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Purpose: Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students' abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as school organization and culture, can pose barriers to subject integration. The purpose of this study is to describe synergies and tensions between data science and the arts, and how these can create or constrain opportunities for learners to engage in IIR. Design/methodology/approach: The authors co-designed and implemented four arts-integrated data literacy units with 10 teachers of arts and mathematics in middle school classrooms from four different schools in the USA. The data include student-generated artwork and their written rationales, and interviews with teachers and students. Through maximum variation sampling, the authors identified examples from the data to illustrate disciplinary synergies and tensions that appeared to support different IIR processes among students. Findings: Aspects of artistic representation, including embodiment, narrative and visual image; and aspects of the culture of arts, including an emphasis on personal experience, the acknowledgement of subjectivity and considerations for the audience's perspective, created synergies and tensions that both offered and hindered opportunities for IIR (i.e. going beyond data, using data as evidence and expressing uncertainty). Originality/value: This study answers calls for humanistic approaches to data literacy education. It contributes an interdisciplinary perspective on data literacy that complements other context-oriented perspectives on data science. This study also offers recommendations for how designers and educators can capitalize on synergies and mitigate tensions between domains to promote successful IIR in arts-integrated data literacy education.

Makerspaces persist as formal and informal spaces of learning for youth, promoting continued interest in studying how design can support the variety of learning opportunities within these spaces. However, much of the current research examining learning in makerspaces neglects the perspectives of educators. This not only hinders our understanding of educators' goals and how educators navigate makerspaces but also constrains how we frame the design space of the learning experiences and environments. To address this, we engaged in a set of semi-structured interviews to examine the contexts, goals, values, and practices of seven educators across five makerspaces. A thematic analysis of the data identified six key categories of competencies that these educators prioritize including a range of skills, practices, and knowledge, such as technical proficiency, communication, and contextual reflection. The analysis also identified five categories of strategies to accomplish certain goals, such as scaffolding, collaboration, and relationship building. Last, it also shed light on three categories of challenges faced at the student-level, teacher-level, and institutional level. We conclude with a discussion on our insights into how we can broaden the problem space in the design of educational technologies to support learning in makerspaces.

Performing arts computing environments have received little attention in the educational sphere; yet, they offer opportunities for learners to validate their efforts, ideas, and skills through showcasing their work in a public-facing performance. In this work, we explore an out-of-school dance and computing educational program run by the organization, STEM From Dance. The organizational mission is to create an equitable learning experience for young women of color to engage with computing while exposing them to STEM careers. Through an analysis of eleven interviews with youth participants, instructors, and the executive director, we examine how the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the learning environment facilitate identity work in computing and dance. Our findings point to three primary activities used by the organization to promote equity: (1) providing psychological safety through a supportive community environment, (2) meaningfully engaging with learners' social and cultural context through creative work with constructionist artifacts, and (3) actively promoting identity work as women of color in computing and STEM through both artifact work and community events. Applying the constructs of identity and psychological safety we explore the tensions and synergies of designing for equity in this performing arts and computing learning environment. We demonstrate how the seemingly contradictory elements of a high-stakes performance within a novice learning environment provides unique opportunities for supporting young women of color in computing, making them non-negotiable in the organization's efforts to promote equity and inclusion. Our work illustrates how attending closely to the sociocultural dimensions in a constructionist learning environment provides lenses for navigating equity, identity work, and support for inclusive computing.

Data-art inquiry is an arts-integrated approach to data literacy learning that reflects the multidisciplinary nature of data literacy not often taught in school contexts. By layering critical reflection over conventional data inquiry processes, and by supporting creative expression about data, data-art inquiry can support students' informal inference-making by revealing the role of context in shaping the meaning of data, and encouraging consideration of the personal and social relevance of data. Data-art inquiry additionally creates alternative entry points into data literacy by building on learners' non-STEM interests. Supported by technology, it can provide accessible tools for students to reflect on and communicate about data in ways that can impact broader audiences. However, data-art inquiry instruction faces many barriers to classroom implementation, particularly given the tendency for schools to structure learning with disciplinary silos, and to unequally prioritize mathematics and the arts. To explore the potential of data-art inquiry in classroom contexts, we partnered with arts and mathematics teachers to co-design and implement data-art inquiry units. We implemented the units in four school contexts that differed in terms of the student population served, their curriculum priorities, and their technology infrastructure. We reflect on participant interviews, written reflections, and classroom data, to identify synergies and tensions between data literacy, technology, and the arts. Our findings highlight how contexts of implementation shape the possibilities and limitations for data-art inquiry learning. To take full advantage of the potential for data-art inquiry, curriculum design should account for and build on the opportunities and constraints of classroom contexts.

With growing awareness of, and attention to, the potential of data to inform decisions across contexts, has come an increasing recognition and need to develop data literacy strategies that support people to learn to be critical of data, given this consequential nature of data use (and abuse). To achieve a just society, inequities in both capacity for data literacy, and the applications of data in society, must be addressed. A key aim is to create learning experiences that engage learners with issues of power and inequity, including those typically marginalized by data literacy education. In this way, data literacy and social justice learning goals are intertwined, and mutually supportive, in developing data literacy in learning about, through, and for social justice. This special issue assembles five empirical studies on learning at the intersection of data literacy and social justice, and that illustrate various approaches to intertwining data science and social justice learning goals. They moreover highlight the importance of the learning sciences as a perspective for understanding how people learn in specific contexts of data justice. This essay reflects on themes raised by these contributions, and offers a framework for conceptualizing the intersections between the learning of data literacy and justice. In particular, we draw on existing distinctions between “reading” and “writing the world,” and propose a mapping of data literacy justice activities from data comprehension to participation, and from thin to thick justice.

Longitudinal data on individual growth and seasonal changes in body mass, girth, and blubber thickness are rarely available for cetaceans, making it difficult to assess their population composition and individual nutritional condition. During different time intervals from 1997 to 2020, we collected longitudinal data on length, body mass, girth,and blubber thickness from seventeen harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) in human care. We compared Gompertz and von Bertalanffy growth curves to collected length data at age 0–4 years for five individuals with known dates of birth. Von Bertalanffy had the lowest AICc value and was used to predict the birth year of twelve animals which age had previously been estimated based on tooth ring analysis and ossification of flipper bones. The growth curve was accurate within 1 yr. of age estimates. Within the first year, the calves grew 66%, attaining 84% of their adult length, and reached asymptotic length at age 3–4. For adults, there were large seasonal variations in body mass, body mass index, girth, and blubber thickness, with up to 28% of variation in body mass between seasons. We predicted individual body mass within ± 2 kg using measurements of length and girth, allowing estimation of body mass index of individuals with unknown mass. Our findings enable monitoring and assessments of population composition as well as nutritional condition of individual harbour porpoises, which is crucial for assessing conservational status and guiding management.

Purpose: This paper aims to describe the design and user testing of GeoForge, a multiple-player digital learning experience for middle school that leverages virtual reality (VR) and individualized websites for learning concepts in planetary science. This paper investigates how specific instructional design choices and features of the technology fostered collaborative behaviors. Design/methodology/approach: GeoForge was implemented in 3 middle school classrooms with a total of 220 students. Learners used GeoForge in class in groups of 3-4 to learn about planetary science. A mixed-methods approach examined collaboration using classroom observations, teacher interviews, student surveys and student artifacts. Using Jeong and Hmelo-Silver's (2016) seven affordances of technology for collaborative learning, this paper identifies ways in which features of GeoForge supported collaborative behaviors. Findings: Instructional design which combined VR and the digital science journal (DSJ) helped foster collaboration. Some collaborative behaviors were especially notable in classrooms that did not regularly practice these skills. Segmenting tasks in the DSJ, clarifying instructions to articulate ideas, showing other group members' responses onscreen and enabling multiuser VR environments contributed to collaborative behaviors and a satisfying learning experience as observed and documented through multiple methods. Originality/value: GeoForge successfully integrated VR and personalized websites in a classroom planetary science lesson, an approach which balanced instructional design and logistical challenges while creating opportunities for collaboration.

As visual cultures scholars have argued, visual expression and aesthetic artifacts largely comprise the modern world. This includes the production of the school as an institution. A critical approach to education therefore must reinscribe students with the ability to see what educational processes attempt to hide and to construct an understanding of the real for themselves. To illustrate this argument, we explore the production of visuality within data science education as one example of how the visual manifests within schools. In response, we propose a visual literacy informed approach to engaging students with data, one that expands beyond contemporary forms of critical data literacy by involving an ontological critique of educational aestheticization. To ground this work, we examine the role of visuality and aesthetics within the implementation of co-designed arts-infused data science projects in four US middle schools. In analyzing interviews with teachers and students, we uncover a series of tensions that reveal the ongoing influence of school visualities alongside the potential for student generated images to amplify their right to look. We therefore argue that critical pedagogies must not only involve reading and critiquing aesthetic artifacts but also engage students in a critique of visuality itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While historical geographers and historians increasingly recognise the benefits of and need for participatory research, the rigid structures regimenting academic practice have acted as barriers to successful knowledge exchange. Community involvement and place‐based research come with a number of challenges characterised by miscommunications, frustrations, and failures. This paper reflects on findings that emerged from a three‐month internship investigating public and community engagement activities at the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI). The internship was the outcome of a collaboration between UHI and the Centre for the History of People, Place, and Community (CHPPC), Institute of Historical Research London (IHR). Based on interviews with UHI academics and heritage institutions beyond the Higher Education sector based across the Highlands and Islands, the paper explores the inevitable pitfalls that comes with community engagement and the ethical questions raised by knowledge co‐production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last extensive (pan-Arctic) review on knowledge available on the bearded seal (Erignathus barbatus) was conducted by Cameron et al. in 2010. As bearded seals are hunted off Svalbard and Greenland but no stock assessments are available, NAMMCO requested a status review, and if possible, an assessment of the species in its area. This literature review attempts to summarise the knowledge that has become available post 2010, with a focus on the Atlantic Arctic. A large amount of information has become available on the behaviour of the bearded seal, with hearing, vocalisation, haul-out behaviour and movement patterns (through satelitte tagging), and their phenology, being well studied. A database of baseline blood parameters is slowly being built but is still limited. New data on distribution has emerged from PAM studies and non-targeted surveys. Abundance estimates are missing for Svalbard, but partial estimates have become available for the North Water Polynya in 2009 and 2014. Additionally, observations of bearded seals from aerial line-transect surveys are available for several areas of Greenland but have not been analysed. More information has become available on the impact of anthropogenic stressors, such as climate change and other related environmental changes, although demographic impacts of changes are missing. Catch data exists for both Svalbard and Greenland, but for the latter the data needs to be thoroughly validated. In summary, information on stock structure as well as local and global abundance estimates, which are both important to assess the sustainability of current catches, are still missing. However other lines of evidence can inform the delineation of management areas and the results of a pan-arctic genetic study should become available shortly. There is survey data available from Greenland that could be used to generate local abundance estimates, the analysis of which should be prioritised.