Azilawati Jamaludin

This paper reports the impact of using a structured argumentation board and enactive role play in Second Life on students' argumentative writing skills in the context of the A-level subject General Paper. Students were taught the structural aspects of argumentation based on Toulmin's (1958) argumentation framework. The structured argumentation board, Voices of Reason, supported their argumentation discourse while the Second Life platform supported students' contextualised role-playing activities on the topic of globalisation. Students participated in these two separate modes of technology-facilitated learning in a cyclic, interwoven fashion, alternating back and forth between two cycles of argument and enaction. Data in the form of argumentative essays were collected at the beginning and the end of a four week intervention period. We compare the pre and post intervention argumentation essays written by the students based on Toulmin’s argumentation framework, contrast the findings with that of the control group's argumentative essays, and present the statistical results in this paper.

Issues of innovation diffusion and its related tractability in schools remain key challenges in education research. At the Office of Education Research in Singapore, the authors have been working to develop a research program leveraging upon a school cluster system with the view to experimenting on the centralization and decentralization structures of Singapore's education system to enable scaling or the diffusion of innovations to occur. They posit that underpinning the structural aspects of diffusion is the notion of apprenticeship learning among teachers for epistemic change to occur. In this article, they define and outline how epistemic learning can occur at the teachers' level, articulating how leaders can provide the necessary socio-technological infrastructure to spread and sustain epistemic shifts for pedagogical change. To this end, they explore the use of the cluster system as an alternative approach and a proximal vehicle to build teacher capacity and to promote epistemic change in a more optimal manner in the context of innovation diffusion in education.

Arising from postmodern influences, notions of knowledge as absolute and foundational get increasingly challenged (Collins & Halverson, 2009; Gee & Shaffer, 2010; Dimmock & Walker, 2000). Instead, there now exists a concerted effort on the exploration of situatedness and contextuality of knowledge within which subjectivities are inscribed (Schon, 1987; Shaffer, 2010; Halpern, 2010). Parallel to this, the notion of corporeality takes on renewed significance in epistemological debates. Rather than thinking of knowledge as transcending the body, embodiment of knowledge has become a key factor in understanding the nature of knowledge and what it means to know (Dohn, 2002; Gallagher, 2005; Johnson, 2007; Gregersen & Grodal, 2009). Occupying the agendas of cultural and cyber theories of the last five decades, the concept of ‘body’ gets even more elusive with the permeation of technologies. The ‘disappearance’ of the body under conditions of digitality effectuate the presumption that contemporary media brings about a state of dematerialisation and disembodiment. It appears that modern technologies may have consequentially undermined the centrality of the body in cultural, social, and educational interactions. Yet, current conceptions of knowledge and learning are predicated on an embodied merging of mind and body. An epistemological reorienting toward the body coupled with a technological turn away from the body thus presents a dichotomy.

Against this backdrop, this study seeks to clarify the notion of embodiment within a seemingly dichotomous interplay of corporeality and digitality. I ask three key questions: (i) How do informants conceive of body in the interplay of corporeality and digitality? (ii) What are the embodied knowing enactments arising from informants’ interplay of corporeality and digitality? and (iii) How do activities and structures within the interplay of corporeality and digitality bear upon informants’ embodied knowing and, by extension, identity becoming? Turning to the extremely popular immersive multiplayer game space, World of Warcraft (WoW) as an expedient and au courant context for corporeal and digital interplay, I investigated how modes of existing in WoW, of being-in-world, provide the phenomenological ground for youths’ embodied knowing as they construct identity, negotiate meaning, and make sense of their social experiences online. In understanding how body is conceived by informants, the emergent themes were: (i) instantiation of a phenomenal body in play, (ii) bodily repertoire from pre-reflective consciousness to organization of the corporeal schema, and iii) interplay of corporeal-perception and digital-action as enabling new ways of being-in-world. To unpack informants’ bodily enactments, three thematic categories of: i) domain practices, ii) discursive practices, and iii) disquisitional practices against self, social, and structural relations were observed. Finally, in analyzing the constructs underpinning embodied knowing and identity becoming, four thematic categories were reported: i) performative enactments, ii) bodily attunements, iii) affordance management, and iv) affectivity and inclinatory constructs.

Drawing on these findings, I characterize a form of rhizomatic embodiment within current media sophistications which I argue to be a conceptual provision that can be used to reduce the analytical elusiveness of embodiment and overcome the gap in current understandings of how digital experiences account for new ways of meaning making and how one comes to know and hence to be within contemporary interactional spaces. I make an argument for a shift of attention from youth’s game play as an interpretive and manipulative activity of arbitrary representations and simulations to recognizing it as rhizomatically embodied material-digital possibilities that is accomplished through the mobilization of multiple modalities. To this end, this thesis is intended as a theoretical and substantive contribution to the study of body in relation to learning and becoming in present times, as it addresses the ontological and epistemological dissonances that confront this area, while seeking to derive possible implications for the institutionalized schooling milieu.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) tools have marched into schools to provide borderless teaching and learning to complement existing face-to-face interactions. This article describes how teachers have used CMC to facilitate asynchronous online communication among students' collaborative project groups in project-based classrooms. Secondary school teachers used the CMC tool to facilitate and manage students' learning in terms of brainstorming and challenging student ideas, building resources, and working collaboratively to complete group projects.

This project was undertaken with the aim of developing and testing a pedagogical innovation—the Integrative Approach to Structured Argumentation (IASA) instruction model—for teaching science at the Lower Secondary level. The IASA instructional model aligns with the goals of the current curricular mandate for school-based scientific inquiry by promoting the practice of scientific argumentation. Engaging science learners in argumentation provides the interactional space in the classroom for them to develop 21st century skills, such as critical thinking and reasoning. Employing design-based research, we collaborated with 6 teacher-participants from two schools. Across the two and a half years of our work, we ran iterative cycles of designing learning and teaching resources, enacting the pedagogy, analysing the outcomes of implementation, and progressively redesigning and refining based on these outcomes. The project has completed the development and testing of three argument-based learning tasks on the topics of Heat, Chemical Changes, and Ecology, which are now contained in the IASA Toolkit lesson package available for download from the IASA website. We have also completed the development and testing of the IASA Web App that supports students’ argumentation activities (student interface) and teachers’ logistical work for argumentation tasks (teacher interface). We analysed students’ written arguments and peer feedback with respect to normative practices for reasoned coordination and assessment of claims and evidence and conventions for representing scientific arguments. The results indicate students demonstrating, over multiple exposures to argumentation tasks, gradual improvement in appropriating, and increased awareness of, the criteria for good scientific argumentation. This promising outcome suggests that the adoption of the IASA instructional model in the Singapore context could begin to address reform calls for science teaching to: (1) emphasise not only conceptual instruction but also the enculturation of science learners in the epistemic practices of the scientific community and (2) support and develop scientific literacy through productive participation in reading, writing, and talking scientifically.

In this article, the authors discuss the importance of studying identity in the context of 21st century learning. Identity is an evolving trajectory that is always in-flux or changing. In a fast changing 21st century, educators are recognizing the significance of identity work, in particular projective ident1ty, as individuals participate in multiple roles. The purpose of this article is to formulate key tenets for the study of projective identity in the form of role-play(s) as youth-participants navigate different social and spatial affinity spaces, and to describe why it is important to 21st century learning.