Abstracts
Poster Presentations
1.35 – 1.55
Researchers will be present at this time for discussion.
NB: Posters will be available for viewing all day in the A Block student common area – 6EA-122.
Rachel Cann: Positive School Leadership for Flourishing Teachers
Research into teacher wellbeing usually takes a deficit approach, investigating the causes of stress and burnout, yet there are few studies of how to enhance teacher wellbeing, particularly in the context of educational leadership (Cherkowski & Walker, 2016). My research investigated teacher wellbeing from the perspective of positive psychology, which is concerned with understanding what enables people to flourish (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), and the role of positive leadership in enabling people to thrive (Murphy & Louis, 2018). The study explored the educational leadership practices that enhance teacher wellbeing in an urban secondary school in New Zealand. The exploratory mixed methods investigation used an existing instrument (Butler & Kern, 2016) to survey the wellbeing of 29 teachers, which enabled purposive sampling of three ‘high wellbeing’ and three ‘low wellbeing’ teachers, who participated in semi-structured interviews and completed a wellbeing journal over five consecutive days. Inductive thematic analysis revealed both individual and organisational factors affecting teacher wellbeing. A comparative analysis of high wellbeing and low wellbeing teachers produced a profile of a ‘flourishing teacher’, and a set of key recommendations for school leaders. To enhance teacher wellbeing leaders should: 1) ensure teachers feel that their voice, work and effort are valued, 2) facilitate collaboration and professional development that is meaningful to teachers, and 3) enable teachers to have sufficient agency in school level changes. To enact these recommendations, it is essential that leaders have sufficient emotional intelligence to ensure clarity of communication and responsiveness to individuals and contexts.
Tracy Gao: The Dimensionality of Assessment Practices in Chinese Higher Education
Assessment in Chinese higher education has an especially strong impact on students’ learning because of the dominance of high-stakes examinations (e.g., gao kao). The present study surveys 2033 Chinese undergraduate students as to the assessment practices they experience in 231 Chinese universities. Data was collected online using an author-developed Assessment Practices Checklist incorporating 15 types of assessment practices which were answered on a binary yes-no scale. Confirmatory factor analysis identified a three-dimensional structure with an acceptable fit to the data. The three assessment practices were exam-oriented assessment, coursework-based assessment, and student-evaluative assessment. Nearly 83% of participants took exam-oriented assessment at least once, about 42% of participants had experiences of attending coursework-based assessment, and the least number of students experienced student-evaluative assessment (around 36%). Regarding the scoring weight of different assessment practices, the results vary greatly. The average scoring weight reported for exam-oriented assessment was nearly 50%, for coursework-based assessment was roughly 12%, and for student-evaluative assessment was less than 6%. The correlation of exam-oriented assessment to coursework-based assessment was r=0.43, to student-evaluative assessment was r= 0.35, and between student-evaluative assessment and coursework-based assessment was r=0.78, which supporting the inter-correlated factor structure. Findings from this survey suggested that although there was a diversified tendency in Chinese university assessment, the exam-oriented practices still in the dominant position.
Moema Gregorzewski: Emerging as the Others of our Selves? Exploring Drama Education as Critical Multicultural Education in Post-Normal Times
My proposed poster will give symposium attendees an insight into my ongoing PhD research project. My project explores how Drama Education can create Critical Multicultural Education that encourages social responsibility and critical citizenship amongst young people against the backdrop of national populist rhetoric and sentiment spreading across the world. The interplay of two distinct developments, the so-called global refugee crisis and the growth of international Islamist terror, has given rise to such public ressentiment towards ‘foreigners’. Propelled by rapid advancements in social media and mass communication, the latter incites processes of excluding Others. My recently completed field work and early stages of analysis throw light on how the aesthetic experiences that Drama Education evokes takes young people beyond mere empathetic identification with fictional Others. More specifically, my work investigates how Drama Education can provoke young people to critically reflect on and deconstruct their own and Others’ cultural identities and experiences of displacement as well as the alienation and fear that lead many members of ‘receiving nations’ to feel forcedly estranged from their own ‘homelands’.
Moira Newton: From reference to rhetoric: children’s metalinguistic awareness and its relationship to their writing performance
Children’s metalinguistic awareness is their ability to view language as an object and reflect upon it. The present study investigates the relationship between children’s metalinguistic awareness and their progress in learning to write. It is a two phase mixed methods study. The participants in the first phase were 84 year three to six children in a multicultural Auckland primary school. They each completed a New Zealand e-asTTle writing test and a Controlled Oral Word Association (metalinguistic) Test. There was a significant relationship (r=.37) between writing performance and metalinguistic ability. Thirty two children from the 84 were purposively selected in four achievement groups for the second phase of the study. They completed think alouds, as they wrote a paragraph, followed by questions about their writing. These were transcribed and instances of metalinguistic awareness were coded and counted. Analyses of the think alouds revealed no significant associations between the total frequencies of verbalised instances of metalinguistic awareness and writing achievement, however there was a statistically significant relationship between metalexical awareness and writing performance (rs=.51, p<.05) and metaemotive awareness and writing performance (rs=.4, p<.05). Qualitative analyses of the verbalisations revealed more complexity and abstractions in the metalinguistic talk of good writers as they considered how they write texts and the impact of their texts on readers. The study provides understanding of the developmental shifts in metalinguistic understandings at multiple levels of language.