Wednesday Onsite Presentation Session 1

Teaching Experiences, Pedagogy, Practice & Praxis

Session Chair: Monika Kamola

09:30-09:55

67796 | Teachers’ Experiences in At-Home Biology Laboratory Activities

Raianne Joy Maulion, Ateneo De Manila University, Philippines

Catherine Genevieve B. Lagunzad, Ateneo De Manila University, Philippines

Rhodora F. Nicdao, Ateneo De Manila University, Philippines

The global COVID-19 pandemic has profound impact on practically every aspect of life, including education, and the Philippines is no exception. Even with these abrupt changes, science classes are expected to proceed and maintain the same quality as face-to face classes. And one important component of Science classes is the Laboratory. This study used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), a qualitative research technique. The study includes two phases. Phase 1: The researcher performed a descriptive online survey. Phase 2: Interviews with ten (10) Science teachers doing online laboratory classes. The mean scores from each subclass is used to identify the overall level of perception of the teacher participants. Descriptive content analysis is used for the qualitative analysis. The survey questionnaire reveals that teacher participants experience challenges by a large extent in all disciplines, particularly in Online Course Development, Facilitation, Technology, and Assessment. Most teachers suffer to such difficulties as Lack of Laboratory Materials to use during the laboratory experiments, time consuming for teachers when preparing for their online classes, Slow and intermittent internet connection, Technical Problems, Lack of Parental Guidance, Student pacing during the online laboratory classes, Understanding Laboratory Instructions, Lack of Student Feedback during laboratory demonstrations, Lack of Laboratory Sessions, Implementing Teaching Strategies and Cost of Software. The researcher recommends for the teachers to attend online teacher trainings about how to effectively handle laboratory activities online. The researcher also recommends for future researchers to modify laboratory manuals and make them ‘online-friendly’.

09:55-10:20

69728 | How Do We Teach About the “Unknown”? Climate Change Education in Japan

Roger Baars, Kyoto University, Japan

Global threats posed by climate change, armed conflict, and pandemics, are exacerbating a sense of uncertainty in how young people live their lives and prepare for the future. This paper argues that good education should foster students’ ability to flourish in rapidly changing times. It should prepare students to be adaptive to rapid social, economic, and environmental changes generated from unprecedented global crises, such as climate change. In other words, an important mission of education today is to support students’ acquisition of knowledge, skills, and values in preparation for uncertain futures. Many schools still rely heavily on fact-based teaching and learning that implies and conveys a sense of certainty. However, these traditional approaches of knowledge transmission have been heavily criticized and a focus on skill and capability development is seen as essential elements of modern education. In Japan, this has been interpreted as fostering human resources (jinzai) for an era of significant global change. Curricular guidelines emphasize the necessity for students’ autonomous thinking, judgement, and self-expression (shikouryoku, handanryoku, hyougenryoku). This paper evaluates climate change education in Kyoto’s junior- and highschools to illustrate current concepts and approaches in teaching about climate change, an ideal context for “learning about an uncertain future”. Climate models, mitigation and adaptation strategies and policies, environmental economics, all include some level of uncertainty. The paper will show how this uncertainty is communicated in current teaching practices.

10:20-10:45

69104 | ECEC Teachers’ Pedagogical Strategies To Support Children’s Problem-Solving During Play Activities With Coding Toys

Monika Kamola, University of Stavanger, Norway

The aim of the study is to explore pedagogical strategies and approaches used by ECEC teachers to support children’s problem-solving during play activities with coding toys. Recent studies show that among several types of play, play that involves digital toys can be considered an important stimulus for the skills of 21st century, including problem-solving skills [1]. Early childhood educators generally demonstrate a lack of knowledge and understanding about technology and about developmentally appropriate pedagogical approaches to bring this discipline into the classroom [2]. Moreover, little is known about teachers’ role during play activities with coding toys in ECEC institutions (Pollarolo et al., In progress), and therefore this is the focus in the current study. Data collection involved video-observations of five teachers and six groups of 3-4 years old children (3-4 children in each group) playing with coding toy KUBO in about 30 minutes sessions. Drawing on Sustained Shared Thinking (SST) theory [3] the observations analyzed how the teachers can support problem-solving process. The results show that the pedagogical strategies and approaches the teachers used were: promotion of curiosity, questioning, investigation and exploration concept’s development.

10:45-11:10

68843 | Transnational SoTL ‘Journeys’ with Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) in Science Education

Sheila Qureshi, Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar, Qatar

Venkat Vishnumolakala, Curtin University, Australia

This presentation informs the transformative power of Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning - POGIL as a pedagogical reform in building the capacity of teachers and preparing science learners, to meet the challenges of knowledge-demand roles, deriving examples from authors’ SoTL activities in trans-national DBER (discipline-based education research) contexts. The 10 year SoTL journey across secondary and tertiary science education landscapes highlights the impact of POGIL as a culturally transferrable pedagogy for improving students’ conceptual understanding, critical thinking, and problem solving abilities. Findings from quasi-experimental and mixed-methods research designs indicate students’ improvement of their attitudes and interests towards learning in POGIL classes. Statistically validated psychometric instruments were used to gauge students’ cognitive and affective dimensions in POGIL classes. The positive impact of POGIL was evident from students’ improvement of their cognitive and affective characteristics thus demonstrating efficacy and cultural transferability of the pedagogy. The study also focuses the effect of POGIL activities on students’ confidence level in understanding of essential key concepts in chemistry. The authors will share their reflections on the practice of POGIL for technological and pedagogical diversity in learning environments. The transformational change management in the practice of POGIL - for learning and assessment - in the context of COVID-19 pandemic will be explained. The curriculum designed for POGIL practice is effective in enabling students to work on their process skills such as teamwork, responsibility of roles and collaboration.