Simon N. Leonard

Pragmatic, scalable and sustainable responses to persistent socio-emotional issues such as mathematics anxiety remain elusive. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising approach by enhancing students’ perceptions of competence, control, and value while transforming teacher-student interactions. This paper advocates for a research agenda exploring AI’s role in shaping achievement emotions and calls for a broader shift in educational research toward leveraging AI for meaningful and transformative learning experiences.

“Closing the loop” in Learning Analytics (LA) requires an ongoing design and research effort to ensure that the technological innovation emerging from LA addresses the actual, pragmatic problems of educators in everyday learning environments. An approach to doing so explored in this paper is to design LA as a part of the human systems of activity within an educational environment, as opposed to conceptualising LA as a stand-alone system offering judgement. In short, this paper offers a case-study of how LA can generate data representations that can provide the basis for expansive and deliberative decision-making within the learning community. The case-study provided makes use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to monitor the changing patterns of decision making around teaching and learning in a very large Australian college over several years as that college embarked on an organised program of practitioner research. Examples of how the various SNA metrics can be translated into matters of pragmatic concern to the college, its leaders, teachers and students, are provided and discussed.

This paper reports from a design-based research project seeking to reduce bullying, and so, contribute to the sustainability goal of improving (understanding of) justice. Goals such as this call for holistic and interdisciplinary ways of thinking that are quite at odds with the linear and reductionist epistemologies available with globally dominant ‘neoliberal’ discourses on education and educational decision making. To achieve goals such as improving justice, sustainable education and educators must explore and champion expansive ways of knowing that acknowledge and celebrate the complexity of everyday learning contexts. Responding to this need, this paper presents a case study of how we, as a group of educational designers and teacher educators, have explored how the arts-based pedagogy known as Creative Body-Based-Learning, when coupled with Engeström’s expansive theory of learning, can provide an alternative structure and methodology for teacher professional knowledge production. The paper will also outline the use of the research methodology of computer-aided phenomenography as a means of evaluating this kind of complex learning where simple testing and self-reporting are typically inadequate.

This study examines the impact of a learning design focussed on providing guided autonomy within a virtual makerspace on the spatial thinking, anxiety and learning creativity of participating students. The learning design deployed within the virtual makerspace was consistent with the learning principles espoused by Self-Determination Theory in that it allowed students to develop autonomy and make many important decisions in their own learning, created diverse opportunities for the relatedness through authentic opportunities to work with others, and ensured a sense of competence through the provision of ‘just in time’ training and support. Through a within-subjects pre-/post-test design, the study showed a significant improvement in spatial reasoning across the cohort (n = 340). The most notable gains were for students with low but not very low pre-test scores before the intervention. Improvements in creativity and anxiety were also reported by students following the program. Given the research showing the importance of spatial reasoning to future success in STEM educational and career trajectories, these results suggest that well designed makerspace learning may be particularly useful in addressing an important learning gap for disadvantaged students.

STEM has become a pervasive part of global education reform. The STEM discourse positions the purpose of scientific education as being to prepare young people for work in a hyper-competitive 21st century knowledge economy, pushing aside alternative approaches focussed on interrogating social, moral and political issues in context. This narrative does not always sit comfortably with the holistic ambitions of many state and faith-based education systems. In this paper we will argue that these tensions emerge from deeper conflicts in the cultural-discursive arrangements around education in the advanced democratic states through an exploration of the response to a STEM curriculum project in a Catholic education system. The exploration is based on a phenomenographic analysis of reflective interviews conducted with participating teachers. We conclude that while the teachers are aware of the tensions, they may benefit from access to a language for discussing the various pressures on learning design and meaning making.

Personal epistemological beliefs play a key role in teacher engagement with professional learning, so consideration of epistemic cognition is integral to the designing of sustainable professional learning. This qualitative study uses Chinn et al’s (2014) model of epistemic aims, epistemic ideals and reliable epistemic processes (the AIR model) as a theoretical scaffold from which to understand how teachers’ ontological and epistemic cognitions affect their engagement with a professional development focused on mathematics anxiety and metacognitive questioning. To cater for the complex situated nature of epistemic cognition, semi-structured interviews were conducted throughout the programme of teacher learning. Thematic analysis identified common influencers on teacher professional learning whilst highlighting conflicts between conceptions of the nature of mathematics and what they had been taught about mathematics teaching. Findings indicate that teachers engaged most fully with situated, practical learning experiences in collaborative learning spaces as they allowed for greater alignment between professional learning content and personal epistemic beliefs. Recommendations for future professional learning and adaptations to the study’s epistemic research methodology are provided in the light of the findings.

In recent decades, the aims and objectives of education – and therefore public discourse on the appropriate skills and attributes of mathematics teachers – have been rapidly shifting due to forces from outside the teaching profession. The forces driving change in mathematics are as diverse as the emergence of “Industry 4.0” and “STEM,” new directions in transnational education policy making, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper contributes to a growing literature seeking to empower teachers to respond to the complexity of such multifaceted change expansively rather than defensively. It does so through the refinement and application of practical theories of educational change and approaches to building actionable practice knowledge. Specifically, this paper will argue for the use of the epistemic object as a practical focus for changes to practice chosen by the profession. This argument will be made within the framework of practice architectures offered by Kemmis and others. The paper first considers the impact of some recent disruptions on teaching and then provides a “worked example” of using mathematical proficiencies as an epistemic object able to practically support teachers to develop actionable knowledge grounded in the specifics of their own professional context.

The “Maker” movement is a cultural as well as educational phenomenon that has the potential to offer significant opportunities to students in conditions of social, economic and cultural disadvantage. The research reported in this paper, however, suggests that the simple provision of “Maker Spaces” for such activity is simplistic and not sufficient to realise this potential. The research involved a mixed methods study of a cohort of year 7 students (n = 26) in an Australian school located in a socio-economically disadvantaged outer-metropolitan region. The cohort undertook a range of Maker activities at a new “creativity centre” built at the school. Results indicate that the activities had positive impact on student attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) overall, but that the impact was highly specific across attitudinal constructs. A strong ranging effect was also evident, suggesting that the impact of the experience was highly dependent on students’ initial attitudes. Reflecting on these results, the paper also offers a reference framework that may help keep equity in mind when designing different kinds of Maker experience.