Search

Secondary students' perceptions of learning science and mathematics have been researched internationally, but less in the global South. This study investigated Grades 9 and 10 students' experiences of learning biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in Bhutanese secondary schools. A mixed-methods sequential design was used. First, 524 students from 7 schools completed a survey capturing their perceptions of learning in the four subject areas. Then, 82 of those respondents participated in one of the eight focus groups, exploring patterns in the survey data. Chemistry was seen as the most challenging subject, associated with memorization, poor performance, stress and fear. Biology was perceived as more interesting and less anxiety-provoking, although a need to memorize large amounts of content was common. Mathematics was polarizing, with some students finding it easier and more enjoyable, others the opposite. These findings add to the international literature on students' perceptions and experiences of science and mathematics. They inform curriculum and pedagogic change to enhance students' experiences, reduce negative perceptions and anxiety, make the choice to study these subjects in senior secondary years more appealing, and lift performance.

Clinical supervision is crucial for the professional learning and development of practitioners in many fields. While many have articulated what should happen in clinical supervision, and evaluative research has been undertaken, little is known about the details of what actually happens in clinical supervision. This study addresses this gap, focusing on how professionals (psychologists) work with knowledge while collaboratively working through complex problems of practice. Six psychologists (three pairs) participated, audio-recording five supervision sessions, and giving two interviews each. Transcripts were analysed to uncover what was discussed and how problems were approached. Four ways of working with knowledge (epistemic practices) were found: recontextualising practice knowledge, recontextualising theoretical knowledge, story-telling, and asking expansive questions. These highlight important features of professional supervision practice that have not previously been approached theoretically as epistemic practices.

Learning is crucial to how professionals enact practices, and to how practices change. Professionals frequently encounter uncertainty regarding what to do, requiring praxis informed by practical wisdom, which takes into account the virtues of practice. Critical praxis takes this further, questioning current norms to reduce untoward effects. A simulation-based education program for healthcare professionals was selected for study due to strong evidence of sustained improvements in handling a rare and challenging birth emergency (shoulder dystocia). Videos of simulations and debrief discussions were analysed in terms of complexes of sayings, doings and relatings. Practitioners learned to respond in agile, collective ways to specific situations, through praxis. An extension to the theory of practice architectures is offered, based on two new concepts. 'Connective enactments' involved narration, questioning, and directing actions. These contributed to 'collective accomplishments' of fluid role-switching, responsive sequencing and pacing, and producing calm. These new concepts help to theorise how professional education can contribute to practice change by fostering praxis and critical praxis, addressing the architectures that shape practices.

This article examines how transformative agency arises in families where parents are struggling with aspects of caring for young children. The mechanisms of how volitional action develops into transformative agency in everyday settings are not well understood. A fine-grained analysis of change is presented in the case of a parent who resolved difficulties relating to her daughter's feeding. This case is situated within a broader dataset relating to diverse Australian parenting support services. Through double stimulation, parents used multiple auxiliary tools to construct new motives, enabling them to expand understandings and develop new possibilities for action. Evidence of transformative agency was apparent in longer trajectories in which the conditions of parenting were transformed. Relationships between expansive learning, double stimulation, and transformative agency are conceptualized dialectically, offering fresh insights into the dynamics of transformative agency 'in the wild'.

This paper explains how simulation-based continuing professional education can enable professionals to overcome significant challenges in healthcare practice. It focuses on pedagogies that address conflicts of motives experienced by teams at work by promoting collective use of protocols and an auxiliary motive to collaborate in agile, relational practices. Data relating to a simulation programme (PROBE) associated with reduced injuries in emergency birth situations are examined. The concept of double stimulation informs analysis of simulated scenarios and linked debriefs. PROBE transforms a commonly used protocol from a memory tool used by individuals to an 'in-between' tool used expansively and collectively across the birthing team. Crucial to this are diverse epistemic levels of mediation that enable teams to resolve conflicted, high-stakes situations through fluid, responsive interactions. Indications in the data that PROBE pedagogies foster transformative agency among health professionals are highlighted and discussed. The paper thus adds to understanding of how double stimulation as a principle of volitional action can be put to work in continuing professional education.

Theories of agency are often borrowed from psychology and sociology; truly educational theories of agency are rare -- theories that not only classify and measure dimensions of agency but enable us to understand how its formation can be pedagogically facilitated. Based on Sannino's recent work on transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), a truly educational approach to agency is gaining traction. In double stimulation, a person or group faces a paralysing conflict of motives (first stimulus) which is resolved by identifying a meaningful artefact that is turned into a sign (second stimulus). Today's critical learning challenges typically do not have obvious or 'correct' solutions. They require a pedagogy that allows learners to face conflicts and construct artefacts to help break out of their paralysis. The paradigm of double stimulation, as explored in the articles in this issue, offers as tarting point for a pedagogy of agentive actions and expanding possibilities.

Purpose: Clinical supervision is a crucial workplace practice for professional learning and development. Research is needed to investigate in detail what happens in supervision to understand how this practice contributes to learning. This paper aims to examine how professionals work with knowledge and navigate epistemic challenges in working with problems of practice. Design/methodology/approach: Three pairs of psychologists audio-recorded five consecutive supervision sessions and were interviewed twice during that time. Analysis considered supervision as a site of emergent learning, focusing on what was discussed and how problems were worked on, whether as epistemic objects (open-ended, aimed at generating new insights) or by using an approach to knowledge objects that focused more directly on what to do next. Findings: One pair consistently adopted an epistemic object approach, while another was consistently more action-oriented, focused on knowledge objects. The third pair used both approaches, sometimes expanding the object with a view to gaining insight and understanding, while at other times focusing on next steps and future action. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to study clinical supervision in terms of how knowledge work is done. Foregrounding the epistemic dimensions of supervision, it reveals previously unexplored but consequential differences in how knowledge is worked with and produced as supervisory pairs discuss complex issues of practice.

Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as 'dangerous' – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, established frameworks that dangerously address praxis, agency and learning. Adopting a postabyssal approach, contributions from the Global South and East are drawn on to develop an epistemologically plural basis for thinking differently about praxis, agency and learning. Recent Latin American scholarship reinvigorates Freirean ideas through connections with Fals Borda and contemporary feminist pedagogues, centred on a notion of feeling-thinking. Luitel's interpretations of Vedic philosophy provide radically different ideas of negative dialectics, chaos, responsibility and liberation. An open-minded, open-hearted, open-ended approach is crucial to making these ideas more useful in the struggle over alternative, more equitable and just futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformation, learning and research come together in educational action research. Change Laboratories (CLs) are a distinctive approach to action research grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CLs seek to go beyond technical change, oriented instead to systemic and ideologically driven transformation. However, there have been few reviews of CL research, none focused on education. This paper reports a review of 55 studies using CLs or sibling approaches involving schools. It finds that CLs have been applied to diverse problems including pedagogical practice development, initial teacher education and collaboration across school boundaries. Wider issues of equity, inclusion and justice are present but not ubiquitous in this work. Theoretical references focus on expansive learning, activity systems and double stimulation, with growing use of wider concepts from within and beyond CHAT, including Southern and Indigenous epistemologies. Critical reflection of these findings informs seven fronts for future development in CLs to strengthen their contribution to educational action research: participation, beyond-technical change, enduring change, epistemic justice, addressing grand challenges, resistance, and reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study promoted professional learning and agency through a pragmatic formative intervention. Participants sought to change professional practices in classrooms in response to critical reflection on pedagogic practices and wider social concerns. Australian researchers collaborated with teachers and teacher educators from Nepal, informed by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Change Laboratory methods identified a contradiction between heavy curriculum content and pedagogies that were regarded as educationally desirable and socially just. Participants developed eight principles to help teachers enact high-quality, inclusive pedagogies. One group linked this to the idea of MicroProjects, a solution for time-pressed teachers that could embody all eight principles. They worked with teachers in a nearby school to develop and implement MicroProjects across the Grade 1–12 curriculum. The paper traces a cycle of expansive learning actions, revealing how committed, activist research methods promoted teacher professional learning and agency in challenging contexts of the Global South, shifting from what is towards what ought to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relational aspects of professional practice demand increasing attention in research on work and learning. However, little is known about how knowledge is enacted in practices where different people work together. Working in partnership with clients surfaces a number of epistemic demands, responses to which are poorly understood. This paper analyses two cases of nurses working with parents in support services for families with young children. The questions asked are: What epistemic practices are enacted when professionals work in partnership with clients? How do they generate distinct modes of partnership work? Findings show how professionals' and clients' knowledge is mobilised and made actionable through practices of diagnostic reasoning, recontextualising, testing and contesting knowledge claims. A distinction is presented between partnership that unfolds as strengthening the client from a professional epistemic perspective, and that which validates and augments the client's own epistemic contribution. This reveals how knowledge is made to matter and becomes a basis for action in the course of working with others, and informs a new analytical distillation highlighting key epistemic aspects of professional-client partnership.

Relationships young children have with caring adults are important in mitigating the effects of adversity in early childhood. Facilitating parents' learning is central to support that helps parents cope with difficult circumstances. Within this, a focus on parent-child relationships is crucial. This presents significant challenges to professionals, who must use their expertise effectively without leaving parents feeling judged and that their knowledge does not count. Professional-client partnership has been proposed as a means to tackle these issues, but remains inadequately conceptualised in terms of connections between professional expertise and parents' learning. Home visits by nurses in Sydney were analysed, drawing on cultural-historical concepts that trace dialectic relations between expertise, practice, and parents' learning. Partnership was accomplished through six practices: making observations, specific modes of questioning, reinterpreting, reframing, orienting to the future, and offering metacommentary. These are discussed in terms of recontextualisation, working in a space of reasons, and practices of categorising. This novel conceptualisation reveals how professionals can use their expertise to address parent-child relationships.

Aim: This study addresses the absence of a definition of care for children with feeding disorders, limited agreement on key performance indicators (KPIs), and the lack of data linked to those KPIs. Methods: Clinicians, consumers and researchers involved in outpatient feeding care in New South Wales (NSW), Australia were invited to participate in a two‐Phase study. In Phase 1, a modified Delphi method was used. Two rounds of voting resulted in a new consensus definition of a multidisciplinary paediatric feeding clinic. Three further rounds voting determined relevant KPIs. In Phase 2, the KPIs were piloted prospectively in 10 clinics. Results: Twenty‐six clinicians, consumers and researchers participated in Phase 1. Participation across five voting rounds declined from 92% to 60% and a valid definition and KPI set were created. In Phase 2, the definition and KPIs were piloted in 10 clinics over 6 weeks. Data for 110 patients were collected. The final KPI set of 28 measures proposed covers clinical features, patient demographics and medical issues, parent–child interaction and outcome measures. Conclusions: A new definition of a multidisciplinary paediatric feeding clinic is now available, linked to a standardised KPI set covering relevant performance measures. These proved viable in baseline data collection for 10 clinics across NSW. This sets a foundation for further data collection, systematic measurement of care provision and outcomes, and research needed to deliver care improvement for children with paediatric feeding disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]