Intentional Improvements
Asynchronous Session
Mathematics in Nature: A Pedagogical Approach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nilda San Miguel, Elymar Pascual
Most knowledge that we can acquire through discovery and investigation is part of the nature around us. This study explores a special way of teaching mathematics through nature. Five individuals from different disciplines accepted a seven-day challenge of teaching preschool learners on a one-on-one basis while observing Philippine Enhanced Community Quarantine in the fight against COVID-19. The lessons are nursery number sense which includes Counting 1-10, Days of the Week, Months of the Year, Ordinal Numbers, Counting 11-20, and The Time and Clock. Pre-and post-assessment of numeracy skills were recorded using observable competency tallied with literal descriptions – A for mastered, B for developing, and C for beginning. Alongside teaching, online conferencing was conducted for a qualitative interview with the teacher-participants. Questions revolved around teaching mathematics using nature as springboard. After the seven-day challenge, it was found out that teaching using naturalist approach led to the increase in numeracy skills of pre-school learners. Six themes were developed based on common experience of the teacher-participants. Teaching mathematics through nature was capsuled in the concepts of familiarity, practicality, and affectivity. Nature’s aid in understanding mathematics is due to interaction, imagination, and concrete notion. Learners’ response to nature discussion was characterized into expressiveness, attentiveness, and inquisitiveness. The features of nature that makes it a feasible springboard are calming, universal fitting, and awe inspiring. Nature’s similarities to mathematics are complex sense, obedience, and cadence, while the mathematics of protecting nature can be observed in valuing, balancing, and growing aspects.
Culturally Relevant Education Challenges and Threats in the US Secondary Classroom View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sylvia Mendez, Owen Cegielski Cegielski, Kristi Maida
This study explores the challenges and threats US secondary educators experience in incorporating culturally relevant education (CRE) practices in their classrooms. CRE is a social justice pedagogical practice used to connect student’s cultural references to academic skills and content, to promote critical reflection, to facilitate cultural competence, and to critique discourses of power and oppression. Empirical evidence on CRE demonstrates positive student educational outcomes in terms of achievement, engagement, and motivation. Through a descriptive phenomenological research design, 20 interviews grounded by the theory of challenge and threat states were conducted with a diverse set of secondary school educators. The guiding research question for this study is: What are the challenges and threats US secondary educators face when seeking to incorporate CRE practices in their classroom? The attitude of the phenomenological reduction method was adopted, and the data were analyzed through five steps: sense of the whole, meaning units, transformation, structure, and essential structure. The essential structure that emerged was while secondary educators display genuine interest in learning how to successfully incorporate CRE practices they perceive it to be a challenge (and not a threat) due to lack of exposure which diminishes educator capacity, comfort, and confidence in employing CRE practices. These findings reveal the value of attending to emotional valence and perception of CRE in promoting this social justice pedagogical practice. Findings also reveal the importance of appropriately resourcing educators with CRE support to ensure they develop and utilize this practice.
The Teaching and the Learning in the Subjective Constitution of Being a Teacher in Times of the Covid-19 Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mozaniel Mendes Pereira Lima, Wilsa Maria Ramos
During the period of social isolation, there were numerous difficulties that teachers had in the mandatory use of digital technologies of the information and communication. To analyze the issue of being a teacher in the period of emergency remote teaching ERT, we carried out a qualitative study to understand how the subjective processes generated in the teaching and learning of teachers express the constitution of “being” a teacher. Two teachers from a private school in the Distrito Federal in Brazil participated in the research. The research instruments form interviews, timelines, formal and informal conversations. The results reveal that the subjective experiences of the participants and the social subjectivity of the synchronous video class were reconfigured, losing quality, not allowing the look and direct communication, the interaction is mediated by the computer screen, which is dispersive and ubiquitous. There are “avatars”, “icons”, talking “balls” and fleeting phrases in the chat. The participants dedicated themselves to the use of didactic strategies of online teaching, although the complaint of the absence of physical presence, of the communication through non-verbal language and the difficulty of controlling the students' activities brought some difficulties to the affective in the teacher-student relation. This new social space brought another representation of “being” a teacher as a spy and television presenter. We conclude that in the ERT, the control exercised by teachers is weakened when the virtual interaction replaces face-to-face classes. It is expected the study can support school management and the return to classrooms in the post-isolation period.
Appreciation of Cultural Intentionality: Leveraging Organic Literacy Rich Practices in Multicultural Contexts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Isela Almaguer
In this study, I focus across cultures, specifically, across the Mexican American and Native Hawaiian cultures, at the similarities that exist between each culture and their approaches to literacy practices. Critical Race theorists view experiential knowledge as a strength from which to draw explicitly on lived life experiences of various people and cultures (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). Consequently, we must recognize that each culture brings strong ethnic components including language that is genealogically tied to cultural and ethnic heritage and harnesses volumes of academic and linguistic capital and assets channeled into literacy development. Emphasis is on the language and literacy skills that Mexican American and Native Hawaiians contribute to their experiential and organic literacy practices from their educational experiences and their life literacies, and how these resources are used to mediate their learning. Additionally, I examine the pivotal role of culture on language, literacy, and learning to further probe the intersectionalities by addressing the parallels that exist between Mexican Americans and Native Hawaiians’ literacy practices. Learning about experiences Mexican American and Native Hawaiian communities have had with language and cultural immersion programs—both for children and for adults has helped to recognize the similarities and differences between the cultures. The surge in cultural and linguistic diversity across our country is a call for action and advocacy by leveraging organic literacy practices within multicultural contexts. There is an increased need for culturally sustaining and empowering pedagogical teaching and learning frameworks that appreciate cultural intentionality in our diverse and global student population.
New Distance Teaching Methods of the Russian Foreign Language View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Svetlana Maliavina, Yulia Ryzhich, Valery Tchastnykh
The new realities in which the academic community found itself as a result of the COVID-19 health emergency situation, prompted teachers to undertake searches for new technologies for teaching foreign languages, in particular, the RFL (Russian Foreign Language), which should focus on the possibility of making ubiquitous learning, removing barriers and reducing the distance. One of the first to emerge was the International Online Learning Project “Our Neighbours”. The main goal of the project is to overcome various difficulties of distance education and to develop oral interaction skills among students or, in other words, to teach them to communicate in Russian. The fulfillment of said task is subject to a special organisation of virtual classrooms, a particular methodology of presentation of the lesson and an exhaustive selection of didactic materials. Obviously, one of the ways to solve the problems associated with the transition to online learning is the use of video affordances and, above all, recordings of excursions and tours, which make learning ubiquitous. The "Russia is calling you" method of the team of professors of the Lomonosov Moscow State University is a multimedia project for teaching Russian language and culture at a distance, which includes videos of its authors' tours of the most outstanding cities and towns in Russia; linguistic material suitable for students of different communicative levels and courses of varying duration and intensity; and transcripts of each recorded excursion.
