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Part of the Psyched about Education podcast series for IOE120.
Introduction
00:00:03 Female voiceover
You're listening to an IOE podcast.
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00:00:12 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Hello and welcome to this recording, which we're presenting as part of IOE 120th anniversary in 2022. As part of those celebrations, each of IOE academic departments is sharing its current areas of work. I'm Professor Jeff Bezemer, Head of IOE Department of Culture, Communication, and Media.
And I'm pleased to be joined today by colleagues from across the department to discuss some of the key themes of our work and how they have informed policy practise in education health in the cultural sector and society more generally.
Our work is very strongly connected to the IOE focus on learning and teaching and culture and society. What our department brings to the IOE is world leading. Expertise in the areas of language and communication, culture and education, and media and technology. We have very much a multidisciplinary department. Our work is grounded in the social sciences as well as the arts and humanities and also draws on AI and human computer interaction.
Over the years we have made significant contributions to knowledge, policy and practise. For example, we have been at the forefront of research in language learning, visual communication, and educational technology. We have trained generations of teachers of English drama, foreign languages, music and art and design, and we have developed a range of digital tools for teaching and learning across the globe.
We're now going to explore these contributions in more detail with six of our professors. They are Caroline Daily professor of teacher education, Evangelos Himonides, professor of technology, education and music, Kaska Porayska-Pomsta professor of artificial intelligence and education John Potter, professor of Media and Education, Andrea Révész, professor of Second Language acquisition, and I will also be joining the conversation as Professor of communication.
00:02:13
Welcome all, I'm delighted that you are with us today, so we're going to go around the table and talk with each of you about your research, what you and your colleagues are trying to find out who you work with what and who your research is for and where you see research going next.
Language learning and language use Professor Andrea Révész
00:02:29 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So I'm going to start with you, Andrea, hello.
00:02:33 Professor Andrea Révész
Hi Jeff.
00:02:35 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Would you like to tell us something about your research, what it’s about and what are you trying to find out?
00:02:42 Professor Andrea Révész
As you've just mentioned, I'm a second language acquisition researcher. I study how people use and learn foreign and 2nd languages, and within this larger fields I'm ultimately interested in understanding the cognitive processes in which second language learners engage the primary goal of this line of research is to inform second language teaching and assessment practises. Some of my work is more basic in research, focusing on the processes in the second language. Learners engage when they write or speak in a second language.
In terms of writing, we use a combination of methods to examine writing processes. I thought I would give you an example just to get an idea what this involves detect participants, keystrokes and mouse movements while they write through keystroke logging software. We also use eye tracking, give treatments to drag their eye movements while they're writing, because when it comes to writing.
00:03:34
Reading and viewing are an important writing process, and when we finish writing, we also ask them to share what they were thinking while they were composing. We hear that in this way, combining these various research methods, we can arrive at a more valid and fuller picture of the writing process.
00:03:53
When it comes to speaking, I have recently begun to collaborate with neuro scientists to tap the speaking process. We ask participants to carry out speaking activities in an fMRI machine. Now this is possible to engage in a spontaneous speech production and then we triangulate this data with linguistic analysis.
00:04:13
Let me also give a few examples of my research which has more direct implications for language teaching, practise, and assessment. From my work with PhD students, we look into the role of captions, subtitles when they engage with videos, for example, they investigated the highlighting features in the input would help second language learning. One of my students looks into multimodal feedback. Is it better to give feedback just through writing or speaking, or to do that simultaneously?
00:04:43
A common side across all of these, research projects are focused on second language tasks. I contextualise my research in task based language teaching, which means that we adopt task communicated activities as a basic unit for curriculum development, designing classroom activities, and also for assessment practises. So when I look at speaking or writing. Usually I do investigate a task based communication and speech or writing.
00:05:12 Professor Jeff Bezemer
OK, so it sounds like you are trying to measure language use at a very detailed level, is that right?
00:05:19 Professor Andrea Révész
Yes, yes, and using psycholinguistic methods and more recently again as I mentioned, working with neuro scientists as well.
00:05:28 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Are there any specific challenges that you encounter when you're trying to measure what people do when they speak or write in that way?
00:05:36 Professor Andrea Révész
There are many challenges and that's why it's important to to triangulate various methods. Because if you just use one of them. Let's say trying to look at how they type or what they see. You will only capture part of that process, and it's a complex phenomenon, so bringing together. These various resources are helpful because then we can overcome limitations of each of these methods to some extent of course.
00:05:59 Professor Jeff Bezemer
OK, and so your broader area of interest in Second Language Acquisition, how does that relate to the work that your colleagues do in your centre?
00:06:09 Professor Andrea Révész
In our centre in the Centre for Applied Linguistics there is a group who also look into second language acquisition. We have a thriving second language acquisition community. Colleagues work on speech production, individual differences, vocabulary acquisition, reading, bilingual language acquisition, another cluster within the Centre is linguistic and social inequalities. And they try to identify solutions to tackle these issues and the ultimate goal of their research is to help transform societies at large.
00:06:40
Maybe it's helpful if I give some specific research interest areas that my colleagues are engaging. Second language assessment, language teaching materials, colleagues also work on educational sociolinguistics, discourse critical discourse analysis, political economy, global englishes. Others research the role of gender and sexuality, and I have some colleagues working on work based communication and health related aspects of life. Probably it's already clear that we are a diverse group of people, we cover several areas. Maybe it's also important to emphasise that we have a broad range research methods that we use, ranging from qualitative ethnographic methods through corpus linguistics discourse, the Psycholinguistic neuroscience research that I've described in relation to my own research. Much of our work is interdisciplinary, bringing together applied linguistics, we have such as sociology, Health Sciences, neuroscience, education, technology, psychology, and of course the larger field of education.
00:07:45 Professor Jeff Bezemer
OK, and you already highlighted the value of your own work for education. Can you elaborate a bit more on what sort of wider benefits are of your research, how it can be applied in practise?
00:08:00 Professor Andrea Révész
I do to some extent as you mentioned, I already outlined that I work with language teachers to some extent and assessment especially so it has wider implications for these fields. I’ve been involved in projects with the teachers. Of course, language learners and also language testing organisations that, among other things, we hope to inform their language testing practises, organisations like English testing service. Cambridge Language Assessment Trinity College, London, British IELTS British Council.
00:08:37 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So would you say that one of the outcomes of your work is that it makes language testing more accurate, more precise?
00:08:44 Professor Andrea Révész
When it comes to testing, then you'd like to test second language knowledge. First you need to understand what that knowledge entails and what processes language learners are engaged in when they, in this case performer test. So this is more basic type of research, but I do believe it's important for language testers to understand these processes so they can design effective and suitable assessment.
00:09:10 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Looking into the future, what are you planning to do next?
00:09:14 Professor Andrea Révész
Well, as it might have become obvious based on my description of my, my research interest, I'm really passionate about research methodology, so I’d like to continue with interdisciplinary approaches. To my research I think it's particularly exciting to look into collaborations between second language acquisition researchers and neuroscientists. It's becoming increasingly possible to look at these processes, so this is one area I'd like to continue. And of course, when it comes to language teaching, again, the primary goal of my research is to inform language teachers and learners and assessment specialists or collaboration with the stakeholders is also important. So I'd like to make sure that the insights from my research actually reaches these practitioners, because ultimately the research is intended for them.
00:10:06 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Sounds fascinating. Do any of my colleagues have any questions for Andrea?
00:10:14 Professor John Potter
I was intrigued by you when you came back to saying about mixed methods. So what kinds of qualitative methods do you use?
00:10:21 Professor Andrea Révész
I would probably I should have maybe highlight that most of my research is more quantitative in nature. But when we ask for interview our participants what they were thinking while they engaged in some type of writing or reading or any type of second language activity that's more qualitative in nature. The data we get, so then we engage in qualitative analysis. But then we quantify that data so it's not the ethnographic qualitative type of research that I do.
00:10:51 Professor John Potter
No, that's fascinating thanks.
00:10:52 Professor Andrea Révész
Thank you.
00:10:53 Professor Evangelos Himonides
It is a fascinating thing. I mean, there have been many discussions in the past about music being in language as well so and debates about it, but for me it's it's also personally fascinating because. What is perceived as my mother tongue is actually my second language. I grew up learning and speaking German as my first language, and now my second language Greek is my mother tongue and German has been completely relinquished, so I've always been fascinated about what happens in the brain, and about the actual structural changes happening, and we've seen those with studies in music as well. About structural changes with musical training and also linguistic training. So I would very much love to actually have further discussions with the with you and to see how future synergies can be formed.
00:11:46 Professor Andrea Révész
Sounds exciting. Some of my colleagues actually look into these areas. They looked into bilingual language acquisition looking at exactly those type of structural changes, what it means to grow up monolingually or bilingually so that research can probably answer some of your questions already, but there's a lot more to look into it.
00:12:04 Professor Evangelos Himonides
Well, I did volunteer my daughter in one of your studies and in sense that as a 3 passport holder that actually doesn't speak Greek but speaks only English but is the daughter of an American and a Greek person. So we did take her to GOSH and volunteer her for the brain scan.
00:12:21 Professor Andrea Révész
Thank you very much for volunteering. We need participants it was. It was very interesting, yes, and she loved it actually and she got an actual certificate so that had a picture of her brain as well so she values that.
Communication and health Professor Jeff Bezemer
00:12:33 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So I'm going to hand over my voice facilitator, momentarily to Kaska, so that we can have a conversation about my research.
00:12:44 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Hello Jeff.
Hello everyone.
I will start by asking you about your research and your research interests, and perhaps you can also give us a few examples of your research, Jeff.
00:12:58 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Absolutely thank you. Yes, I am a professor of communication, but I have in fact in the past ten years or so focused on team work, so it's a very kind of broad conception of communication and more specifically, teamwork in at clinical settings in hospitals. So for example, at teams that work in an operating room or that come together to resuscitate patients in intensive care unit, those kinds of situations where people come together to engage in cooperative action and what I'm really interested in is to find out how they actually go about doing that. It looks so simple. The idea of working on the task together.
00:13:44
But in actual practise it is rather complex, especially in those clinical settings where you've got lots of different people operating in particular roles and actually having to rely on each other to engage in joint action. Even just simple things like one person having to hold something up that the other person can cut it or manipulate it in didn't in some way. And I use video recordings to explore that. So I've spent hours going through those recordings and really trying to work out what happens on the kind of second by second basis how do they get from 1 from 1 action to another?
00:14:26 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
I guess this is this is also illustrating how broader definition of education we adopt in within the department and more broadly within the IOE, so we are not just talking about classroom learning or just young learners, but we're talking about much broader settings, where people actually can engage their expertise in professional settings.
00:14:56 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Yeah, so could you give us maybe an idea of how your work relates you know to work across the department or kind of partners do you have within the department and then maybe more broadly as well?
00:15:14 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. My work is not exclusively focused on learning and teaching. Although it is part of it, so I'm also interested to see what happens when you put, let's say, newcomers or learners into that group that comes together to work on things, how does that change the way they work and how do they support the learner? How do they induct the learners into that environments at what kinds of remedial action do they engage in to make things work? Even though you have to also support people at the same time. But there are lots of people, in fact in the IOE that work around what we call multimodal communication. So this is the idea that people use a range of different means of communication in in their day to day life. Whether it is a gesture or forceful speech or writing or gaze or any kind of visual communication like image. All these different means of expression. Uh, tend to be used in in in conjunction and the area of multimodal communication emerged almost 20 years ago now, which was around the time that I joined the IOE. In fact, in fact it was the reason why I came to the IOE, because, yeah, we was pioneering that that that space people like going to Gunther Kress, Carrie Jewett and some other colleagues were working on a project called English in the classroom and they were looking at the ways in which teachers and students communicate with each other through all those different means of communication, not just through talk and at the time.
00:17:18
There was a very Revolutionary idea and I was very excited too to join that team and it has since expanded and other people have joined the team that they have started looking at other sites like museums or they've started looking at digital literacies or film semiotics, or about touch, for example, or multimodal learning analytics. It kind of expanded into a range of different areas.
00:17:49 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
It's really fascinating. It really brings to the fore this notion that we don't learn in one particular way. You don't engage with the environment in one particular way. We recruit all of these different forms of interaction into our existence, I guess, and into our learning and into our understanding of the of the environment and one of the more fascinating to me at least areas is this transition from novice to expert and how novices find themselves in these quite contrived environments where they really have to enact, learn what an expert or what expertise is. What is required of them, and to act in the heat of the moment, so this is. This is really again emphasising the variety of the different contexts in which in which we learn and enact our expertise.
00:19:04 Professor Jeff Bezemer
But indeed, indeed, if you go into these spaces that you haven't where you haven't been working yourself, you need to work very closely with the people who do you can't just observe them doing what they do, which is a big part of my work, but you do also need to talk to them and you need to ideally also work with them on your research so you can look at the video recordings in my case, but data more generally together to make sense of those data. So I do work with health professionals that worked with surgeons with nurses. I've got PhD students that have a background in physiotherapy and so on. So that is absolutely essential. That's that close collaboration. And it should really go beyond you know the interview, which is what researchers used to do. Having a conversation and that's it. But you need to work much more closely together.
00:20:15 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Could you tell us a bit about why do you think this research is important? Who will this research, or who does this research benefit?
00:20:27 Professor Jeff Bezemer
That's a really good question, and of course I get asked that question all the time, especially from the health professionals themselves and what I always say is that what we're trying to do, what I'm trying to do is get a better sense of the life experiences of those health professionals of of the kind of messy day-to-day world that that they have to operate in, and two identified sorts of challenges that they encounter, but also the worker ants that they designed to work in spite of all those challenges, or perhaps even to address those challenges bang on. So it's an attempt to come up with a detailed representation of what their day-to-day life looks like and what their work entails in practise, and the next step is to then make explicit what the underlying principles or patterns are of those behaviours that we've encountered, and to discuss those to subject those explications t, to some form of joint analysis critical analysis. And to start a conversation about how things may work better if you redesign aspects of the environment or aspects of the of the procedures that they that they follow. So again, that's really a matter of collaborating very closely with health professionals directly.
00:22:12 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Wonderful, I wanted to open up the conversation to other colleagues. Do you have any questions?
00:22:24 Professor Caroline Daly
Thanks, Jeff. I'm aware that there's been interest from medical professional learning in the kinds of research that that you do. Have you got anything you could tell us about the networks that that you've got with? For example, people in medical education, Primary Health care, education, what they've been able to gain from the research that you do.
00:22:49 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Yeah, well I can give an example of a PhD project that the medical school of UCL was also involved in. It was a co supervision and it was in fact a surgeon who was interested in work-based assessments. Which is something that health professionals are all too familiar with. They have to complete. I don't know how many forms every year to document learning that involved supervision, or that they did entirely independently. There are different types of learning that they need to document and surgeon Albronter Heim was very interested in finding out not just what that what the outcome of that process is, which is a whole lot of forms as we know. But the process behind it. So how do people actually go about completing those forms, what makes them decide to document one, particular instance of learning rather than another, what who actually completes the form to begin with? Is it the learner or is it the supervisor? Turns out that often the learner completes parts of the form on behalf of the supervisor, who then just needs to sign it off. But that doesn't mean that they can complete the form in whatever way they want there are all sorts of considerations that come into play. There would have to do with the professional identity of the learner and the impression that they want to give towards their supervisor but also towards the people that eventually need to look at those forms to decide whether they can stay on as a learner or whether they need to repeat or whatever. So that's one example of the ways in which my research can contribute to understanding medical education.
00:24:58 Professor Evangelos Himonides
If I may, if find it fascinating because I see a lot of value in people in educational, educational research being involved in in opening these new doors, which is a new thing. And I think that society has started understanding how important it is to involve educators and educational researchers in that you know adopting multimodal approaches to try to understand how things work, which if you think about it, is by default what teachers are supposed to be doing in order to be effective teachers and one of the fascinating things that I've discovered, for example, as one of the founding editors of a new branch in performing science in frontiers and the psychology is that when using different multimodal lenses, for example surgery or other parts of medical practise are seen as performative practises and you have no new scholarship in new research health being submitted and under the form of science, and that's why, for example, we have very interesting initiatives like the synergy between the Royal College of Music and the Imperial College and medical school, or they massively funded project in order to explore these things. So, it's fascinating work and it will be very nice again to explore possible synergies, because, again, music is very strongly interwoven with the therapeutic sector.
00:26:30 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Indeed, thank you yeah.
00:26:32 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
I think Andrea wanted also to ask a question.
00:26:35 Professor Andrea Révész
Thanks, this is indeed really exciting research and I was interested in the multimodal aspect of your work and I was wondering what a multimodal analysis actually entails in your case, how would you go about this analysis?
00:26:51 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Well, there's different ways of doing it, but I suppose the easiest way to think about it is rather than trying to just describe what people say, which is what researchers in our area have done for a long time you're also trying to transcribe in one way or another, at the gestures that they use, the actions that they perform whilst our talking, or when they are not talking at all, but simply getting on with the task at hand. And that's of course a real challenge because at best you can, you can describe it or you need to find an alternative code to represent different types of actions, but that's effectively how it works. You go through a video and you've got different streams or different tiers if you like for each mode of communication.
Thank you.
Learning and technology Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
00:27:48 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
So I will hand over back to Jeff now to continue the conversation. Thank you.
00:27:56 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Thank you very much Kaska. Could you tell us something about your research Kaska?
00:28:03 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Sure, so I'm professor of artificial intelligence in education and I am interested in understanding at a general level, what drives people's learning, action and decision making. So this is a very broad area. But fundamentally this is an area which is of relevance to them being able to not only understand what makes us human and what makes us interact with the environment. But also it's important to helping us shape the behaviours and actions and decision making processes, and in order to conduct my research, I rely very much on artificial intelligence techniques and models and theories. And the advantage of actually using technology, and especially technology that is inspired by human cognition and human behaviour, is that we can create very tangible and testable models of our theories, so that allows us to manipulate these models. It allows us to manipulate different variables and to gain a much more precise understanding of the phenomena that we are looking at. But by the same token by creating these models we are also able to then invest in tools which we can use directly to help people learn to enhance their communication, or to enhance their decision making in diverse contexts. And there are plenty of examples from my own research and also from research across the IOE, but especially within the lab where I'm based, the UCL Knowledge Lab. Where we investigate we invest in both these aspects, of research, so creating models contributing to our theories of human behaviour and learning and also developing tools for helping people learn and and communicate and so on. And these examples typically involve creating specialist models of particular aspects of behaviour. So for example models of how people solve problems in. For example, in. In domains such as mathematics. Models of how people are motivated to actually engage in linguistic communication. So the specific examples there are multiple specific examples of these kinds of projects research projects which, for example focus on helping young children on the autistic spectrum to engage in social communication and linguistic communication as well. And there are also other forms of models, for example, models of how teachers actually employ support strategies to help students in the moment to progress through their learning experiences in multiple different domains.
00:32:08 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So you talk about models. Could you explain to the lay public, myself included, what does a model mean in this case and how do you how do you build it.
00:32:24 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Well, it's a very complicated process which involves engaging many different methodologies. Andrea was talking about quantitative methods and qualitative methods. You were talking also about methods of observation and coding the data, which is a very painstaking process. We do exactly the same in the context of AI in education. We collect data about how people behave. So obviously this is the models are restricted to particular areas. We can't model everything. So for example, we may be interested in modelling or understanding the emotional processes that are involved in engaging with solving maths problems for example, and this is very important. We know that from educational research and from psychology research psychological sciences that emotions are fundamental to our learning and especially in in domains such as mathematics, we may encounter some of the barriers, such as maths anxiety and so it is important to understand how these kinds of emotions arise, what are the triggers? And what we can do to help students overcome these difficulties in order to allow them to learn and so, again, to create a model of maths anxiety, for example, in a in a particular sub domain of of maths requires a lot of observation. It requires not only observation in general but also observation in ecologically what we call ecologically valid circumstances, so it requires setting up quite controlled environments, which resemble as closely as possible the kind of environment in which we envisage helping students, and then such models require a very close analysis of the behaviours. In order for us to be able to then encode these observations in a computationally in a formal way in a computationally in a way that it can be computationally processed.
00:35:14 Professor Jeff Bezemer
OK. I know that you're also interested in the ethics of AI. Could you say a bit more about that?
00:35:23 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Well, it's a very big, very hot topic, not least because we have had a lot of examples of ethical concerns arising as a consequence of using AI and within the AI in education these concerns have been until very recently, I'm not so much ignored, but they didn't receive as much attention and part of the reason for that, maybe because just a lot of a lot of researchers who work within the AI in education assume that somehow you know we observe. From the ethical concerns, simply by virtue of working and education. So somehow, you know, we can delegate to do the education as a kind of domain that is responsible for looking at for questioning any possible issues that may that may arise, but obviously we are not absorbed as researchers in this in this domain and there are very specific concerns within AI in education which require close inspection and these concerns are very much to do with how the education system works, so they the issues are very entangled, with what we value in education and how the education system itself is structured and the technology itself beads AI, or, you know broader kind of Edtech, educational technology industry feeds into that system. So in many ways it reinforces a lot of the things that already exist there, so examples of ethical concerns that cut across between different areas of the island that are specific that are also relevant to AI and education includes the, who is actually education for, where the emphasis is being placed. So for example, you know the main emphasis is placed on the so-called neurotypical learners with neuro diverse learners receiving different and maybe not so, well, the different kind of provision, but there are other concerns which relate to what kind of domains we value what, what kind of outcomes we are looking for and these concerns, kind of, both drive the educational technology and AI industry that tries to cater for the system, but also the technology by virtue of catering for the system, reinforces what we value and where we place the emphasis. So, so this is the kind of work that we are trying to do. Also at the at the Knowledge Lab with colleagues such as Wayne Homes, we have a book coming out in August. That is, that that is concerned with AI in education and ethical concerns. And we also have a substantial chapter book chapter that's coming out later this year in the Handbook of AI in Education, where we put forward a framework or a beginning of a framework for how we may actually question the way that we design technologies, and especially AI and how we can cater for the different ethical concerns.
00:39:33 Professor Jeff Bezemer
OK. Final question. How would you say your research specifically it contributes to all the research agenda on AI.
00:39:48 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Well, I would hope. That that it's central to the agenda on multiple different levels, not least because of the ethics concerns and questions in the work that we're doing. There's actually very little on AI in education. Education is very often mentioned as part of the AI agenda, but actually there is very little in the way of policy and understanding of what it is, what AI can contribute to education and how education can inform also how we develop AI. And I think it's central because it really does take a very human centric approach as opposed to a lot of the approaches that that are presented, which are very much coming from a technocentric origin, whereby you know we create solutions, AI solutions or technological solutions, and then we look for problems that these solutions, can solve and so it's I think the contribution is very much in, or at least the contributions, the contribution that I'm trying to make and colleagues with whom I collaborate are trying to make is to put on the agenda. To emphasise really, we need to look from the problem to the solution from the human to the technology as a tool for enhancing rather than hindering our you know functioning development, development, learning, communication and wellbeing.
00:41:36 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Thank you Kaska. It's really exciting. Yeah we have time for a quick question from colleagues, John.
00:41:40 Professor John Potter
I've just got a very quick question, which is that I mean, given the complexity of what lies behind everything that you do, how do you communicate with the public about it? Because their experience of AI is things like the A level, the exam fiasco couple of years ago. Where the machine learning was used to specifically discriminate against certain groups and award grades in that very, it was loaded into the system and then politicians can say oh it's just a bad algorithm. I mean, I wonder how that makes you feel? And how on Earth how do you explain the role of AI to the general public and what it what it actually could offer that's positive in in that kind of negative environment?
00:42:18 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Well, it's a challenge to explain AI. There is a lot of misconception surrounding AI. Not, least, the idea that actually the algorithm responsible for the fiasco was AI, it wasn't.
00:42:38 Professor John Potter
Yeah, but that's how it gets portrayed, you know, in the press and yeah.
00:42:40 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
That is the problem. There is a lot of mythology that surrounds AI. There is a lot of hype that surrounds AI and you know the hardest task that myself and a lot of my colleagues here and across the world have is to explain what is AI in the 1st place, once you get, over that hurdle, then you can engage in a in a conversation with different stakeholders. I mean, I work primarily with teachers and and educational practitioners and once you get over that, hurdle and once you start asking questions and looking at the problems that they have and asking, them you know what is that they need? What is it that they think? How they could benefit from technology then you can start a really, you know, a completely different conversation about. OK, So what can we do? I mean, yeah, AI, the way that's certainly that I conceive of what I do. AI in education is a form of civil engineering and this is this is 1 conceptional. You know it's a blind spot for a lot of people that it's that it's not this kind of separate thing that stands, you know alongside the humans is an artefact that we create that we interact with that we shape, but that shapes us in return, but is also a tool. And you know the fact that we can shape it, that we are shaping it. You know gives us a lot of power to make decisions and to make the right decisions. But we do need to start with the problems.
00:44:43 Professor John Potter
Thanks, thanks very much. Thank you.
00:44:46 Professor Andrea Révész
Kaska, you mentioned that you work with teachers. I wonder whether you think it's helpful for teachers to have some basic understanding of AI to begin with before they can understand how they can actually benefit from this technology. So how does this interaction or partnership with teachers actually work?
00:45:04 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Well, this is a very interesting question, and it's an open question. You know, the extent to which. No, next personally I experts need to have the understanding of AI in order to engage with it, and it's it's something that, I don't have an answer to, I mean. It's there are different levels of expertise that you can have. So the question is you know what is the basic level that people need to have in order to engage with AI, and this is in fact the subject of PhD research by one of my students who is actually a teacher himself and he is investigating, you know the level of understanding that is required by his colleagues. But more broadly by educational practise, in order to make informed decisions about not only what products to purchase, but also how to how to use them, how to sabotage them for the benefit of their practise, how to, utilise them into the to the best effect
Thank you.
00:46:20 Professor Caroline Daly
So that's really fascinating Kaska. I'd say that isn't just about AI in in terms of various kinds of resources and affordances that can help teachers to be agentive. And to inform their professional knowledge and understanding, it's part of a huge area of debate. I think around the nature of teachers knowledge and understanding and requisite knowledge that can help teachers to be professionally informed. I think there are many, many connections between the kinds of those really important concerns that you're addressing, you say are difficult and broader concerns for the for the teaching profession at the moment.
00:47:01 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
Absolutely. And you know, I often wonder. In fact I, I believe very strongly that, the use of not just the use of technology, but the basic kind of principles of how technology is being designed, including you. Know what informs these designs should be part of the professional training that teachers receive and the continuous professional development, and it's something that, at least from my experience, teachers really want, and especially after the the pandemic and this whole situation into which they were thrown into of all of a sudden having to engage with technology, so I would say that now is actually a very good time to be thinking about how we may be able to incorporate this kind of development this this kind of expertise development, to give teachers the agency the autonomy, the knowledge to make decisions about whether they use the technology, what kinds of technologies they use and how they use them.
00:48:22 Professor Caroline Daly
So like you say, it comes down to one of the problems, that the technologies, or anything else are trying to solve. I think that's something that probably ties in a lot with other work across the department, actually.
Technology and music Professor Evangelos Himonides
00:48:36 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Evangelos, what's the focus of your research?
00:48:38 Professor Evangelos Himonides
Thank you Jeff.
Well my personal research focus is slightly idiosyncratic because of my strange background, but I'm I'm going to say a little bit about my own research, but I'll also try to be agent advocate and celebrator of my valued colleagues research, which is much more mainstream music education, so I'm a professor of music, comma technology, Oxford comma and education, and I'm making that emphasis because many misconceptions exist about what music technology is about, what music comma technology might be, and my background is, as I said, a bit strange because I started my life with mathematics. Computers have always been part of my in my life. And we charted followed the most computer society, computer scientists and for many years I've been working at industry. Crunching data for other people, mainly in order to make them richer.
00:49:42
So at some point I decided that I had enough of that and I tried to use my expertise in order to try to make a difference to people's lives. So music has always been a passion of mine at some point. Once studying mathematics, I decided to do a very crazy thing that worried my family. Which was to come to the UK, and do masters in choral conducting and choral education. Because I just wanted a break from mathematics. And that also triggered a huge love for the voice in singing and the voices as an agent for communication as well. So not just within a musical context.
00:50:20
So obviously when you get old and you're trying to find a job, you try to combine all of your passions and I tried to do that by combining my passion for technology and education and music and voice and singing, which was a bit of a challenge so we did have to be creative and we did create my my job title and so my research in many cases is centred on helping other people with their research. But I have been fortunate to be very selective in the past decade and participate in things that I find terribly exciting. So things that have to do with music, things that have to do with communication health is a very important centre in my work I have developed more than 15 years ago, a world resource free resource which is called sounds of intent, which is supporting children with profound and multiple learning difficulties and severe learning difficulties. And so we're talking about from minus six to plus 24 months of more typical development and so supporting children and their carers and their parents with them from music and making their lives better. I have worked in making and disseminating knowledge about music and about research, and about appropriate methodological approaches public and try to develop policy, and change policy in some cases as part of the government of the country’s music manifesto teams of inspiring music and as advocates of the importance of understanding the appropriateness of certain methodologies in researching the effectiveness of music and its role in our everyday lives.
00:52:33
Singing as I said is a very very big passion of mine. Last summer I was invited by the BBC at The One Show to just do a quick demonstration of some of them who the logical tools in assessing chills, and what happens when we hear someone saying in different contexts and what we you commonly know as goosebumps. So I set up all of my equipment there and try to demonstrate what is the actual phenomenon of goosebumps and how that works. So I've been extremely fortunate, and in echoing many of the previous colleagues works and I have worked extensively with functional magnetic resonance imaging in understanding what and how certain things can be mapped in the brain or how different behavioural issues can be marked or understood, what the impact of music or the impact of sound can be to everyday life. But also in contexts where music no longer exists or used to exist, and because of trauma. And it was taken away, for example because of a stroke and trying to understand neuroplasticity and how things are built up and become different in order for music to be regained. So I have been extremely fortunate, and I still am to be to be part of many interdisciplinary teams. I never a kind of lone ranger and I always try to be part of teams that do interesting things. And sometimes I provide technical solutions for those. Sometimes I just look at the ways that things are being assessed in order to understand how things could be done differently, or whether they should be done differently.
00:54:34 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So would you say that the focus of your research group overall is to explore the wider benefits of music?
00:48:43 Professor Evangelos Himonides
It is a very big part of some of the colleagues in my research group, and a very big part of my focus, but obviously our team is very much diverse and this is one of the things that you see in in teams that have to do something with music. People will come with many different backgrounds, many differently, starting any different baggage. In in your previous discussion, for example, and that we were having with there with John, we realised that John is a music enthusiast and he does, he blogs about music and about what he called obscure different musics. So everyone has a relationship with music, which is, it was just an amazing thing, but other folk I do exist. We have people that are working on music instruments. Learning across the lifespan from very early childhood, and we have a huge passion for voice and singing myself and Professor Graham Welsh are the ones that primarily research voice and sing, and the use of technology and media in in pedagogy, different methodologies, as I said, effective mentoring of non specialists, generalists in music that is a very big part of what we do.
00:56:10
For example, for my work in special needs as well, because one of the very big challenges is for people that want. To help understand how powerful music can be, but feel that they're not equipped to actually, become engaged so we try to make things accessible for them. And try to also explain that you don't need to be a specialist, least the way that one might perceive that being need to be a specialist in order to be supportive. We work on supporting children, young people with complex and multiple needs as I said, but also in in things that might kind of raise an eyebrow, for example, work that I've done. In preserving the musics of Afghanistan, and with the current development with the return of the Taliban, for example, one of the things that my people might have not realise is that the Taliban completely banned music. So, about 10 years ago I developed in collaboration with Professor John Bailey at Goldsmiths a unique resource which teaches people how to play the rubab, which is the most important musical instrument of Afghanistan. And also try to explain how it scales on how different playing techniques work. And since the launch, it's one of the most rewarding things for me to say that I on a daily basis, I receive messages from inside Afghanistan from people being thankful for learning about their own music from people outside Afghanistan. Because they're not allowed to do that within their own country.
00:57:57
We have people that are working in at formal and other than formal contexts, and trying to understand how bridges can be built between those, or demolished, which is another very important discussion. And we have colleagues that focus on the sociological aspects of music. Once again, meaning gender society. Obviously music is very much kind of socially located and there is a lot of research happening without under that umbrella, so it's a very diverse world and it’s something very exciting and very important to be positive as well, very glad to be part of this.
00:58:43 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Just going back to your own research. One of the projects that I thought was really powerful, it seemed to me was your beatboxing projects for patients that have had a laryngectomy. Could you say a bit more about that? And also how it came about and how you worked with different stakeholders on that?
00:59:06 Professor Evangelos Himonides
Thank you, yes, that's a very important in the project. I'm very dear to my heart. The news is that actually the charity with who I've been working with Shout At Cancer actually recently received the Queen's Award for Excellence in Public Service, which is the highest recognition that’s a charitable body can receive. But this this project is also a celebration of the importance of forging, synergies and forging relationships with students and the things that can happen with people that you have taught. Because this whole thing started with just a sparking medical doctor, coming to me, wanting to and asking about whether he could participate in the quotes that I'm leading, which is called choral conducting leadership and communication, and he wanted to do this a s an external student.
01:00:07
So I agreed and I realised that he had a plan. He was a man with a plan, so he wanted to learn more, not just about the heuristics of collecting about being a musical director because he was already an experienced singer. But also about current research and current evidence about leading a choral group and being the leader of a choir, and his cunning plan, of course, was to form the world first, and still only choral group of people without voices, which is a very powerful thing because, it also celebrates how important music is, even if you don't in singing, even if you don't have a voice to sing with so he found he found it. The charity Shout at Cancer, so and I have been a kind of founding member and supporting the charity since the beginning of our relationship and we have been trying to identify new and different ways to support the laryngeal group, the cancer patients and one of those was by exploring, bringing beatboxing into a laryngectomy a group of laryngectomy, so I was one of the first IOE academics to actually get a receive a beacon bursary from UCL culture. And our aim was to bring people together, bring them together with a beatboxing expert. And try to create master classes and try to help them rehabilitate their voices using beatboxing as the excuse as they kind of icebreaker and at the end we gave a public engagement performance at the Olympic Village, which was absolutely fantastic. Absolutely great. But it also led to us understanding many things about voice rehabilitation, about how beatboxing as an art form can be catalytic to this.
Which and we did actually publish a methods paper in frontiers in order to enable other people to use our experience and what we got out of it if they wanted to support laryngectomy or voice rehabilitation groups. So they use, because I'm taking too long with my answers because I'm very passionate about the things that we do, and everyone in here and everyone that listens to this broadcast is cordially invited to a very big performance that we're going to be given in October this year 2022 at the Bloomsbury Theatre, which is going to be an even greater event and it's going to involve jazz and outspoken, which we call outspoken jazz. So will be spoken word, theatre, in a huge performance with our laryngectomy patients. So thank you for asking about that. I'm very happy to share that.
01:03:14 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Thank you just looking around to see if there are any questions from colleagues. John.
01:03:22 Professor John Potter
I'm blown away by all of that, basically, Evangelos. Thank you for sharing all that I knew some of it of course. What I wanted to ask you about because it's something that perplexes me some of the time is, when people blithely talk about interdisciplinarity. Is the interdisciplinary is interdisciplinarity easy? It's not easy to say. Is it easy to do and how would you communicate that to a wider audience?
01:03:51 Professor Evangelos Himonides
Well, it depends on whether you subscribe to the actual tyranny of the label or whether you care about the, what it means in its implications, and unfortunately, it's a very big part of the discussion, so so many people focus on interdisciplinarity. Not at the IOE, we're all perfect! Outside the IOE and they just only care about something being interdisciplinarity. Well, in the things that we do, I mean, especially in in music and media and the arts and everything. We are interdisciplinary by design. You cannot be in vacuum. You cannot do things in silos, it doesn't work, and this is one of the very important things that we try to instil in our kind of teacher, and trainings as well, especially because, people that have formal musical training can come with great misconceptions and with kind of narcissistic tendencies about, and not narcissism as a celebration of their of their own greatness. But as a kind of lack of understanding and respect of other people's baggage and pathways and trajectories. So this is a huge part of an effective music education to actually try to introduce to others that is it that the whole discussion is by default and by design interdisciplinary, whether it has to do with genres where it has to do with the different instruments, different approaches, different journeys that you followed in order to become a musician. I was not formally trained and I started my formal training when I was 22. Other people would say that this is already too late. You need to be 4 like my daughter was when she started, so interdisciplinarity is is an extremely important part of this, but not only in doing it, but also in assessing what is done in and how it is done, which is my big passion, is to try to understand how things work.
Digital media Professor John Potter
01:05:58 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Moving on to John. John, can you tell us about your research?
01:06:06 Professor John Potter
Well, thanks Jeff. I've got a history with the IOE since this. I may as well mention the IOE history since we're here for that and my history with the IOE goes back a number of years. I started my professional life here as a trainee in primary education. And I never would have imagined that I'd be sitting in this room. Here a couple of lot more than a couple of decades later. You know, as a professor of media and education, and I don't think a lot of what I do at the moment existed then. So in trying to understand how I've ended up doing this, whatever it is I've tried to think about it. In terms of how we make meaning as being the foundation of it, because when you start to teach and to work with small children as everybody in the room will appreciate, you are really talking about the foundations of communication and communicative learning. So I recognise in everything that that's been said so far some aspects of my work, so it's really located in media, in education and in is very important to me because it's not media education and it's not media studies, it's media in education, so it's quite a diverse portfolio of different things I've done. And if there is anything that unites it all i's an interest in what learners or people bring to the meaning making process and how that changes in the era of digital media. And why on Earth our education system lags so far behind the actual practises in which people engage in everyday life. Because it definitely does, which is not to say. That reading and print writing are unimportant, but to say that we need to think about a broader conception of learning in 2022. And some of our curriculum is not really fit for purpose anymore.
01:07:52
So part of one of the ways of researching that is to go into people's lives and to try to find out what people are doing in the in the things that they make and the and the meanings that they share and some of that involves thinking about it in a sociocultural frame, and some of it involves thinking about it in a multimodal frame. Actually, the technical aspects of how meaning is made, so I recognise that in some of the things that you've been saying, Jeff, so to bring it all together.
I think the most recent research projects have been involved in. I've just been directing an ERC project called the play observatory which is about children play during the pandemic and we were really researching remotely so we had to use a lot of technology and our communication was mediated throughout the project. But it was interdisciplinary in nature and what it required was finding people who were prepared to share quite intimate and personal stuff about what they had been playing children had been playing in the home and how the virus in particular the phases of lockdown, had impacted on children loss of amenity, their loss of friends and inability to be able to go to school. How all of that impacted on their on their lives. And we required people to, if it wants to take part to in really detailed ethics applications. I'm sure you can imagine and to commit to submitting images and video, and text about their experiences. So the project I asked Evangelos about interdisciplinarity, because in doing this project, we were working in a very interdisciplinary way with people from the School of Education at Sheffield University and with CASA at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
01:09:40
So we had human interface design in there. We had folklore, we had archives and we had media in one kind of soup of human experience and we opened with a survey and a portal that was opened on the website that we hosted, where people could make submissions and we followed that with some interviews, and we've been beginning to conduct an analysis drawing on the strengths of the team. I mentioned Sheffield, but also Kate Cowan involved as well on multimodal techniques of analysis. So, what the reason for doing it, was that we were interested given that the different kinds of factors I've already mentioned drive my interest, but everybody in the team is interested in answering questions like how have children been playing during the pandemic online and offline, from the initial out regular virus throughout lockdown and during social distancing, how has that impact tonight when they've gone back to school? How has it been different at school? In those months, how does the virus itself feature as an aspect of children play? Because I'm very interested in how children and people make use of cultural resources in their play and in what they make and share, and what insight does that when it goes into their play? What insight does that give into their experience of the pandemic itself.
01:11:00
What continuities and discontinuities does this form of play have with play of the past? Because this project follows on from work that Andrew Burn and Jackie Marsh directed that I was part of on the Opie Archives of Children Play. So, we're interested in that archival connexion and disconnection with the past and how, finally and we put it together in a disciplinary interdisciplinary way with cultural studies, folklore studies, the history of childhood, media literacy, multi-modality, and education to help us better understand the role value of play and wellbeing because the discourse has been mainly around learning loss, so we want to speak back to power and say learning loss is not the only aspect of children experience. We need to focus on what they have been doing in terms of their resilience and well being in their play during these, quite stressful and difficult times, so that's that's been the most recent project, and now I'm heavily into the dissemination of it.
01:12:02 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So can you give us a glimpse of the findings?
01:12:04 Professor John Potter
Well, it's a glimpse. A glimpse would be that the children have been playing, so they've been doing all of the things that they were doing before, and they adapted to the lock down very rapidly. Interesting forms of play emerged that we're kind of accentuated. Children built lots of dens in the evidence we've seen, to have a sort of space that they can control. So, lots of turning, you know, a table, a chair over the other way, and crawling under it and making a space, a space to play, they've adapted their toys. You can see on our site and in our exhibition, which I can talk more about, they've put masks over their toys, faces and things like that, so they're engaged in imaginative play that, help them to make sense of it.
01:12:48
We celebrated a lot of, or are celebrating a lot of children, resilience and how they kept on with storytelling. Imaginative play innovating how they worked with screens, how they played remotely with each other. In roadblocks and Minecraft, how they communicated with relatives through tablets played hide and seek with grandparents, and then hid an iPad with the grandparent on it in the House and all that kind of, you know, really adapting their play, but we've also been sensitive in interviews to children who did not have a good time. So, it's important to accept all the evidence we you know it. It's lovely to be able to report on the things that went well, but we also want to give accounts of where children really did feel that they were on their own with things they did not enjoy being disconnected from school and they did not enjoy the return to school, having got used to a different way of being so, we've got evidence that there are some children who did not really have a great time in lockdown, but throughout they were self-directed. And what's really interesting, of course, is, they go back into a curriculum in our country, which is quite tightly controlled, certainly in terms of its literacy experiences. So we're interested in writing about what children were able to do in terms of creative production, their creative writing, their creative photography and video, and music creation that they cannot do at the moment, easily some schools do it, but not all easily in in the present curriculum. And so we're interested in speaking to policymakers about how that could shift as well on the basis of what we've seen in lockdown.
01:14:28 Professor Jeff Bezemer
We talked about Interdisciplinarity, several times, and you raised it yourself, and you just told us that on this project you also worked with a number of different people that bring different perspectives to your data, that you're trying to make sense. Where do the children fit in? How do you work with children in research?
01:14:53 Professor John Potter
Well, I think that there's a number of lessons that we learned on playing the archive that Kate tonight, Kate Karen, and I spent a long time in in the playground observing so he did the traditional things of interviewing and observing and making notes. But we also gave licence to children to become researchers of their own experience. It's harder to do in in the play observatory to an extent, but from playing the archive, we gave out voice recorders at lunchtime, for example, and children run around and collected massive hours and hours of voice notes interviewing each other about what they were doing they became like kind of YouTube news reader broadcasts or type people and also making their own videos. And we recruited in the schools that we worked in at the time a research team from year five in each school there are 10 or 12 people that we trained up as researchers of children own experiences and their own lives. So that's one aspect of doing it, but I think it's giving them space to talk and to be. And having said there were difficulties with remote research. What we did find was really interesting was that the screen flattens hierarchies quite quickly, so when we were doing the interviews with the interviewers in the same occupy the same screen space as the as the children being interviewed. And when they talk, you don't talk over them because in this world of zoom and teams you get used to contributions being delivered in a very kind of this person speaks then that person speaks, so there's a little bit of flattening of the hierarchy there, and in some instances, we've got examples of where children drove, the conversation by actually taking control of the laptop. There was a child who when the mother was speaking, gradually moved the laptop over to her face and then started talking directly into it. Kate has got great example of that. So yeah, I think it's about trying to give children their own voice in the research as much as possible. But then when you write it up, don't overstate that. It is still your research. They're Co producers of the research with you. They're not actually in this project. Co researchers as such, but they're Co producers of the research with you. I think it's getting that balance right.
01:17:10 Professor Jeff Bezemer
How would you say your research might inform policy in practise?
01:17:16 Professor John Potter
Well, as I alluded to, I think that we can use it to speak back to power a little bit. I mean, I'm part of a group of the primary literacy research collaborative in my other role as an executive member of the Media Education Association and on the Research Committee of the United Kingdom Literacy Association. There's a group of five or six of us have been corresponding with the Secretary of State for Education on this exact fact and on the publications as they emerge. We're kind of gathering the research together to provide a research base for a different way of thinking about primary education it's kind of a pincer movement if you think about the work that Dominic Wise and Alice Bradbury have done on reading, for example, we're coming into it from a different angle from play agency, creativity, media, and folklore. That kind of area, but we think that these are things that we all we can do is say what we're finding, and then hope that the policymakers listen.
01:18:15 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
So I'm interested John in what, how do you envisage our curriculum changing? Well, how could it change and how should it change in order to address the findings and the concerns that you have?
01:18:33 Professor John Potter
I think my concern is with the narrowing of the curriculum into atomised skills and atomised pieces of knowledge. Whereas in the world we join these things together to perform particular tasks of communication and to build things together so collaboration is way down on the list of priorities about individual attainment at the moment. So I would change it in I'd move it towards collaborative projects. I would connect the subjects at primary level because I think they've started to ape the kind of the necessary division into subjects that happens later. I think some primary schools have gone down that route of disconnecting anatomizing knowledge into geography, history you know. And I, I think there's a value in putting things together because children experienced the world they would talk about a historical event. But then they also talk about a story they've just read. They'll talk about a piece of music they're listening to. They need to see the connections between things. So I think media in particular has a role. It makes you join things up if you think about.
01:19:40
I've been engaged in projects, for example, that connects poetry with animation at with six year olds where they see how an animation is put together, and because that's a time limited thing, they also understand poetry as rhythm and metre as well, and is about image and children. See that holistically, so rather than closing the door on media and screens, I think they should be welcomed into the school, and sit alongside everything. So I'm not saying replace the curriculum, I'm saying enhance it. And I think that a proper kind of media education programme could really enhance the curriculum.
01:20:18 Professor Caroline Daly
John, I think that's really interesting. I think. I mean, would you say that there are big implications from what you've just said for teachers as curriculum makers along with children in classrooms as curriculum makers?
01:20:30 Professor John Potter
Definitely definitely. And I would say that that reminds me of a project that I did with Theo Brya where we looked at iPads in filmmaking in classrooms and we worked in a primary school and in a in a secondary school. She did more of the secondary school work than I did. And yeah, it definitely is a part of it and it kind of drives that response to external culture as well. I think. So, it's not about bringing the external culture into the constant per say, which is, you know, David, Buckingham always says that thing about you can't make something cool by bringing it into school, can’t make school cool by bringing in external culture in that way, but some of the skills and dispositions that children employ, and young people employed in the things that they do and making share outside. Could form a useful backdrop to activities and enhancements to the curriculum within school.
01:21:24 Professor Andrea Révész
And really exciting research time. I found your project on play during the pandemic particularly exciting and interesting. Just having two children at home during the pandemic made it very personal to me, so I was wondering how you think or whether you found out anything about the parents role in facilitating play or creating spaces for play for children.
01:21:45 Professor John Potter
Oh, I think. I think we definitely did. There are a number of examples even during the interview sessions we had an interview session, Michelle Cannon and I were conducting an interview on screen with a family where the parent was following the four and the two year old through their den and in and out, and you got a glimpse in their house of how the normal kind of routines of where things should be the right way up and tidy, had been kind of like abandoned to the to this world that the children had kind of created because that's what was happening. And it and it made sense to the children. And it made sense to the adult to have a kind of relaxation of the normal kind of ways of being, because the pandemic was not the kind of the normal way of being at that stage. It was very new, and so, yeah, parents, parents who listened, parents who gave space parents, who there was lots of we've got lots of stories of parents going at getting out and going for walks with children that they hadn't done before, and interestingly, as well as parents, siblings.So whereas previously you know the brothers and sisters who may not have got on very well or two- or three-year age gap and I'm too cool to play with you. They could only play with a sibling for a while. So it discovered new kinds of relationships. We've got lots of stories of that kind of evidence as well, so parents were crucial. And we really need to find ways of communicating that back. I mean Kate has been doing nursery world type interviews and early insights stuff, but we need to disseminate to parents groups as well, definitely.
Thank you.
Teacher education and classroom research Professor Caroline Daly
01:23:22 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Caroline, could you tell us about your research?
01:23:29 Professor Caroline Daly
I think it's really interesting actually speaking at the end of our conversation. How many of the kinds of themes that have gone round the table come back to the area that I work in, which is the learning of new teachers with a particular interest in those who've already qualified and are moving into those first two to three years of their teaching careers. And with a specific focus on how they learn. What the factors are within schools that influence their learning and what the kinds of consequences are. And of course, we know that in this country and many others in the UK and internationally, there's a serious concern around the attrition of new teachers. We invest huge amount of resource into training teachers of course. And we think there's a lot of work to be done in understanding better what it is that enables them to stay in teaching. Once they've qualified, and particularly on what makes it a satisfying career. It is a postgraduate profession and we're interested in the intellectual dimensions, and the dimensions that let teachers feel they're making a contribution towards socially just goals and making a worthwhile difference. And we know that sometimes when people set out to become teachers, they want to make a difference. They're not always completely aware of what that difference might actually be in reality. But nonetheless, we think there's a considerable job of work to do still to help teachers achieve goals that are worthwhile, worthwhile enough that help them to stay in the profession.
01:25:16
So a lot of the research that I've focused on in recent years has been around that around the experiences of new teachers working in the English system, the Welsh system and actually in New Zealand. And which is interesting to compare with because of the focus in New Zealand on principles derived from research and with universities on which it's considered valid to base a learning programme for new teachers for two years. And because in New Zealand they they've had a A2 year induction period for long, a long period of time for new teachers, which is considered a very new thing in England. But which in fact has been going on on the other side of the world for quite a long time, and we could do well to learn more, perhaps from other systems. And so I would say that particular focus of this, if you like, you could sum up by saying we're interested in looking at the idea that it takes a school to grow a teacher. A little bit like drawing on that analogy, if it takes a village to grow a child, but it takes A school to grow a teacher and so my research has looked at what it is within schools what are those school level factors that impact on the experiences of teachers on their understanding of their own professionalism on the kinds of knowledge that they develop the skills they develop and on the expectations of what it would mean to stay in teaching to make it a career long lifestyle choice that can be sustained over time. So primarily looking at school level factors in terms of inter relationships with other people, both learners and colleagues, leadership, the impact of school cultures, but also understanding from ecological analysis, really about how those factors are in schools, are also deeply affected by the policy environment nationally and locally, the communities which schools serve. And also the needs to take into consideration teachers own histories that they bring with them into the profession. The autobiographical dimensions of their professional learning and how their own histories and experiences affect their understandings and the decisions they make, and the sense they make of classrooms and the curriculum and their expectations or the actions they'll take as teachers. And understanding the significance of that and how that contributes to how they make decisions in the moment and interact within all the statutory requirements and the mandatory things they have to do and how that relates them to their projected futures so, it's really quite complicated, so it's looking at schools as sites of professional formation, but understanding that those schools are intricately interconnected, with so many networks of relationships with resources, people policies with impact on the possibilities for those new teachers.
01:28:48 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So how do you paint that picture of that village of that side of professional formation? What sorts of methods do you use to better understand how teachers make sense of all those things that you just mentioned.
01:29:06 Professor Caroline Daly
So it's it draws on a range of methods and we've talked about mixed methods studies earlier around the table, and why so many of us in CCM find that approach very appealing, and I think this is probably a good example of that, so that's where it's been great to work with colleagues in New Zealand and who were developing a quantitative approach developing a scale of induction and mentoring and that was trialled with three waves of new teachers in New Zealand between four to six years ago. We've worked closely with them to look at how we can adapt that scale and in Wales, where we've been able to think what are the constituent elements around principles derived from literature and trialled over time. That mean we can arrive at a single factor analysis of induction and mentoring within schools and that can enable us to measure on this scale.
01:30:09
What those environments are constituted of how effective they are as places for the learning of new teachers, and what's been really interesting working in that way has been to find the similarities across sites in New Zealand and Wales, around the differences between different stakeholders and in terms of how they score on this scale of induction and mentoring. And so, for example, it probably wouldn't surprise anybody to hear that we found that school leaders and headteachers have a marked difference in their perceptions of their schools as effective learning environments for new teachers. Compared with the new teachers themselves that there's actually some considerable gulf between how new teachers score according to a whole series of ratings. But also what was less less predictable, perhaps, was the ways that the majority of staff of those who are not involved with new teachers, particularly not mentors, for example, and people who are not school leaders, but all the rest of the staff, how differently they score, and also from head teachers in terms of their perceptions of the schools as learning environments for new teachers, and in fact they scored even lower than new teachers. Which indicated along with interviews in some sites. It indicated a real fragmentation within schools between different parts of the school workforce. Very siloed conditions and we often think you know where we think of schools. As places with silos we might think of that, along departmental lines, for example, in a secondary school. But what we were finding was that was really around the kinds of positions that people hold the relations they have and around what new teachers have got to do with them. Why they should be remotely interested in new teachers and why the decisions that are made in in terms of how you run the geography department, or the way you develop behaviour policy. What that might have to do with new teachers. It was really interesting to look at. There's this very strange and fragmented kind of conditions within schools, and I think why does this matter for new teachers? Why should this impact them? What do we need to understand more?
01:32:47
And what's been interesting there is looking at qualitative analysis and which was undertaken in New Zealand by colleagues out there so substantially over three waves. But what we're trying to do now in in what we're just developing, is to work with critical incident analysis, which is something that's well established in professional education in many professions. But looking at it specifically with new teachers is something where there's less work. I'm also trying to develop ways where we can do that and online which is quite a shift, because normally when we think about ways of developing critical incident analysis, we think of working in quite an intimate way around a table in a room and extended conversation with lots of opportunities for all those social cues that that help people talk about their experience and to understand and to analyse and reflect on it. And so we're looking at ways of doing that that we can move online so that we can undertake a much wider scale qualitative data collection. Which is what we think is warranted. We need to. We need to listen to these new teachers we under we need to understand them situated within those schools and within the ecologies, and how? They are part of those how they help to make those ecologies, and how they're influenced by them, but we also need to understand their specific voices and to be part of that kind of sense making process with them. It's kind of really important to listen to new teachers. Because we are losing so many of them.
01:34:35 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So what would you say them? To people that come to asking Caroline what works? What do we need to do in order to keep our teachers to attract the right number of new teachers that we need to keep the education system going what works?
01:35:00 Professor Caroline Daly
Well, I think what works is a recognition that new teachers yes need a framework of entitlements and opportunities. We need to rethink what we mean by such a framework. I think at the moment it's rather similar to what John was saying about a curriculum model in in primary schools that doesn't allow the flexibility necessarily that harnesses the opportunities that are that are there for children to learn from. We have a similar kind of situation. I would say in teacher education. In that at the moment, there's an increasing emphasis on a teacher education curriculum that's composed of content of sequential content to be covered, and stuff that teachers need to learn if they can learn it, then they can become better teachers and more satisfied, and I feel a greater sense of efficacy and stay in the profession. We think it's actually much more complicated than that, and if we could think about a curriculum in terms of experiences, entitlements and opportunities for new teachers to learn, through working collaboratively through inquiry through space for sensemaking, so acknowledging the histories they bring and the knowledge is that they bring us learners in the world. Specifically, paying attention to subject, and what constitutes subjects interest and expertise, and how that needs space to grow and be nurtured for new teachers. And if we could understand that, that means that support in the form of mentoring. It's not so much about leading a teacher along a preordained path towards fixed idea of an expertise, but rather about helping them to develop our whole set of professional skills and knowledges which may be quite unique to their context, their subject, the communities they serve. That would go a long way. It's much more difficult to regulate aspects of that. But increased regulation hasn't actually enabled more teachers to stay in the profession. It needs a long a long hard look.
01:37:30
Subject needs a lot more attention. And I think within individual schools it can be quite challenging to support new teachers to develop all their potentials within a subject domain. Working with wider networks, working with pools of experts, working with people who come along from the outside and say “here are some other ways we could try something. Why don't we try it together” like some of the projects that we've heard of, around the table and those kinds of opportunities and the risk taking that goes with that and the trust in teachers to build knowledge with a whole network of people who bring different and quite challenging disruptive ideas to schools. That's part of the lifeblood, I think of teaching as an intellectual practise. Which is what I think they're crying out for.
01:38:26 Professor Jeff Bezemer
So you think of teachers as agentive professionals?
01:38:30 Professor Caroline Daly
I think that teachers themselves if they are agentive, find the job incredibly satisfying. Yes. I think it's an area where a lot of policy and research and teacher development programmes should focus a lot of attention at the moment. Yeah, I think we look at a lot of other things as proxies for teacher competence and teacher excellence. I think we need to look hard at what it is that makes the job really worthwhile for teachers. That sounds quite basic, but it's actually. It calls for some quite complicated thinking.
01:39:10 Professor John Potter
Question, because I've got both of my children are teachers. One is a primary school teacher, one is a secondary school teacher in there, both at that sort of second third year of their jobs. I wondered a couple of questions. At what point do you think a new teacher stops being a new teacher? Or is it very, very individualised? You couldn't put a finger on it like numbers of years.
Then the other thing is, at what point can they mentor somebody because I'm always impressed by people that take on mentoring quite early because their experience is so fresh as opposed to always being a highly experienced teacher. I know they've got a role to play as well, but I wonder what you thought about almost peer mentoring right within a couple of years.
01:39:52 Professor Caroline Daly
I think let's talk about the second one first. I think that's really interesting. I think so much depends on what we mean by being a mentor, and again, that's something that I think is very debated at the moment and there is a strong emphasis on mentoring as being an obvious expert relationship in which a body of knowledge fairly uncontestably resides in an experienced teacher, however many years it takes to develop that which we could then pass on in fairly unproblematic ways through modelling and showing and giving feedback to others. And I think there are other concepts of mentoring out there around sort of educative ideas around mentoring by which and two people or more in dialogue, investigate aspects of practise in the classroom and by which the person who's been teaching longer shares the challenges they have experienced in being able to reach certain lives or enabling learning in certain contexts. And this is something that is shared with a with a new teacher with a person with less experience and it becomes a focus of joint inquiry and of course that's not an equal contribution of the same kinds of knowledge that's brought to that. But the new teacher brings their own world of experience through subjects through being a learner and through prior engagement with young people, they're far from an empty vessel and I think reconfiguring what we mean by mentoring relationships could help enormously. And if we thought about how policy and resource was channelled into other kind of as a joint project, a joint endeavour between two teachers, it sets up a way of professional working, that I think could be hugely advantageous. But that does mean a reconfiguration of the idea of what it is to be the expert and who knows what. And I think that that that connects with what you were saying about at what stage do people stop being new teachers? And yeah, I totally agree. I think in terms of policy and resource I guess we have to have various kinds of thresholds where we say, we can now say that the person is being.
01:42:08 Professor John Potter
Yeah, no, no you're not new anymore.
01:42:10 Professor Caroline Daly
We do need to be able to say those things. But in in in terms of hard and fast frameworks, I think that's really problematic, because we've all worked in our different projects. I'm sure with stunning new teachers entering the workplace in their first year. And just immensely thankful that they're working with children and young people and making a superb impact from the start. And I, I think that you know positioning them as novice in certain respects isn't helpful. It's not. It's not the dialogue that you want to have with them, and that's not to underestimate you know that the huge amount of learning that goes on throughout teachers career so yeah, not straightforward answer I’m afraid John
01:42:50 Professor John Potter
No, no, I didn't think it would be.
01:42:54 Professor Jeff Bezemer
Kaska final question.
01:42:54 Professor Kaska Porayska-Pomsta
You know, I loved the idea and fully, you know, embraced the idea of teachers and their expertise development in a kind of holistic way in the environment through the interaction with the environment. By, you know, taking account of their of their histories as well as their kind of personal, subjective experiences as well. But I also see and we I see that also in the in the context of AI in education and where technology is being taken and how it is being exploited within education. There's an issue, there's a kind of a trap in a way we are trapped in a in a system which values you know exam results as an outcome. And it's a very entrenched kind of, system, in a sense whereby teachers, and all of the tools that we recruit in within this system serve that one particular direction you know to learn a particular subject matters in silos and to produce measurable outcomes, and so the vision that you outline. Which again like I fully embrace and this is something that that you know, I also spent quite a lot of time, you know trying to communicate to diverse stakeholders that you know technology as a tool can actually allow us to think outside of the box. It can allow us to make meaning as John was saying as well in the context of media in education. So AI in education. How can we you know, change the status quo? How can we get out of this state of entrenchment? What can we do as experts in our specific areas to actually change the situation?
01:45:22 Professor Caroline Daly
Yeah, and I mean that's so important and absolutely right. I think we know that we've tried through so many kinds of networks and policy influences and so on that that we all engage with. We know the work that we do to try to make that difference, and we know that sometimes that can be very rich, but sometimes there are certainly frustrations and I think there's no particular straightforward kind of answer to that is there. But we do know that policy has to respond to the circumstances of the moment and the circumstances at the moment our teachers are continuing to leave in ways that are massively draining on our resource on our system. On the goals we want for closing the gap in terms of social inequities in our society and we know that that is growing rather than closing. We know that we've we've hit that kind, that kind of threshold of the of the great sort of meteoric rise and examination results that that come along comes along with certain kinds of policy that you know that addresses deficit, and by certain kinds of interventions. And then you reach a plateau. So and then what? And I think you know. We can see when we look across the various aspects of our of our schools and our education system. We've plateaued in various kinds of ways. For growth, things have to change, and I guess that's not going to be through any kind of single strategy policy making.
I think it needs to look at curriculum. The education of teachers. Our assessment system. And the relationships between schools and communities. And single strategies don't work desperately well even when huge amounts of money is thrown at them because it is an ecology and it does mean policymaking. That takes account of so many factors before one thing just wipes another out. We can see this, we know this. We talk about these things. I guess that's why I mean one of the things that I think holds out possibly more. Hope who knows is working with stakeholders that where their longevity it outlasts particular sort of changes in in policymaking and policy makers. Some of the national bodies that are around for longer. And are very interesting to work with.
Outro
01:47:54 Professor Jeff Bezemer
That brings to the end of this conversation. We've heard about some really exciting projects at the intersection of culture, society and education, and the impact that this work is having, whether by advancing our understanding of contemporary social life, cultural forms of expression and learning. Offering critical analysis of big challenges in society and among specific groups such as teachers and students or health professionals and patients. All by helping design and evaluate solutions at making improvements to address those challenges.
Sadly, that's all we have time for. Thank you for the speakers and to you for listening. If you'd like more information on the research we've been discussing, you can find that in the links we've published alongside this recording. Thank you.
Thanks so much for downloading and listening to this IOE podcast.