as making traditional gendered societal roles ‘available’’ (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020: 520). The cyborg subverts gender and provides new political possibilities for women.

In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway posits ‘lived storying’ (2016b: 150) as ‘the most powerful practice for… becoming-with each other’. Shiva has written of co-storytelling as a way of making-together, co-theorizing and co-enduring (Niccolini, Zarabadi & Ringrose, 2018). Lived storying foregrounds the care-full response-ability required when researching participants’ experiences. Towards the end of her PhD thesis writing, the COVID pandemic put the world into multiple lockdowns and made racism intelligible in new ways. Shiva’s PhD participants are from British Bangladeshi backgrounds, they live in overcrowded households and, like other BAME populations, suffer disproportionate social and educational inequalities (Booth, 2020). Their COVID storyings speak of histories of exclusion, troubled times and uncertain futures.

‘No adventurer should leave home without a sack’ writes Haraway (2016b: 40) in Staying with the Trouble. Haraway learned about the carrier bag theory of storytelling from Ursula Le Guin (1989). During her PhD, Anna experimented with a Bag-lady positionality (Moxnes, 2019), figuring herself as an (elderly) woman collecting whatever she found carrying everything with her in bags. For Anna, the carrier bag theory became a story of research, a methodological and methodic concept, a feminist force enabling her to do research differently. Carrier bag research provides a compass ‘to think otherwise’ – it changes our understandings of the world we live in and how we make meaning about it.

In our work together, Haraway’s philosophy gives us the courage to find philosophical and practical ways of troubling dominant educational thinking, research and writing (Zarabadi et al., 2019). Haraway’s philosophy informs our collaborative research experiments in theory, method and practice enabling us to continue to think of new ways to produce academic knowledge differently.

Some Final Thoughts

Haraway’s books are not easy, but they repay the focus, immersion and concentration needed. Haraway makes you think about how you can do research and teaching differently and in more creative ways. Her writing is an encouragement to slow down, ponder, not rush to action too quickly, and to focus on details and specificities. She offers intellectual resources to contest neoliberal imperatives of competitive individualism, performativity and measurement. Haraway’s philosophy provides a stimulus to new, creative, experimental ways of producing knowledge; her generative, ecological, life-affirming thinking offers important insights for reshaping educational thinking to contest the damages of the Anthropocene.

Citations and Further Reading

Biography of Donna Haraway

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective – Haraway, 1988

Situated Knowledges – Monika Rogowska-Stangret

Manifestly Haraway – Haraway, 2016

Rethinking Ethical-Political Education – Strand, Torill

Reconceptualizing international mindedness in and for a posthuman world – Barratt Hacking and Taylor, 2020

When Species Meet – Haraway, 2008

Is a posthumanist Bildung possible? Reclaiming the promise of Bildung for contemporary higher education – Taylor, 2016

Producing Pleasure in the Contemporary University – Taylor, 2017

Earthworm disturbances: the reimagining of relations in Early Childhood Education and Care – Fairchild, 2017

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (The Cyborg Manifesto) – Haraway, 1991

Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post‐qualitative re‐turnings – Benozzo et al., 2019: 89

Towards a posthumanist institutional ethnography: viscous matterings and gendered bodies – Taylor and Fairchild, 2020

Staying with the Trouble – Haraway, 2016

Spinning Yarns: Affective Kinshipping as Posthuman Pedagogy – Niccolini, Zarabadi & Ringrose, 2018

BAME groups hit harder by Covid-19 than white people, UK study suggests

Dancing at the Edge of the World – Ursula Le Guin

Working Across/Within/Through Academic Conventions of Writing a Ph.D.: Stories About Writing a Feminist Thesis – Moxnes, 2019

Feeling Medusa: Tentacular Troubling of Academic Positionality, Recognition and Respectability – Zarabadi et al., 2019

Authors

Professor Carol A. Taylor

Professor of Higher Education and Gender in the Department of Education, University of Bath

Professor Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender in the Department of Education at the University of Bath where she leads the Reimagining Education for Better Futures research group. Carol’s research focuses on the entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space and ethics in higher education and utilizes trans- and interdisciplinary posthumanist and feminist materialist theories and methodologies. Carol co-edited the journal Gender and Education for 7 years (2016-2023), and currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Teaching in Higher Education, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning and Journal of Posthumanism. Her latest books are J. B. Ulmer, C. Hughes, M. Salazar Pérez & C. A. Taylor (Eds.). (2024) The Routledge International Handbook of Transdisciplinary Feminist Research and Methodological Praxis; Fairchild, N., Taylor, C.A., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Koro, M., & Elmenhorst, C. (2022). Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events. London: Routledge; and Taylor, C. A. and Bayley, A. (Eds.) (2019) Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dr Nikki Fairchild

Associate Professor in Creative Methodologies and Education at the School of Education, Languages and Linguistics, University of Portsmouth.

Dr Nikki Fairchild is an Associate Professor in Creative Methodologies and Education at the School of Education, Languages and Linguistics, University of Portsmouth. Her research is theoretically informed by critical feminist materialist, posthumanist, and agential realist theory. She employs creative methodologies to disturb knowledge production and relationality by entangling materiality, gender, place-spaces, time, temporality and (early) childhoods. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Posthumanism and on the Editorial Boards of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Norland Educate Research Journal, and Gender and Education. Her latest book is Fairchild, N., Taylor, C.A., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Koro, M., & Elmenhorst, C. (2022). Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events. Routledge.

Dr Shiva Zarabadi

Dr Shiva Zarabadi holds a Ph.D. in Education, Gender, Feminist New Materialism and Posthumanism from UCL Institute of Education. Her research interests include feminist new materialism, posthumanism and intra-actions of matter, time, affect, space, humans and more-than-humans. She uses walking and photo-diary methodologies to map relational materialities in ordinary practices. She is the co-editor of the book Towards Posthumanism in Education: Theoretical Entanglements and Pedagogical Mappings (Routledge) and the author of ‘Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment’ in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies and ‘Watery assemblages: the affective and material swimming-becomings of a Muslim girl’s queer body with nature’ in Australian Journal of Environmental Education.

Dr Anna Moxnes

Associate Professor, Department of Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE), University of South-Eastern Norway

Anna Rigmor Moxnes, PhD, is Associate Professor at the department of Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE), University of South-Eastern Norway and works as educator in pedagogy and mentoring. Her recent research-projects are ‘Children and animals relationships’, ‘Mentoring’ and ‘Teaching slowly’. She is inspired of feminist new materialism and post-human theories.

Her latest book is Moxnes, A.R., Wilhemsen, T., Øvreås, S.,Santan, M.O. & Aslanian T.K. (2022).

Barnehagelærerutdanning i endring – å forske på egen praksis i høyere utdanning.

[Early Childhood Teacher Education in Change - research on own practice in higher education].

Universitetsforlaget.

How to prepare for your first ERG conference

by Dr Estella Ferraro | DFG, Emerging Researchers' Group

The Emerging Researchers’ Group holds an annual conference, the Emerging Researchers’ Conference (ERG), preceding the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). We asked Estella Ferraro for some tips on preparing and attending your first ERG Conference.

Going to an international conference for the first time can be overwhelming and exciting at the same time. It is an excellent opportunity to meet fellow colleagues from all over the world – I have met colleagues from Europe but also from Australia, Asia, South America, and Africa. It also gives you feedback on your research from outside the own academic framework, which can really open your eyes to entirely new perspectives.

You can’t just show up on the first day of the conference. There are a number of preparations you should undertake, and some of them start months before the conference even takes place. Especially when planning to go to ECER for the first time, it is easy to lose track of the upcoming necessary deadlines. So here are some tips on how to prepare for your first (or second or third) ERG conference.

Deadlines and preparations in advance to the conference

The Proposal

Many reasons may have led you to want to attend the ERG conference. Perhaps the topic is of great interest to you, or you have always wanted to travel to the place ECER takes place that year, or maybe your supervisor asked you to come along. The first decision is if you wish to present yourself or if you are attending to watch, learn, and network. Both have their advantages: it can be very inspiring to participate for the first time without being nervous or stressed about your own presentation, especially if your funding permits that.

On the other hand, I would suggest that if you have a chance to present you should go for it! The ERG conference is a great place to practice your presentation skills and get helpful feedback on your research in an extremely friendly atmosphere on an international scale.

Submission usually starts in December before the conference and ends in January. You can find the current deadline here. This timeline is something you should keep in mind and plan for so you can write the proposal and hand it in in time.

Funding

With that in mind, you might also consider funding opportunities. There are many opportunities for travel grants and funding you can apply for (from EERA, your home country, or home university). It is worth researching the conditions and deadlines for funding opportunities so that you don’t miss a chance! Make sure you can get all necessary documents in time, especially if you need something from others who might take some time such as a recommendation letter.

Accommodation, Visa and Flights

Obviously, this won’t apply if the conference takes place digitally. In April review results are usually announced, and this is when things get real! It can be advisable to book accommodation even before results are announced if you have an option to cancel free of charge. ECER is a huge conference and often in small cities so affordable accommodation can be booked out quickly. Don’t leave this to the last minute. Similarly, if you need to apply for a visa, check the deadlines so you don’t miss anything.

Deadlines and Preparations Closer to the Conference

Preparing your Presentation

Once time draws closer to the conference, you should start preparing your paper if you have been accepted to present one. Here it is important that you don’t overload your presentation as timing can be tricky. Participants often want to include too much information, while often it’s better to keep it simple and clear. Don’t be scared about presenting in another language. Your English doesn’t have to be perfect and, in my experience, everyone at the ERG conference is really helpful even if you forget how to say something. If you have questions on your research or about something you’re stuck with, it’s fine to ask for that in the discussion too, so that you can really get the most from your experience and presentation at ECER.

Scheduling your conference

Look at the schedule and think about what interests you, and what you want to get out of the conference. Be prepared to pick out some sessions in advance but also accept that sometimes you might end up spontaneously changing your mind. Don’t overschedule yourself Leave some space for networking opportunities and meeting other academics as well.

Finally, all I can say is the emerging researcher conference is an amazing platform to learn, engage and network, so: Enjoy your time there!

Further Information

Find out more about the ERG Conference, including deadlines, programme, and accepted presentation formats on the EERA website.

Want to know what to expect? Have a look at the previous ECER and ERG conferences and check out our YouTube channel for videos of the ECER keynote sessions in 2020.

Dr Estella Ferraro

Dr Estella Ferraro (née Hebert) is a Post-Doc researcher at the Goethe University in Frankfurt at the chair for theory and history of education. She is also a co-convenor for the Emerging Researchers Group and for Network 6 Open Learning: Media, Environments, and Cultures of the European Educational Research Association (EERA). Her research interests focus on questions of media education including teaching and learning with new media, datafication and big data, digital surveillance, identity in the light of personal data, and questions of digital ethics. Her PhD thesis published under the title of „Willful Blindness – on the relationship of identity, agency and personal data“ exemplifies the intersection of a bildungs-theoretical perspective with post-digital theories that characterise Dr Ferraro as a researcher.

She has over six years of experience in teaching and researching media education and has worked and studied internationally. For more information on her research and work go to: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/55826755/Estella_Hebert

Posthumanism and Education

by Anna Kokko | Emerging Researchers' Group

The rapidly changing world and new challenges have led many of us to wonder if the current ways of understanding and organizing education are adequate. One emerging perspective in the field of education is posthumanism. Although posthumanism is often considered in a coherent-sounding way in many contexts, it is not a single, unified theory and it has been used in many areas of education. Its multiple voices can be interpreted in many ways – ways that cannot all be introduced in this short text.

In general, however, the common goal of the posthuman is to shake dualistic thinking and the dominant position of the humanism. This means that in posthuman thinking humans are not seen as privileged, and the focus is not on how something is but rather how and in what kind of socio-material relations it emerges.

What is the posthumanist approach?

Posthuman questions could be posed when discussing issues related to the relationships between human and non-human. This would include topics such as, for example, animal-human relationships or climate change.

Importantly, instead of thinking simply how humans use nature, the focus could be on what emerges when human and nature inter-act and intra-act (become) together. One of its most interesting perspectives of this time, in my opinion, is the becoming of physical space.

This approach stems, in this case in particular, from the concept of becoming as discussed by Karen Barad which has made visible the school social practices in time-space relationships. The concept functions as a so-called relational concept, in which human and non-human, such as matter and discourse, or social and material, are not separated, but rather focus on how through entanglement they become something new.

Not only what is but how it is becoming

In our study, we examined the social and material becomings in two schools which operated in open and flexible learning spaces. An examination of everyday events and processes concretely opened up how space (matter), discourse and social practice were shaped together. This was seen in situations where, for example, teachers and students negotiated new meaning for physical space and how it could be used. In these situations, space was not seen as fixed or given according to someone’s pre-determined (often political) agenda but actively shaped by its users. An active approach to space allowed for experiences of agency and ownership of one’s own learning, for both teachers and heterogeneous groups of students.

Examining the becoming of physical space also brought out broader perspectives. By recognizing of becoming rather than the static perception of space, we realized that changes over time should also be taken into account at the school level and more broadly in decision-making. From the point of view of using the space, it is as important to continue investing in the stages of rebuilding the space as it was to invest in the new school building as a one-time purchase. Investment can mean, for example, re-building the physical space, but also time for teachers co-planning or a sufficient number of teachers. Therefore, in order to understand the often messy everyday life of education, space cannot be confined to a static, already predetermined perspective, but must be viewed as situational, in relation to other situational and existing components (Massey, 1994; Barad, 2007).

From familiar to strange

As illustrated by the above example, posthumanist thinking can be used to explore the processes that are often left out, perhaps precisely because of their mundane and routine nature, hidden and excluded from research. Therefore, studying becoming can offer an opportunity to make the familiar strange. This familiar alienation, in turn, can open up new perspectives on extensively studied phenomena.

On the other hand, even the possibilities of posthumanism are often discussed I think it is important to understand also its incompleteness. Emphasizing the becoming of certain combinations automatically excludes others. Although in our study we found some answers, the study also left a number of questions. In other words, instead of being able to give comprehensive answers to phenomena, posthumanism draws its strength from illuminating phenomena from a particular alternative perspective, while inviting new perspectives to the debate.

Nor was the purpose of our research to present posthumanist thinking exhaustively, but rather to promote a discussion to what questions posthumanist thinking can find an answer. Although the posthumanist becoming has been associated with educational discussions, it is still in the margins of educational research. Is posthumanism thus something more than just a new post? Although posthuman thinking has its own challenges that would require its own writing, turning attention away from how something is at the moment to what human and non-human together become, offers an opportunity to understand more complex and messy worlds of education.

References and Further Reading

Barad, K. (2003). Posthuman performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs. Spring, 801–831.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kokko, A.K., Hirsto, L. From physical spaces to learning environments: processes in which physical spaces are transformed into learning environments. Learning Environ Res (2020).

Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage.

Anna Kokko

Second-year doctoral student in the University of Eastern Finland

Anna Kristiina Kokko works as a younger researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests related to the issues of posthumanist and new materialist theories. In her dissertation, she studies the becoming of agencies in comprehensive school settings.

Intercultural Translation through EERA and ERG

by María Angélica Mejía Cáceres | Emerging Researchers' Group

María Angélica Mejía Cáceres first heard of EERA and ECER via a post on the web about the summer school: Doctoral Studies in Environmental and Sustainability Education: Contextualizing the Process at the University of Cambridge. It was the first event that María Angélica attended where she needed to speak English all the time so it was a bit of a challenge. María Angélica agreed to write about her experiences, both at the summer school and her further engagement with EERA at the European Conference on Educational R esearch (ECER) in 2019.

The Summer School in Cambridge

When I got to the Cambridge summer school, I was excited to meet recognized environmental education researchers from around the world, and I was glad to see other doctoral students who were interested in similar topics. As a consequence of this summer school, I did my visiting research in Canada in 2017 with one of the professors who led the summer school in Cambridge. These experiences generated my interest to participate in the European Conference on Educational Research, so I submitted to present two papers and to receive the bursary. And it happened! I was a bursary winner, and my papers were accepted.

The European Conference for Educational Research

The ERC and ECER moment was as I expected because it enabled me to have a dialogue with various researchers, acquiring knowledge, readings, experiences, and participating in debates, and activities.

In addition, participation in this conference was an opportunity for cultural exchange, and to recognize Latin representation with dignity because we want to have a voice in different spaces.

In Latin America, we have discussions about how Europeans and North American countries made hierarchical impositions and colonization. In response, we have developed the epistemology of the south.

We have other realities, other problems, but we are generating knowledge too, from other local interests. I agree that sometimes certain communities, such as Latin people, and their research are considered inferior.

“The South is rather a metaphor for the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism on the global level, as well as for the resistance to overcoming or minimizing such suffering.”

– Santos Boaventura

I am glad that I was a bursary winner, alongside other people from the south. I interpreted it as a step to break discrimination and to be inclusive. And I don’t feel that this was just with the bursary.

I observed it during the whole event. I participated actively in the conference, workshops, network meeting, social events, and meeting others. I learned about education, but also about the cultures, and the similarities and differences between our realities.

I had high expectations about what I would find in the Conference, and I am glad to have found it to be a high level, in comparison with other events in which I have participated in the past. In the ERC, I listened to the interesting, critical, and constructive comments of the participants. It shows the commitment of EERA to emerging researchers.

This congress helped me to create new connections with emerging researchers from Poland, India, Kenya, Germany, Spain (fellow bursary winners). I was also able to establish connections with professors who have distinguished trajectories. I hope to consolidate more through collaborations in projects, writing papers, and more. That for me is awesome because as Santos Boaventura so fittingly put it:

“In order to bring together different knowledges without compromising their specificity, we need intercultural translation.”

– Santos Boaventura

The ERC and ECER permit the intercultural translation!

María Angélica Mejía-Cáceres

Doctor in Sciences and Health Education, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Maria Angélica Mejía-Cáceres is a doctor in Health and Sciences Education from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

She is a member of the research group Languages and Media in Science and Health Education at the university. She is also a member of the research group Science, Education and Diversity and the research group Science, Actions, and Greeting at the Universidad del Valle in Colombia.

Currently pos-doc at NUTES Science and Health Institute, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, she is doing research about climate change education.

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Reconceptualising knowledge, learning and education with Donna Haraway

How has Haraway’s philosophy been influential in our research?

Some Final Thoughts

Citations and Further Reading

Authors

Professor Carol A. Taylor

Dr Nikki Fairchild

Dr Shiva Zarabadi

Dr Anna Moxnes

Deadlines and preparations in advance to the conference

The Proposal

Funding

Accommodation, Visa and Flights

Deadlines and Preparations Closer to the Conference

Preparing your Presentation

Scheduling your conference

Further Information

Dr Estella Ferraro

What is the posthumanist approach?

Not only what is but how it is becoming

From familiar to strange

References and Further Reading

Anna Kokko

The Summer School in Cambridge

The European Conference for Educational Research

“The South is rather a metaphor for the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism on the global level, as well as for the resistance to overcoming or minimizing such suffering.”

“In order to bring together different knowledges without compromising their specificity, we need intercultural translation.”

María Angélica Mejía-Cáceres

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