Unit 5: Exhibition


UNIT 5: EXHIBITION

In this final Unit of the MA I have been asked to present an element of my research to an identified audience. I have chosen, initially,  to present this work to teachers and education professionals at my current school. To do this i decided to condense my final project (click here) into two parts:

1: A 15 minute presentation to staff during our Continuing Professional Development 'Micro-session' 
2: A Follow up 1 hour CPD session in which staff received hands on experience with the technology and explored the potential uses for their own teaching. 
  
The Prezi for the initial presentation is embedded here:


Rationale and Audience

I intended to present my findings as a piece of research that would inform the staff at my school of several factors:
1) The ideologically different approach to learning that is found in our new curriculum
2) The ascribed importance of background knowledge now found within this design
3) The challenges or areas of strength found within our school population in relation to cultural knowledge
4) Potential uses of technology in bridging this gap.

I decided to focus my presentation on this topic contained within my final project as I felt that it was the area in which i not only completed some of my best work but also the area that I felt would have most importance to a whole school audience. The work is relevant to the current educational setting in which we work and as such I felt staff would be more likely to engage and contribute to a piece of research that they themselves had experience of. I wanted also to provide some information on these issues so that we could present a whole school approach to tackling this issue (at least within the sixth form in the first instance) and one that incorporates the full range of subject areas within the school. My rationale for splitting the presentation was fairly straight forward in that I wanted to do something that reached the whole school (presentation 1) and then a more focused session that equipped more enthusiastic and perhaps more technology savvy members of staff with the knowledge to go and run something similar in their departments, thus spreading and embedding the ideas I had presented more widely across the school. 

This is similar to the idea of communities of practice as suggested by Lave and Wenger "Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." (Wenger, 2015).

Fig 1:
Characteristics of Communities of Practice (from Wenger, 2015)


It was my aim to start a technology focused staff community group, or 'working party', who could explore the issues around providing more curriculum relevant background content to our students. Using the activities in Fig 1 above we were in part 'Problem Solving' (in working around 'Cultural-Gapital' reated issues), but also 'growing in confidence' (with technology), 'documenting projects' (myself initially, but later with staff ideas) and Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps (many staff were paired with others who had more or less experience than themselves). This working group could potentially then explore other issues and problem areas in the future. I was hoping to incorporate as wider a group as possible from my school community so that we could  foster, in the future, a school action research group that focuses on the impact on technology.  When looking at existing research community examples I was hoping to create a group that will be 'accommodating differences and offering mutual support' as the Dialogues in Methods of Education groups that have been documented by Bertram & Eastley, (2000). These groups have quite stringent rules around the contributions that take place within them: 
 

Fig 2: Rules for 'dialogue in Methods of Education' groups from Bertram & Eastley (2000).



I was hoping for a similar outcome without necessarily incorporating such a formalised set of rules. I also wanted to create a presentation forum space in which staff could come together and talk comfortably about their own curriculum areas rather than just solely my research focus (although this was talked about and engaged with). Letting the staff who take part actually use the technology and relate this style of intervention to their own needs is something that I felt was important as "training (and technology that supports a training model of learning) tends to pull professionals away from their practice, focusing on information about a practice rather than on how to put that knowledge into practice." (Schlager & Fusco 2003). From previous CPD sessions I have run or been involved in from the receiving end I felt that allowing staff to use the ideas within their own classroom schema was an important part of making the presentation become more like training and professional development.



Presentation:

The first part of this presentation took place on a Wednesday morning Professional Development Micro session at Haggerston School. There were around 35-45 members of staff present, although i took no official register of this and many members of staff (including the head teacher and senior leadership team) are located off camera in the back left hand corner of the hall near the main entrance. I decided to use this venue and forum as it is a well attended and well established part of my school's calendar and I felt that by putting forward my research in this time and space already associated with positive training methods that my work would gain from it's established respectability. Staff would see it as worthwhile as it would have to have been checked by the Faculty fo Teaching and Learning at the school, who consist of the most established and well respected teachers in charge of the majority of staff training and appraisal. It therefore was an excellent opportunity for me to have my work 'pre-validated' in this manner.

 This presentation of my 'Cultural Gapital' project went well and I received plenty of positive comments both after the presentation itself and throughout the week as people mentioned in passing they enjoyed it. The session was intended as a taster and potential push into a longer, more focussed class, on using augmented reality interventions in the classroom. As staff were not able to design or explore the technology in this short time I looked at in the first half, the political background and rationale for my exploration into this area. I felt that this understanding of the ideological framework for their new curriculum is something that all staff regardless of their openness to technology would benefit from. 



exhibition-unit 5 from Mr Sloan on Vimeo.
Password = culture


Feedback:
In my initial presentation to staff in the Main hall I received many supportive messages afterwards from staff exclaiming their interest and positive outlook on my project and its potential use in our school. So in that sense it had served some of its initial purpose. I had designed the follow up session to give staff a more detailed look at what could be achieved with this augmented reality approach to background knowledge but I had also framed the session as an opportunity to talk about the impact of technology more generally, (this was in part an attempt to get as many people as possible to give up their time to attend the CPD session).

All teachers who attended the hour long follow up session filled out both a university participation consent form and an anonymous questionnaire, (I have included these here on this page). I decided questionnaires woudl be the only realistic method of data collection aside from the video observation data I gathered. I was only ever going to be able to ask staff for between 5 to 10 minutes of their time for this feedback (as the majority of the sessions I wanted to provide them with some training and resources), logging in to computers and carrying out interviews for instance would have been too time consuming so I opted for a simple two sided questionnaire with a mixture of simple quantitive style questions and some more open qualitative opportunities also. This would hopefully give me to access to some insight and key information around potential uses and impact but within the short time frame available.


 All teachers who attended the session ticked that they all found the session useful, which is a starting point is at least some measure of relevant impact. Likewise 11 out of the 13 ticked that they did believe that digital technology could assist in delivering additional content to our students. This does point towards staff who have a positive outlook on the uses of technology in the classroom although this is unlikely to be something that will have been born out of this session alone. 7 of the staff who attended were NQTs or trainee teachers and for some of them it was the first opportunity for them to discuss the impact of technology in the classroom. Many of the staff did however point to the usefulness of the session being the 'Blippar' technology itself and there were general written affirmations such as:

"the session was very helpful"

"great potential to enhance learning" 

There were also comments about the session generally...

"space to think about in relation to our own subject areas"

and that there were...

"plenty of examples" 

Several members of staff have commented in the questionnaires that they will use this technology in their classrooms as a result of this session

"trying the app for a revision session" 

"I could see myself using it for period 6 Sociology"

"(Blippar) is an app that I am actually going to start to use in my KS5 lessons" 

"Will try to use blippar with A level"

"KS5 tasks and research to share as a class - quicker than laptops" 

There definitely was an initial enthusiasm and many staff understood the point o me using the technology in this way. Staff seemed much more favourable to using this form of technology with KS5 classes and this is partly due to many of the examples I mentioned being aimed at this age range, although I did get them to focus on a year 9 interactive homework task for some of the session. Despite this many staff said that A level would be their focus even though "it has great potential to enhance learning in a year 11 class". 

"Never with KS3!" was one quite sceptical comment. Which led to an interesting discussion about when (and why) it could be appropriate to use technology with KS3 students

It was also nice to see some staff buying into my rationale for my cultural capital project as they also experienced similar problems in their curriculum areas. Questionnaire comments such as...

"Currently it is quite hard to teach context and background as its needed for the correct scheme of work" 

"Increasing cultural knowledge is a major part of my teaching.. and therefore involves context lessons on a regular basis." 

Some teachers even commented about the impact this could all have on their own teaching: 

"I was able to learn a new tool and show I can improve my pedagogy to improve ownership"

Personally I found the session genuinely interesting and encouraging to see so many staff communicating and collaborating around the ideas that I had presented. It was a very obvious example of collaborative learning or what Vygotsky might have called the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) in which more able peers were helping and guiding other staff members to develop their skills and create ideas and interventions for their classrooms that previously they had not considered to such an extent. 

Overall Feedback Conclusions: 

  • Staff found the ideas within the session interesting and engaging.
  • Most staff acknowledged that technology could help them increase access to a wider range of background knowledge
  • Most staff designed practical activities and resources for use in their own lessons.  
  • Acceptance that the use of technology could allow our students to bridge gaps in knowledge.   
  • The presentation formats of a split 'mini-presentation' and then follow up 'hands on hour' seemed to be a solid 'flipped learning' way of disseminating this training to staff. As staff arrived with a prior understanding of what I was talking about and felt confident enough to take the ideas into their own areas of expertise.  

Limitations of my presentation format: 

By opening up the session to some general 'technology in education' type advice I felt that some of the dialogue around the curriculum changes was lost on staff, who were all too excited and enthused by the chance to engage and experiment with a novel new technology. If I were to do this again or run a follow up, I would certainly ask staff in more detail around how they were approaching the increased need for wider context and background knowledge that I found to be lacking in our Sixth Form. Even though I did ask about this in the questionnaire, and received some feedback, I feel that I should have highlighted this in more depth in order to assess staff awareness and understanding of this issue and hopefully highlight the issue as something deserving of their time and focus in future lessons.

In my design of presentation I had hoped to create a community of practice and according to Wenger and Lave these communities share three key elements: The domain, the community and the practice. (Wenger, 2009). The issue I had is that my domain is not currently explicit enough to enable committed participation to the community. In future iterations of this I hope to be very clear initially about the aims of the work I am hoping for the group to achieve. As despite the presentation of my own research having a very clear aim, my follow up training was perhaps too vague to achieve anything meaningful, aside from the obvious engagement it generated in the technology and its potential 

Encouragingly there were few occasions during the two presentations in which staff openly questioned the usefulness of the project or the technology. There were some questions raised about the practicalities of using mobile phones in the lesson and the potential for disruption. However these were relatively straight forward to defend by referring the member of staff to the correct part of the school behaviour policy regarding mobile phone usage. One area of improvement for my presentation is that the questionnaire is not perhaps as detailed or comprehensive as I would have liked and I think that some follow up form of feedback such as an audio interview with teachers who have had a chance to use the technology in their own classrooms would really be beneficial to finding out how much impact this approach could have.

In my experience of using technology with teachers and students once the novelty of the initial idea has worn off, the ideas generated in sessions such as these can very rarely result in a meaningful intervention for the students. Measuring the actual impact by tracking the number of augmented reality resources and displays created and the number of background knowledge focussed interventions that are run in future will also be of importance in measuring the success or impact of this research.

Next Steps:

As a school I am hoping that this cultural capital interactive and collectable display idea will now become part of the way we present information and background knowledge in faculty areas across the school.

1: (next 2-3 months) In the run up to Exam season I will try and keep the idea of increasing access to curriculum relevant culture present across school:

I have already designed an augmented display in the Drama faculty for their GCSE cohort to use and interact with. This does however rely on other members of staff to commit to this. I have also created some augmented reality homework booklets for the English department, which I gave out to staff at the exhibition events and these have been received really well. This helps keep the technology present in the minds of staff and should hopefully encourage them to include a wider range of background knowledge and curriculum relevant content as a result.

An example of some of pages from these booklets, in which you can scan various pictures and obtain extra content,  can be seen here:




These booklets have been rolled out across the English department as a way of allowing students to interact with their homework and allow for contextual background resources to become easily accessible to them. In my previous role at my current school (as teacher in charge of digital technology across the curriculum) I found that a suprising number of students found it hard to access homework materials on a computer, but nearly students had access to a smart phone. By making available to our students a curated selection of internet resources (such as the websites, youtube videos, audiobooks and teacher created materials in the book above) that are accessible from their phones it is my intention to again allow another mechanism for wider culture to be provided for our students

It is clear that this approach is having some positive impact in our school and wider community. The true test will be whether we can keep and hold teacher and student engagement in cultural capital beyond the attention capturing starting point provided by the augmented reality intervention. 

2: (4-6 Months)
I also hope to widen this idea  of cultural gapital and augmented spaces / resources to a borough wide meeting using our 'East London Media Teachers' network that meets a couple of times a year. Wenger et al. talk about how; as a result of complex networks that now exist, there is 'a trend towards communities that are not confined to a single organization’. (Catalgo, 2009, p. 220). This may build the usefulness of designed interventions, alongside making any claims we make around the impact of the new curriculum, contain more weight as it will have been considered within a variety of institutions and not just my own.
 

My Development

During my time on the MA Creative and Media Education I have enjoyed the luxury of having time and reason to read academic literature once again and to write about areas of education that interest me such as how crowd funding models might benefit education in my very first project. This allowed me also to see how hard it can be to write about topics that I ask students to digest daily throughout their A level courses and it has given me not only new study skills (such as improved referencing and note-taking) but also reinvigorated my desire to develop my subject knowledge in relation to pedagogical approaches to media education.

The practical task also showed me just how difficult it can be to apply theoretical ideas within a short production time frame. Again the insight into how much we expect from our students in terms of creating a video within a packed educational schedule was not lost on me as I struggled to produce my 'Genre-mixing' Video This will develop into having a real impact on my own teaching of practical productions, asking students to be more concise and cogent in their selection of material.

The focus of my final two projects across both Unit 3 and 4 has allowed me to discover and write about a topic that concerns me greatly but has also taught me just how hard it can be to write critically and without personal prejudice and subjectivity. My research methodology was at times the weakest part of my research and this is something that I would spend more time improving upon in any research I complete in the future. 

For my own personal timeline:

Next 6 months:

I hope to send off this research to academic journals and media publishers to see if the idea of 'Cultural Gapital' that made up my project is one that is of sufficient interest to other educational stakeholders tasked with tackling this new curriculum approach that we find ourselves dealing with.

I will conduct follow up meetings with participants of my research project to see if they feel the projects have had impact of they have changed their delivery and approach to background knowledge in any way.

I will send off submissions to media education related conferences in the near future as I feel this work is relevant to our contemporary education landscape and one that needs teacher involvement if we are to ever rectify and change the impact of right wing think tanks such as 'Policy Exchange' and address the huge issues facing our children's education, that are in part due to a focus on core content and cultural literacy. Of course a series of augmented reality displays will do little to change this but as just one example of how we can co-opt the current curriculum to engage and assist the learners in our care it may give other teachers and educators some ideas for projects that they can develop in their own schools and institutions to tackle any gaps in cultural background knowledge that appear in their own school context. 

I have also arranged with fellow MACME teachers, such as Michelle Thomason to visit their school and media department in order to share good practice especially in the areas of research we have designed and developed during the MACME course.   


1 year and beyond: 

Next academic year I will hopefully be in charge of rolling out the Google Classroom within our school. I plan to set up an online forum and participatory network using this interface that will allow staff to collaborate around background knowledge and flipped learning strategies that can be valuable if used correctly. This will give me some more experience in whole school responsibility and training but also in the skills necessary to create and perpetuate the formation of a long lasting, useful CPD tool for all staff.

My current Head Teacher has spoken to me, whilst doing this MA, about potentially joining the faculty for teaching and learning at our school (a department for teacher CPD) and this would be something I would like to try and achieve whilst continuing to run a successful Media Studies Department.


If I can find the time and resources then continuing the research into 'Canon-resistance' and highlighting the impact of government backed think tanks masquerading as independent educational research groups by challenging the acceptance of a solid elite base of core culture is something that I would wish to carry out. Designing a fluid acceptance of culture and cultural capital within our curriculum and our society is something I personally think is of extreme importance.  I would love to do a PhD in Education at some point especially in this area of culture and 'canon rejection' but also around the use of data within primary and secondary education that I can see on a daily basis to be hugely flawed and damaging in many respects. In the future I hope to reseach and investigate around these two areas of education that I can often see narrowing and transforming our schools into data driven, core content led exam factories that serve not the achievement of individuals and their distinct identities but the continued authority of the dominant and the privileged. 

Working to develop Media Studies in areas of the world where there is little current Media Education is also something I have thought about developing, altough this is still very much a pipe dream. My family and I spend at least 6 weeks a year in Mexico and I know that Media Studies is not something that is taught in schools there. As the need for scrutiny and an understanding of the forces involved in the creation of the Media is something that many could benefit from, particularly in Latin America where press freedom is immensley curtailed. I initially plan to explore this by making contact with University Departments and in Mexico and enquiring about current Media Education provision in more detail. 

I have enjoyed my time on the MA Creative and Media Education immensely and hope to continue working in the field of Media Education for many years to come equipped with the many skills, contacts and new forms of knowledge that I have found on this course. 




Bibliography
Bruce, B.C. and Easley, J.A. (2000) ‘Emerging communities of practice: Collaboration and communication in action research’, Educational Action Research, 8(2), pp. 243–259. doi: 10.1080/09650790000200118.
Cataldo, C.G. (2009) ‘Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge, by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, & william M. Snyder. Boston, MA: Harvard business school press, 2002. 284 pages, hard cover’, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 8(2), pp. 301–303. doi: 10.5465/amle.2009.41788855.
Etienne and Wenger-­‐traynerBeverly (2015) Communities of practice a brief introduction. Available at: http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/07-Brief-introduction-to-communities-of-practice.pdf (Accessed: 12 January 2017).
Schlager, M.S. and Fusco, J. (2003) ‘Teacher professional development, technology, and communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse?’, The Information Society, 19(3), pp. 203–220. doi: 10.1080/01972240309464.
Vygotskii, L.S., Wygotsky, L.S., Vygotsky, L.S. and Souberman, E. (1978) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, and Sylvia Scribner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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