Database and narratological representation of Australian Aboriginal knowledge as information visualisation using a game engine

Current database technologies do not support contextualised representations of multi-dimensional narratives. This paper outlines a new approach to this problem using a multi-dimensional database served in a 3D game environment. Preliminary results indicate it is a particularly efficient method for the types of contextualised narratives used by Australian Aboriginal peoples to tell their stories about their traditional landscapes and knowledge practices. We discuss the development of a tool that complements rather than supplants direct experience of these traditional knowledge practices.

Mentoring pre-service teachers on school students’ differentiated learning

This Australian study explores the mentoring of pre-service teachers in selecting and implementing teaching strategies to meet students‟ learning needs. Two case studies involving 28 mentor teachers in a professional development program and a mentor-mentee partnership during a four week practicum provided data about mentoring teaching strategies for differentiated learning. Findings showed that contexts for learning about differentiation occurred at the pre action, in-action, and post-action stages. Central to each stage were pedagogical knowledge practices such as planning, preparation, classroom management, assessment, and problem solving (reflection-in-action to present solutions to problems) as key to in-action strategising and the mentoring processes. Mentoring pre-service teachers on how to devise teaching strategies for differentiated learning needs to be researched with a wider range of mentors and pre-service teachers, including those at different stages of development.

Mentoring as professional development: ‘growth for both’ mentor and mentee

Teachers need professional development to keep current with teaching practices, although costs for extensive professional development can be prohibitive across an education system. Mentoring provides one way for embedding cost-effective professional development. This mixed-method study includes surveying mentor teachers (n = 101) on a five-part Likert scale and interviews with experienced mentors (n = 10) to investigate professional development for mentors as a result of the mentoring process. Quantitative data were analysed through a pedagogical knowledge framework and qualitative data were collated into themes. Survey data showed that although mentoring of pedagogical knowledge was variable, mentoring pedagogical knowledge practices occurs with the majority of mentors, which requires mentors to evaluate and articulate teaching practices. Qualitative data showed that mentoring acted as professional development and led towards enhancing communication skills, developing leadership roles (problem-solving and building capacity) and advancing pedagogical knowledge. Providing professional development to teachers on mentoring can help to build capacity in two ways: quality mentoring of preservice teachers through explicit mentoring practices, and reflecting and deconstructing teaching practices for mentors’ own pedagogical advancements.

Mentoring for Effective Teaching (MET)

The Mentoring for Effective Teaching (MET) program aims to facilitate understandings and skills for advancing mentoring and teaching practices for preservice teachers. The paper outlines the key findings from the MET program, including findings related to: (1) the mentor-mentee relationship, (2), mentoring pedagogical knowledge practices, and; (3) providing feedback to the mentee. Each part of the paper presents a model synthesised from the research, which can be used as a visual guide for faciltiating effective mentoring practices.

How to design educational settings to promote collaborative inquiry: Pedagogical infrastructures for technology-enhanced progressive inquiry

Strategies of scientific, question-driven inquiry are stated to be important cultural practices that should be educated in schools and universities. The present study focuses on investigating multiple efforts to implement a model of Progressive Inquiry and related Web-based tools in primary, secondary and university level education, to develop guidelines for educators in promoting students collaborative inquiry practices with technology. The research consists of four studies. In Study I, the aims were to investigate how a human tutor contributed to the university students collaborative inquiry process through virtual forums, and how the influence of the tutoring activities is demonstrated in the students inquiry discourse. Study II examined an effort to implement technology-enhanced progressive inquiry as a distance working project in a middle school context. Study III examined multiple teachers' methods of organizing progressive inquiry projects in primary and secondary classrooms through a generic analysis framework. In Study IV, a design-based research effort consisting of four consecutive university courses, applying progressive inquiry pedagogy, was retrospectively re-analyzed in order to develop the generic design framework. The results indicate that appropriate teacher support for students collaborative inquiry efforts appears to include interplay between spontaneity and structure. Careful consideration should be given to content mastery, critical working strategies or essential knowledge practices that the inquiry approach is intended to promote. In particular, those elements in students activities should be structured and directed, which are central to the aim of Progressive Inquiry, but which the students do not recognize or demonstrate spontaneously, and which are usually not taken into account in existing pedagogical methods or educational conventions. Such elements are, e.g., productive co-construction activities; sustained engagement in improving produced ideas and explanations; critical reflection of the adopted inquiry practices, and sophisticated use of modern technology for knowledge work. Concerning the scaling-up of inquiry pedagogy, it was concluded that one individual teacher can also apply the principles of Progressive Inquiry in his or her own teaching in many innovative ways, even under various institutional constraints. The developed Pedagogical Infrastructure Framework enabled recognizing and examining some central features and their interplay in the designs of examined inquiry units. The framework may help to recognize and critically evaluate the invisible learning-cultural conventions in various educational settings and can mediate discussions about how to overcome or change them.

Kehittäjä-interventionistien peiliaineistokäytännöt muutoslaboratoriohankkeissa : Narratiivit käyttäjätiedon välittäjänä

This research has its background on Knowledge Practices Laboratory (KP-Lab) research project. One of the aims of KP-Lab is to create virtual and technological tools to support the interventionist who use the Change Laboratory method as a developmental tool. In this research I studied the interventionists' mirror material practices which are context and theory bound and for that reason they pose challenges on the development of new tools. I focused on the gathering and working on the mirror material. The purpose of this study was to find out what kind of user knowledge does the research on narratives of mirror material practices in Change Laboratory provide to the developers of virtual tools? I answered this question by three sub questions: 1. What kind of mirror material the interventionists gather and analyze in different phases of developmental cycle of Change Laboratory project? 2. What kind of knowledge the different mirror materials contain and how is the knowledge transformed when the mirror material is analyzed and worked on? 3. What kind of tools the interventionists use and create when gathering and working on the mirror material? What wishes do the interventionists have on tools? I interviewed five interventionists in four different projects. I created narratives from the document supported interviews. Then I analyzed the narratives in three steps: first I placed the mirror materials in the developmental cycle. Secondly, I analyzed the mirror materials by placing them in a table by the form of the knowledge. Thirdly, I examined the tools the interventionists had used and created and what wishes they had on virtual tools. This research showed that different user groups of Change Laboratory method have different needs. All interventionists transform knowledge from one form to another so they seem to need especially tools by which they can analyze and transform knowledge. It seems that standardized model of gathering and analysing mirror material is not meaningful because mirror material is constructed in accordance with the object developed. This research also shows that the mirror material has a social function. This finding should be also noted when developing virtual tools together with actual users.

Constellations: A participatory, online application for research collaboration in higher education interdisciplinary courses

The research establishes a model for online learning centering on the needs of integrative knowledge practices. Through the metaphor of Constellations, the practice-based research explores the complexities of working within interdisciplinary learning contexts and the potential of tools such as the Folksonomy learning platform for providing necessary conceptual support.

'Mining money': science, legal technologies & working the borderlands of global finance

This paper explores the roles of science and market devices in the commodification of ‘nature’ and the configuration of flows of speculative capital. It focuses on mineral prospecting and the market for shares in ‘junior’ mining companies. In recent years these companies have expanded the reach of their exploration activities overseas, taking advantage of innovations in exploration methodologies and the liberalisation of fiscal and property regimes in ‘emerging’ mineral rich developing countries. Recent literature has explored how the reconfiguration of notions of ‘risk’ has structured the uneven distribution of rents. It is increasingly evident that neoliberal framing of environmental, political, social and economic risks has set in motion overflows that multinational mining capital had not bargained for (e.g. nationalisation, violence and political resistance). However, the role of ‘geological risk’ in animating flows of mining finance is often assumed as a ‘technical’ given. Yet geological knowledge claims, translated locally, designed to travel globally, assemble heterogeneous elements within distanciated regimes of metrology, valuation and commodity production. This paper explores how knowledge of nature is enrolled within systems of property relations, focusing on the genealogy of the knowledge practices that animate contemporary circuits of speculative mining finance. It argues that the financing of mineral prospecting mobilises pragmatic and situated forms of knowledge rather than actuarially driven calculations that promise predictability. A Canadian public enquiry struck in the wake of scandal associated with Bre-X’s prospecting activities in Indonesia is used to glean insights into the ways in which the construction of a system of public warrant to underpin financial speculation is predicated upon particular subjectivities and the outworking of everyday practices and struggles over ‘value’. Reflection on practical investments in processes of standardisation, rituals of verification and systems of accreditation reveal much about how the materiality of things shape the ways in which regional and global financial circuits are integrated, selectively transforming existing social relations and forms of knowledge production.

O mediador social e pessoal nos cursos de educação e formação de adultos

Trabalho de projecto de mestrado, Ciências da Educação (Formação de Adultos), Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Educação, 2011

Environmental impact assessment in higher education and training in Portugal

Journal of Cleaner Production, nº 16, p. 639-645

Las visiones y los mundos: depredación, transformación y equilibrio en discursos de la Amazonía occidental

Ce travail se veut d’un rapprochement aux pratiques et savoirs des peuples amazoniens à partir de discours produits par ces nations. Nous y interpréterons des chants sacrés, des narrations ancestrales et des textes académiques de penseurs autochtones. Ce travail indique que les pratiques amazoniennes s’inscrivent dans un contexte de significations qui considèrent que tout être vivant possède des pensées et un esprit; qu’il existe des êtres spirituels qui défendent ces êtres vivants contre les abus possibles. Les êtres humains doivent transcender leur état de conscience, se déplacer vers les mondes invisibles et initier la communication avec ces esprits, pour ainsi maintenir l’équilibre existentiel. Selon les pensées de l’Amazonie, les communautés humaines ne peuvent pas se concevoir comme autosuffisantes; elles doivent plutôt maintenir de constantes relations avec les multiples êtres qui peuplent leur environnement visible et les mondes invisibles. Les trois concepts clés qui permettent de rendre compte des pratiques des peuples amazoniens sont la déprédation, la transformation et l’équilibre. Par déprédation, nous entendons les pratiques amazoniennes qui impliquent une destruction des autres êtres afin de sustenter la vie de la communauté. Selon les pensées de l’Amazonie, cette déprédation devrait être mesurée, dans le but de ne pas tuer plus que nécessaire à la survie. La déprédation est régulée par les êtres spirituels. Les pratiques amazoniennes de transformation sont destinées à la sauvegarde des liens de la communauté, en transfigurant tout ce qui entre ou sort de cette dernière, de manière à ce qu’aucun agent externe ne mette en péril les liens affectifs. Les pratiques de déprédation et de transformation sont complémentaires et elles requièrent toutes les deux de se produire de manière équilibrée, en respectant les savoirs ancestraux et les lois cosmiques établies par les esprits supérieurs. En ce qui a trait à la méthode d’analyse, nous aborderons les discours de l’Amazonie à partir leur propre logique culturelle, sans imposer des méthodologies préétablies, ce qui donne comme résultat un travail académique qui approfondie la production intellectuelle interculturelle, puisque ce sont les voix indigènes qui expriment elles-mêmes leurs conceptions et le sens de leurs pratiques. Dans son ensemble, le travail engage un dialogue critique avec son champ d’étude en discutant ou en approfondissant certaines conceptions forgées par la littérature anthropologique consacrée à l’étude de la région, à partir des savoirs ancestraux amazoniens qui nourrissent les pratiques de ces nations.

When glaciers vanish : nature, power and moral order in the indian Himalayas

La présente thèse est une étude ethnographique qui examine le savoir en tant que pratique située au Ladakh, dans l’Himalaya indien. Elle analyse les implications socioculturelles des deux moteurs de changement en jeu au Ladakh: l’un est d'origine socio-économique et lié à la production du Ladakh en tant que zone frontalière, tandis que l’autre est de nature environnementale et entrainé par les changements climatiques. Alors que le Ladakh est demeuré hors de la portée de l’État bureaucratique pendant l’administration coloniale britannique, la région s’est trouvée reconfigurée en zone frontalière stratégique après l’indépendance de l’Inde des suites des guerres successives avec le Pakistan et la Chine. L’Indépendance a mené à la partition de l’Inde et du Pakistan en 1947; cette thèse examine la portée à long terme des évènements traumatisants de la partition tels qu’ils se sont déroulés au Ladakh et comment les Ladakhis établissent des liens entre ces évènements et les changements climatiques. L’État indien s’est produit dans la région à travers une volonté de dominer les montagnes, principalement par le développement d’infrastructures et par l’intégration du savoir local des Ladakhis dans l’appareil militaire. La militarisation a restructuré l'économie du Ladakh, redéfini la structure des ménages, contribué à l’exode rural, déplacé la centralité des activités agropastorales et, tel que la dissertation le soutient, altéré de manière significative la connexion de la population locale avec l'environnement. La rationalisation croissante de la perspective sur l’environnement aujourd'hui contribue à la fragmentation des liens qui unissent les domaines naturels et humains dans la cosmologie locale de même qu’à l'abandon des pratiques rituelles connexes. Parallèlement, la région est touchée par des effets distincts des changements climatiques, en particulier la récession des glaciers. La thèse juxtapose l'expérience subjective de ces vastes changements dans la vie quotidienne des villageois de la Vallée de Sham avec les faits historiques environnementaux, démontrant ainsi que les événements historiques locaux influent sur les perceptions des changements environnementaux. L'analyse démontre qu’un phénomène objectif tel que la récession des glaciers est interprété à travers des réalités locales. Plus précisément, selon la conception du monde locale, un glacier en retrait est une figure rhétorique d’une transformation de la condition humaine. Comme le fait valoir la dissertation, l’interprétation culturelle ne constitue pas un obstacle à l'objectivité de l'histoire naturelle de la cosmologie locale. L’interprétation culturelle et l'expérience empirique s’avèrent par ailleurs essentielles à la vitalité des connaissances locales sur l'environnement et à la performance des pratiques associées.

Visual representations as 'artifacts of knowing'

How does the manipulation of visual representations play a role in the practices of generating, evolving and exchanging knowledge? The role of visual representation in mediating knowledge work is explored in a study of design work of an architectural practice, Edward Cullinan Architects. The intensity of interactions with visual representations in the everyday activities on design projects is immediately striking. Through a discussion of observed design episodes, two ways are articulated in which visual representations act as 'artefacts of knowing'. As communication media they are symbolic representations, rich in meaning, through which ideas are articulated, developed and exchanged. Furthermore, as tangible artefacts they constitute material entities with which to interact and thereby develop knowledge. The communicative and interactive properties of visual representations constitute them as central elements of knowledge work. The paper explores emblematic knowledge practices supported by visual representation and concludes by pinpointing avenues for further research.

Introduction: the policy trajectory of Fair Trade

This paper provides a selective review of literature on fair trade and introduces contributions to this Policy Arena. It focuses on policy practice as a dynamic process, highlighting the changing configurations of actors, policy spaces, knowledge, practices and commodities that are shaping the policy trajectory of fair trade. It highlights how recent literature has tackled questions of mainstreaming as part of this trajectory, bringing to the fore dimensions of change associated with the market, state and civil society.