Tan, Michael Lip Thye

Over the past two decades, the notion of culturally relevant pedagogy has gained attention as a student-centered approach to helping low progress learners achieve academic success. First articulated in the US by Ladson-Billings (1994) in her study of the pedagogic practices of exceptional teachers of African American students, culturally relevant pedagogy identifies students’ unique cultural backgrounds as strengths and these are nurtured to promote academic achievement (Brown-Jeffy & Cooper, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 1995a; Morrison, Robbins & Rose, 2008). This approach has since been adopted in countless schools and classrooms across North America under various names – culturally responsive teaching, culturally congruent teaching, culturally appropriate pedagogy, etc. (Ferger, 2006; Hastie, Martin, & Buchanan, 2006). As many of these studies have shown, by having teachers draw upon students’ “cultural reference points” (Ladson-Billings, 1994), schools can create bridges between students’ home and classroom experiences, while still maintaining the high expectations of state/national curricular mandates (Gay, 2000; Gutierrez, 2000; Lambeth, 2014; Paulk, Martinez). Indeed, as Gay (2000, p.29) explains, culturally relevant pedagogy is especially important in classrooms of low progress learners because it uses “the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant and effective… It teaches to and through the strengths of these students. It is culturally validating and affirming.”

In creative problem solving, an essential component is the divergent idea generation phase before deciding on a plan of action for convergent, relatively well structured problem solving. In makerspaces and other sites where problems are posed in physical form, the material affordances of the objects and their spatial configurations can aid or hinder the search through problem space for possible solutions. In this study, we present the preliminary results of a study involving six pairs of grade eight students involved in a school makerspace context. Given sixteen little Bits modules housed in a small toolbox, along with some light construction materials, students were tasked to produce a prototype of a device that could attract teachers’ attention during class work sessions. The material actions that students made in early exploration of project ideas were correlated to the creative outcomes of their project.

This symposium proposes a genre of learning designs called Student-Generated Ideas (SGIs), based on designing learning contexts that promote students as critical producers, distributors, and consumers of knowledge. SGIs place students’ ideas at the center of learning designs, considering the learning process as well as the learning goals/outcomes. By soliciting and foregrounding students’ diversified ideas in the classroom and beyond, the learning environment communicates to students that their ideas matter to others and that they have a position of responsibility to their own and their peers’ learning processes. The notion of SGIs is embodied in a repertoire of studies at the Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Singapore, that offer varied yet overlapping interpretations of how student ideas can inform the design of learning contexts. In sharing the core design principles for SGIs approaches, this work contributes important components to the learning sciences discipline and changing educational practice.

Despite the many developments in the teaching of science, an aspect that continues to be neglected appears to be the character and nature of science (NOS). This is becoming especially important in the light of recent developments in pedagogy, as, for example, more teachers adopt constructivist methodologies and computing technology enables simulations that may blur the lines between models and reality. From the literature, it is known that teachers' modern NOS conceptions, though not a sufficient condition for transmission of modern NOS views, is necessary. In this study, pre-service teachers' NOS conceptions are assessed with an adapted Views of the Nature of Science (VNOS) instrument, originally designed by Lederman, Abd-El-Khalick, Bell, and Schwartz (2002). The modified instrument is an eight-item, open ended questionnaire – designed to elicit descriptive responses to common NOS misconceptions. Responses were analysed into coded categories of ‘informed, ‘uninformed, and ‘ambiguous’. It was found that a significant proportion of teachers possessed uninformed views. Some implications for teaching and teacher education are presented in this paper for discussion.

While most are familiar with the idea of using a video camera as a generic recording device, a deeper understanding of what happens “behind the camera”; the biases that audio and video recording usually are accompanied with; and the type and level of analysis of recorded footage, is still largely lacking in many educational research communities. In this paper, a quick survey of some technical, methodological, and analytic issues is presented with a view to introduce to the reader some established paths to pursue for further study. A brief presentation of work attempted elsewhere is also offered, and several suggestions for incorporating video into research in the local context are proposed for the reader’s consideration.

Despite the many developments in the teaching of science, an aspect that continues to be neglected appears to be the character and nature of science (NOS). This is becoming especially important in the light of recent developments in pedagogy, as, for example, more teachers adopt constructivist methodologies and computing technology enables simulations that may blur the lines between models and reality. From the literature, it is known that teachers' modern NOS conceptions, though not a sufficient condition for transmission of modem NOS views, is necessary. In this study, pre-service teachers' NOS conceptions are assessed with an adapted Views of the Nature of Science (VNOS) instrument, originally designed by Lederman, Abd-El-Khalick, Bell, and Schwartz (2002). The modified instrument is an eight-item, open ended questionnaire - designed to elicit descriptive responses to common NOS misconceptions. Responses were analysed into coded categories of 'informed, 'uninformed, and 'ambiguous'. It was found that a significant proportion of teachers possessed uninformed views. Some implications for teaching and teacher education are presented in this paper for discussion.