Artificial Intelligence in Student Assessment: What is our Trajectory?

Artificial Intelligence in Student Assessment: What is our Trajectory?

by | 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 Innovations in AI become outdated within a few months because of the rapidly increasing studies on image processing, speech recognition, natural language processing, robotics, expert systems,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

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

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

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

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

by | 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 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 is Director of Research and leads the Learning, Pedagogy and Diversity Research cluster. Carol’s research focuses on the entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space and ethics in higher education and utilizes trans- and interdisciplinary feminist materialist and posthumanist theories and methodologies. She is currently exploring the relations between feminist praxis and quiet activism, women’s academic leadership and mentoring, and institutional power. She is engaged in various experiments in doing academic writing differently. Carol is co-editor of the journal Gender and Education. Her latest books are Taylor, C. A., Ulmer, J., and Hughes, C. (Eds.) (2020) Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice. London: Routledge and Taylor, C. A. and Bayley, A. (Eds.) (2019) Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research.

Dr Nikki Fairchild

Dr Nikki Fairchild

Associate Head (Research and Innovation), School of Education and Sociology, University of Portsmouth

Dr Nikki Fairchild is Associate Head (Research and Innovation), School of Education and Sociology, University of Portsmouth. Her research interests include posthumanist and material feminist theorizing to articulate more-than-human subjectivities in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Her recent research centres on place/space in classrooms and gardens, this has been enacted using walking-with methodologies. She is also part of any International collective which challenges the knowledge practice in conference spaces. The collective enacts arts-based research-creation workshops at conferences to consider how human, non-human and other-than-human bodies interact. The collective has recently been awarded a Special Commendation for the BERA Anna Craft Creativities in Education 2020 Prize.

Shiva Zarabadi

Shiva Zarabadi

PhD research candidate at UCL Institute of Education

Shiva Zarabadi is PhD research candidate at 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. In her PhD she uses walking and photo-diary methodologies to map these relational materialities. She is the co-editor of the book Feminist posthumanisms/ new materialisms and Education (Routledge 2019) and the leading author of the journal article “Feeling Medusa: Tentacular troubling of academic positionality, recognition and respectability” (2020) in Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, and chapters “Post-Threat Pedagogies: A Micro-Materialist Phantomatic Feeling within Classrooms in Post-Terrorist Times”(2020) in Mapping the Affective Turn in Education Theory, Research, and Pedagogies,  “Re-mattering media affects: pedagogical interference into pre-emptive counter-terrorism culture” in Education Research and The Media(2018) and a co-authored article ‘Spinning Yarns: affective kinshipping as posthuman pedagogy in Parallax(2018).

Dr Anna Moxnes

Dr Anna Moxnes

Associate Professor at the department of Pedagogy, University of Southeastern Norway

Dr. Anna R. Moxnes is an Associate Professor at the Department of Pedagogy at the University of Southeastern Norway. Anna’s research interest is feminism and new materialist perspectives. Her recent projects involve both higher education and early childhood practices, including children and animals, and children and aesthetics, in Early Childhood Education and Care institutions, but also classroom teaching and materiality in Early Childhood Teacher Education ECTE) and research connected to education of mentors for students in teacher education. These research interests brought her in contact with international researchers, which have expanded her professional network and her writing experiences. Right now, she is co-editing a book about research-projects in ECTE in Norway. In 2019, she was honored with a Norwegian national prize for teaching.

How to prepare for your first ERG conference

How to prepare for your first ERG conference

by | 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

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

Posthumanism and Education

by | 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

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

Intercultural Translation through EERA and ERG

by | 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 Research (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

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.

Supporting a European Community of Emerging Researchers

Supporting a European Community of Emerging Researchers

by | Emerging Researchers' Group

In her first post, Saneeya Qureshi told us a bit about the history, goals and achievements of the Emerging Researchers’ Group. We wanted to know a bit more about Saneeya’s personal experience with EERA and the ERG.

Since 2015, I have been involved with EERA in my role as Link Convenor of the Emerging Researchers’ Group (ERG). Before this, I participated annually in the ECER Conferences and EERA Summer Schools as a Masters and then a PhD student. 

When I first took on the role of ERG Convenor, I worked closely with the EERA Secretary-General to review the general regulations relating to the ERG. One of the outcomes in terms of managing the operations of the ERG has been the formative element to the manner in which ERG co-convenors are engaged.

I initiated a mentoring programme during the ERC Best Paper Award review process, so as to ensure that the new co-convenors were mentored by experienced colleagues. I combined this with an extensive stakeholder consultation of past and present ERG reviewers, to redesign a more constructive double-blind peer review process for the ERC Best Paper Award. Colleagues from EERA Council are also involved in both the ERC Best Paper Award Competition and EERA Bursary Review process.

In terms of further supporting the development of emerging researchers who are not co-convenors, the ERC proposal review mentorship process via meta-reviews on Conftool was introduced in 2016. An increasing number of emerging researchers are mentored via this process each year, and to date 40 emerging researchers have been mentored in this regard. Since 2018, I have chaired a new system for the EERA Conference Bursary Review process, including clearer and more transparent application and review guidelines.

I am particularly proud of the developmental and formative nature of the ERG’s activities that I lead, and the collaborative approach that I have introduced in relation to managing the ERG. I work with the ERG co-conveners actively and encourage them to take on roles of responsibility whilst providing support.

I have also worked closely with the Senior Mentor, EERA Office and EERA Council across various ERG activities, including many new ones that I have introduced, such as an extended, specialised formative feedback process led by the network convenors on papers that are not shortlisted for the Best Paper Award.

 These collaborations underpin and augment numerous successful initiatives associated with the ERG that means we have an exponential increase year on year of emerging researchers’ enriched participation across the various activities.

However, I recognise that whilst these successful activities currently form a diverse and exciting offering for emerging researchers, there is still work to be done. Therefore, the ERG continues to work with researchers, supervisors and local institutions to ensure that collectively we provide the very best environment we can for our current and future researchers.

Indeed, an increasing focus in this endeavour has been garnering participants’ feedback and evaluation of ERG activities, so that the future of the Group’s initiatives can appropriately cater to their evolving needs.

Since 2018, for instance, on the basis of this feedback and evaluation, the ERC offers two informal lunchtime sessions: ‘Lunch with Local Academics’ and ‘Making the most of the Emerging Researchers’ Conference and ECER’. As Link Convenor, my intention is to continue to mirror this pattern of evaluation to evidence the value for money that EERA invests into the emerging researchers’ activities.

It is also a privilege for the ERG to contribute towards EERA’s objectives to encourage collaboration, communication and the dissemination of findings as contributions to policy and practice amongst educational researchers, international governmental organisations, research associations and institutes within Europe. Indeed, the ERG was an integral part of the EERA Strategy writing committee and ensured the inclusion of activities and interests of emerging researchers at all levels were represented in the Strategic Plan. As ERG Convenor, I also operate as a liaison between the World Educational Research Association (WERA) and EERA and furthering the ERG’s Links with the Doctoral and Early Career Network.

The excitement, dynamism and rewards of engaging with the EERA Emerging Researcher community drive my passion for leading an ever-growing offering of activities and collaborations through which colleagues can share and discuss their research findings via truly global forums.

I believe that belonging to a professional body like EERA, and contributing to the global academic debate is an important responsibility for any educational researcher and, that in order to do this, communication and sharing of research practice, through a range of mediums, is needed to ensure effective dissemination and, ultimately, impact.

Saneeya Qureshi

Saneeya Qureshi

Head of Researcher Development and Culture at the University of Liverpool, UK

Dr Saneeya Qureshi is the Link Convenor of the Emerging Researchers Group for the European Educational Research Association (EERA). She is also the Head of Researcher Development and Culture at the University of Liverpool, UK. She is responsible for the University’s provision for researchers at all stages of their careers. She manages activities related to the University's European Commission's HR Excellence in Research Award, liaising with stakeholders regarding Liverpool's commitment to the development of its Early Career Researchers.

She holds a PhD in Inclusive Education, and has over 15 years of experience in teaching and educational management in the UK and internationally.

Since 2015, Dr Qureshi has been a co-opted member of the EERA Council where she represents emerging researchers' interests. She leads an annual programme of EERA's developmental and capacity building activities for emerging researchers, including the annual Emerging Researchers Conference. She is also an Editorial Board member and a reviewer for several international educational journals. She can be found on Twitter 

5 More Tips for Completing your PhD

5 More Tips for Completing your PhD

by | Emerging Researchers' Group

Following the positive response we received after publishing Emily’s 5 helpful tips for writing your PhD, we asked if she had any more advice to share. She dug deep and came up with five more ideas for you to keep your head while the world spins around you!

Break down your thesis into smaller, more manageable chunks

Break down your thesis into smaller, more manageable chunks that you can test out through conference, seminars, and blog posts. Engaging with others will help re-connect you with your community and will support the development of your ideas through feedback and conversation.

Your thesis is an opportunity to build your own community and collaborate with other students, early career researchers as well as your supervisors.

Ale Okada, an educational researcher at the Open University, suggests attending and participating in a variety of events.

If conferences and IRL talks are suspended, then look out for webinars and online conferences. 

And of course, EERA offers a range of opportunities to gather feedback on your work, such as the Emerging Researchers’ Group and its LinkedIn community. The yearly ECER is preceded by the Emerging Researchers’ conference. 

Be Patient with Yourself

Remind yourself learning is not linear and that all your emotions are expressions of your investment in your thesis.

“Set daily goals that are reasonable and keep you moving forward,” recommends Nadine Janes, Director of Undergraduate Nursing and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, “and find someone to hold you accountable to those goals”.

Look After Your Body and Mind

Eat something healthy before midday every day. Drink water. And take yourself for a walk in the evening. Studying from home can entrench the sedentary lifestyle fostered by long hours of writing, reading or editing.

Developing an achievable routine that you can feel good about for your wellbeing is vital. Find out if there is a walking group at your university. Exchange healthy recipes with your peers.  

If you aren’t managing your goal, then aim smaller. Being good to yourself includes setting yourself up to win.

 

Things Will go Wrong Again and Again

But the sun, too, will rise again, and that disaster might be the making of your PhD, or you, or a total disaster with no redeeming features and that’s ok too.

Reflecting on her experience, final year student Carolyn Cooke explains:

“The second year was the year where things changed the most – change of literature base, change of methodology too. These changes meant I had written much which I then felt wasn’t useful anymore but rather surprisingly (to me!) I have come back to a huge amount of it in the last couple of months when writing up as there were things I could develop. So, nothing (no writing, no exploring, no “tangents”) is wasted effort – it’s all part of the process!”.

Practice Identifying Yourself in Different Ways

Deborah Lupton recommends taking the time to listen to good quality radio programmes and podcasts, to read the newspaper and engage with others socially.

Finding your academic identity is part of the research journey so read broadly when you can and cultivate connections to your interests including those that cross your departmental or disciplinary boundaries.

“I recommend thinking ahead to say 5 to 10 years down the road and answering the following questions: what do I want my ‘academic identity’ to be? Which academic community do I belong to long term and what do I want to be known for within that community?”, shares Jaideep Prabhu, Jawaharlal Nehru professor of business and enterprise at the Judge Business School, Cambridge, “Once you have some clarity about that, then work backwards and ask yourself: what do I need to do now to get there?”. 

NOTE:  This post was originally written in October, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the post was originally titled, ‘5 more tips for completing your PhD during COVID-19’, we realised that the advice is just as valid four years later, after the crisis had passed. For this reason, we have updated the post and the title.

Emily Dowdeswell

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

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

How Social Capital Affects your Research

How Social Capital Affects your Research

by | Emerging Researchers' Group

While thinking about research, most researchers focus on the research questions, design, and methodology aspects. However, we may forget about the most important thing about research, as well as our life – the fact that we are human beings. When I was conducting research for my master thesis, this was the part that I had forgotten. There are qualities that we cannot hide, like our colour of skin, our biological gender, and our career (if we are being truthful). And then social capital and being an outsider or insider come into prominence.

What is Social Capital?

Social capital is a controversial concept in sociology, and there are many different definitions and perspectives on this concept. It is a broad concept, related to many aspects of the individual. Claridge presents a detailed typology of social capital. In his article, he described the three levels of the different dimensions of social capital: micro, meso, and macro. These levels of social capital are about all dimensions of social capital and include education, gender, ethnicity, religion, SES. Social capital is not just about the relationship and networks that the people have, but it is also about their visible and invisible characteristics.

The qualitative researcher’s perspective is perhaps a paradoxical one: it is to be acutely tuned-in to the experiences and meaning systems of others—to indwell—and at the same time to be aware of how one’s own biases and preconceptions may be influencing what one is trying to understand. 

As Maykut and Morehouse stated, in qualitative research, the researcher must be aware of their social capital and its effect on their research. While doing my research for my master thesis, I was not aware of the impact of my social capital on my research.

What is MY Social Capital?

My hometown is a small, religious city in Turkey. I am a PhD student and a research assistant at one of the top-ranked universities in Ankara, Turkey, where the medium of instruction is English. I am also an alumnus of another top-ranked university in İstanbul, Turkey, where the medium of instruction is also English. I lived alone in the largest city in Europe, İstanbul, where I got my bachelor’s degree. Currently, I am living alone in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, as a woman in a Middle Eastern country. I speak English, travel abroad independently, have a career, and at the time of writing my thesis, I had neither a boyfriend or a husband.

How my Social Capital Affected my Research

My research was about Turkey’s refugee issue, and I wanted to learn about school counsellors’ issues and any problems in schools. I conducted interviews with school counsellors from different cities in Turkey. Before conducting interviews, I introduced myself briefly, giving information about the universities where I had studied and my current position. In the first interview, I was asked many questions about my personal life:

  • How did you get the job at such a good university?
  • Are you living alone without EVEN a boyfriend?
  • How is this possible? And is it hard to work while keeping on top of household chores and responsibilities?
  • Were you living alone during your bachelor’s degree as well?
  • How can I, a school counsellor, get a position like yours?
  • Were the questions hard for PhD admission?
  • Where are you from and do you have a father and mother? What were their thoughts about your career?

During the first three interviews, I was eager to start the interview and I didn’t recognise this issue. After conducting the interviews and starting to transcribe them, I realized that the school counsellors mostly emphasized their schools’ accomplishments. They did not talk about any problems they encountered around refugee issues but concentrated only the achievements they have made. It was a huge challenge for my research because I couldn’t get the information I needed.

After this, I started to allocate some time for initial chitchat with the school counsellors. I gave more detailed information about myself, e.g.,  I am from a small city. I am a normal woman from Turkey. I got to know the school counsellors and put emphasized their role, acknowledging how hard it must be to work at a school with refugees in a small city. After this little chitchat, I think the school counsellors felt better understood, and they did not try to prove anything. We could then focus on the refugee issue, and they could give information more freely.

 

Before conducting the interview, I did not realize that my social capital, such as my gender, SES, and education level, might create such a barrier to my research. I believe that the social capital we have is vital for every person we encounter in society. We may not be aware of our privileges and/or specialities. However, the things that are usual and normal for us might be eligible for others. That is why it is useful to be aware of our own social capital, not just for our research but also for our daily lives. 

References

Claridge https://www.socialcapitalresearch.com/social-capital-at-different-levels-and-dimensions/ 

Maykut & Morehouse, 1994, p. 123 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203485781 

 

 

Dilara Özel

Dilara Özel

PhD Student and Research Assistant at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey

Dilara Özel is a PhD student and also a research assistant in Guidance and Psychological Counseling program at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. She received her master’s degree from the same department in METU with a master thesis titled An Examination of Needs and Issues at Refugee- Receiving Schools in Turkey from the Perspectives of School Counselors. She is an alumnus of the Faculty of Education Bachelor’s Program in Guidance and Psychological Counseling department at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. She worked as a volunteer at several projects and trained in peace education, conflict resolution, and human rights. Then, she gave short training sessions on negotiation and mediation techniques. Dilara worked as a school counsellor at a private college with preschoolers. Her research interests are peace education, multicultural education and refugee studies.