A collaborative autoethnography study to inform the teaching of reflective practice in STEM

The paper explores a collaborative self-study, autoethnography research project, which aided in informing practice for the teaching of reflective practice in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) at an Australian university. Self-report methods were used, because it enabled the collection of a variety of self-awareness data generated processes to help produce insights and understandings. This was achieved by undertaking a systematic approach to the exploration of a critical friendship between two academic support staff members alongside reflections from a recorded, focus group interview with nine STEM teachers. Four self-awareness data generated processes were used: (1) self-reflections; (2) collaborative reflections; (3) reflections on pertinent literature findings and (4) reflections from nine STEM teachers. A thematic analysis of the data was undertaken, which resulted in the discovery of three turning points such as moments of understandings that challenge assumptions and/or lead to new insights. The findings indicated that a STEM-centric, scaffolded approach that utilised the scientific method for reflective practice enabled the development of a shared understanding around teaching and assessing reflective practice for STEM teachers. First, because it boosted self-confidence and second, because it reduced scepticism around reflective practice as a non-scientific form of learning.

Collaborative reflective experience and practice in education explored through self-study and arts-based research

Eight teacher educators used self-study methodology to engage in reflective practice to overcome their isolation as individual teachers and researchers, and to facilitate professional development. Their research question asked: How can we continue to develop our teaching practice to ensure we are high quality, contemporary teacher educators? They contributed collaboratively in one overarching research project as well as through several focussed projects that explored issues in their individual teaching practices including: sustainability, creativity, curriculum design, pedagogy, assessment, and the learning experiences for students. This paper explores the outcomes from collaborative inquiry that five of the eight educator/researchers engaged in during a research-writing retreat. It documents their experience using arts-based strategies in which drawings were created about their experiences of engaging in a collaborative project and smaller focussed self-study projects. Analysis involved inquiring into each other’s drawings through recorded conversation. The metaphoric representations found through analysing the drawings provided insight into participants’ teaching practices and identities as teacher educators. Six months later when the participants had developed their projects further and used other artsbased methods to understand these experiences, they reflected on the key issues for their teaching practices that had arisen from undertaking this Collaborative Reflective Experience and Practice in Education research. Arts-based inquiries and reflective analysis over six months, constitute this paper. The experiences and analyses are shared to show how creating and sharing metaphoric meaning of visual representations is useful in self-study research to drill down into the real issues. Importantly, this in-depth sharing provides authentic interdisciplinary links when individual educators share their own approaches to teaching in their disciplined area. Findings suggest that gaining new insights into each other’s discipline-based approaches to teacher education through these methods, revealed different responses to pedagogical challenges and allowed for new possibilities for understanding the landscape of teacher education.

Whiteout: writing collaborative online poetry as inquiry

This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaboratewithin a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or deconstruct the poem, but thinks it in an alternative way, as a broader collaboration, or intra-action between entities, both human and non-human. We avoid determining how our purported individual voices merge to form any united voice. Rather, we are alert to agencies and flows that complicate understandings of us as three rational, discrete, fully formed human figures articulating coherent narratives. We therefore offer a response to theoretical calls to explore collaborative writing as inquiry, through sharing our practice.

A gallery walk: 'drawing out' understandings of collaborative self-study in teacher education

The Collaborative Reflective Experience and Practice in Education (CREPE) Research Group formed mid 2014 as a group of eight teacher educators interested in working collaboratively to improve our teaching practice through self-study methodology. Located at distance across the three campuses of Deakin University in Victoria, Australia and from the disciplines of mathematics, science, visual arts, performing arts, and curriculum and pedagogy, we aimed to better understand, improve, and share our practices as teacher-educators. While a few of us had engaged in self-study previously, all were comfortable with observing some kind of professional reflective/reflexive practice. We shared the intention of engaging in the scholarship (teaching practice and research) of self-study methodology via community of practice approaches, focusing on our collaborative (overarching) research as well as engaging in focused research simultaneously. It is our efforts towards collaborative research that are the subject of this chapter.

Collaborative dance between robot and human

Dance is an inherently embodied activity. The dancer is attuned to the effects of the physical world on her own physicality and the relationship of her presence to other dancers. This research is an investigation into artificially intelligent performing agents and robots and how a human dancer can guide the learning and performance of a robot performer. Using Artificial Neural Networks as the bases for the agent’s computational intelligence, performing agents were created that can perform by collaborating with human dancers through robots.

A general collaborative framework for modeling and perceiving distributed network behavior

Collaborative Anomaly Detection (CAD) is an emerging field of network security in both academia and industry. It has attracted a lot of attention, due to the limitations of traditional fortress-style defense modes. Even though a number of pioneer studies have been conducted in this area, few of them concern about the universality issue. This work focuses on two aspects of it. First, a unified collaborative detection framework is developed based on network virtualization technology. Its purpose is to provide a generic approach that can be applied to designing specific schemes for various application scenarios and objectives. Second, a general behavior perception model is proposed for the unified framework based on hidden Markov random field. Spatial Markovianity is introduced to model the spatial context of distributed network behavior and stochastic interaction among interconnected nodes. Algorithms are derived for parameter estimation, forward prediction, backward smooth, and the normality evaluation of both global network situation and local behavior. Numerical experiments using extensive simulations and several real datasets are presented to validate the proposed solution. Performance-related issues and comparison with related works are discussed.