Although educational reform efforts have failed repeatedly over the last 40 years, this paper posits that the cultural revolution currently underway as a result of the widespread use of digital technologies will put additional pressure on the traditional culture of the school. This paper queries how teacher educators might react to these challenges given that the first wave of people that has grown up with Web 2.0 technologies is entering teacher education programs. The social interactions associated with the ideas of “digital publics” and “collective intelligence” are conceptualized as opportunities to create radically restructured learning experiences within a teacher education program. Teacher educators would do well to find ways to leverage the potential of digital publics and collective intelligence to create productive learning experiences in their classrooms.

Thank you to everyone who attended the presentation.

Download the paper

The title of my talk was “Constructing Knowledge about Teaching and Learning Physics.”

Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation.

My thanks to all who attended.

As physics teachers, we can readily agree that our students should be able to solve challenging and meaningful physics problems. At the same time, many students report that framing a problem is the most difficult task that they encounter in both high school and undergraduate physics courses. In this hands-on workshop, participants will explore a number of research-based approaches to engaging students with a variety of problem-solving techniques. Some of the topics to be explored include the nature of a problem, problem classification, planning for problem solving, collaborative learning, and the importance of self-monitoring during problem solving. The workshop will provide an experience for participants to do a variety of problems, using the techniques that will be presented, with a view to thinking about how these techniques might be implemented in a physics classroom.

Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation. Click here to download a PDF version of the handout.

Thank you to all who attended.

The way that science teachers learn to teach is profoundly influenced by the effects of what Lortie (1975) called the “apprenticeship of observation.” Teacher candidates’ long experiences as students in schools serve as a powerful acculturation into a dominant culture of teaching and learning. Science teacher candidates come to pre-service teacher education program with a default set of ideas about what science teaching and learning look and feel like. This paper is an in-depth study of how physics teacher candidates’ visions of teaching physics develops over the course of a B.Ed. program with a particular emphasis on how they construct professional knowledge during field experiences and in the context of a physics curriculum methods course. The results indicate that the practicum, a familiar and often unquestioned feature of teacher education, tends to encourage candidates to adopt conservative views of education. Attention to student-centred, active-learning pedagogy in a methods course, however, has the potential to disrupt many assumptions about teaching and learning. This paper considers the notion that coursework need not be perceived by teacher candidates as irrelevant to their development as teachers. A coherent pedagogy of teacher education can help candidates to reframe their understandings of how to teach.

Thank you to everyone who attended the presentation.

Download the paper | Download the audio podcast (21:48)

Program description:
“The increasingly symbiotic relationship between society and digital technology suggests that studying one is impossible without studying the other. Technological innovations are fueled by a seemingly ever-growing demand for sophisticated communication devices that serve multiple purposes such as voice and data communication, personal information access points, collaboration tools, multimedia recording and editing, data presentation, GPS, and measurement instruments – just to name a few. Simultaneously, society is being shaped by the power and ubiquity of technological devices and processes that serve us… sometimes to the point of addiction. Over the past 150 years, technological advances and research in medicine served to improve general health and extend life expectancies. Today, there is a need to focus on digital technologies in education to understand how its sociological and technological interdependencies can have similar effects on education over the next 50 years. This ED-MEDIA pre-conference symposium will explore these interrelationships.”

Topics
• Epistemological and/or Sociological Perspectives on Digital Technologies
• Going beyond Interactive Learning Environments
• Co-operative / Collaborative Technologies
• Mobile Technologies
• Cloud Computing
• Online Pedagogical Issues
• Technological Competencies

Call for Papers: Papers may be written in “short” form (max 2,500 words, excluding references) or “long” form (max 6,000 words, excluding references). Long form papers should take the form of either a research proposal (data collection is incomplete) or a research report (data collection and analysis is complete). All papers should be written in a style consistent with the APA manual of style (6th edition). Participants should be prepared to upload a PDF version of their papers by May 15, 2010 to provide everyone with the opportunity to review ideas before the pre-conference. Proposals for papers should be limited to 700 words (excluding references).

Submit to: roland.vanoostveen@uoit.ca by March 8, 2010.
Submitters will be notified by March 29, 2010.

Format of the Symposium: The symposium will take the form of a “working” conference. Each participant will be assigned to one of three break-out groups, based on the major theme in their paper, for the majority of the day. It is expected that this format will provide participants to engage deeply with issues in a small-group format. Each breakout group will give a brief summary presentation to the main group at the end of the day. Discussants will also participate in small-group sessions to provide additional context for their comments at the end of the day.

Program:
08:00 Introduction UOIT Facilitators
08:15 Keynote Address William Muirhead, UOIT (Whole Group)
09:00 Working Session 1 Short Paper Summaries (Working Groups)
09:50 Break
10:00 Working Session 2 TBD by Working Groups
10:50 Break
11:00 Working Session 3 TBD by Working Groups
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Summary Status Check (Working Groups to Whole Group)
13:40 Working Session 4 TBD by Working Groups
14:40 Break
14:50 Panel Discussion TBA (Whole Group)
15:30 Closing Keynote Address Maggie McPherson, Leeds Uni. (Whole Group)
16:00 Closing UOIT Facilitators

Organization of Working Groups:
Each working group will be composed of participants who have a paper that is relevant to a particular theme. During the first working session, participants will each present a short (10-minute) summary of their paper to the rest of their working group. The group will then decide how best to discuss the papers and develop ideas for the remainder of the day. Each group will be responsible for presenting a short (10 minute) summary of their discussion to the entire group during the session immediately following lunch. It is hoped that working together in small groups might facilitate discussion and produce preliminary working partnerships.

Cost:
Symposium registration is $145 USD and includes morning and afternoon beverage breaks and lunch.

We participated with colleagues from across the country in a focus group charged with thinking about the role of field experiences in teacher education programs. Our group discussed what is possible within current structures of education practice in universities and in schools, and how field experiences might best reflect both what we know about teacher education pedagogy and what we could be different about teacher education pedagogy.

The overall goal of these working conferences is to “develop a set of working documents that can be made available to the teacher education research community to support the scholarship and practice of teacher education in Canada.” Plans are underway to have the proceedings from the conference published in time for CSSE’s 2010 meeting in Montréal.

Sincere thank you to the other participants in the working conference for a productive series of discussions.

The synopsis of the book from the publisher’s page reads as follows:

How might study of the self illuminate and inspire social action? This book presents a trans-disciplinary, trans-cultural discussion of the dynamic interplay between self-study and our social world. Building on work done in the education field, essays in the four themed sections of this edited volume provide diverse perspectives on the social relevance of self-study in relation to the self in memory, (re)positioning the self, creative (re)presentations of the self, and the development of self-knowledge. Scholars, educators, researchers, and students across the arts, humanities, and social sciences will find much in this volume to inform their engagement with self-study both as a social phenomenon and as a methodology for social inquiry and action.

It was a pleasure to work with the editors and authors involved with this project.

The abstract for the paper:

Teacher candidates know how to mimic the surface-level features of teaching they have witnessed over many years, yet it is unlikely that they have ever considered the complex pedagogical decisions made by teachers every day. The relevance of this extensive prior exposure of teacher behaviour to how teacher candidates learn to teach has received little consideration in efforts to improve preservice teacher education. The data provide considerable evidence that how a methods course is taught can be a significant catalyst that encourages teacher candidates to carefully examine, in deep rather than superficial ways, their prior assumptions about teaching as they construct professional knowledge from experiences in a preservice teacher education program.

Thanks to all those who attended the presentation.