Month: February 2021

This last revision cycle brought several different changes to pieces of my DLRCP Final Proposal document.

Early on, gamification did not feel like the right fit for the theoretical framework, and somewhat complicating. Had the DLRCP and the OER that I’m proposing have some other focus than explicitly teaching games, it might have been clearer to think and write about. As it was previously, I was, in the writing, ongoing trying to clarify whether any/and/or each game reference was about the framework of gamification, or about the OER and games themselves. I persisted with gamification as the framework until the initial round of revision due to inexperience and being unwilling to make what I was perceiving to be a large change. Initial revision with my Advisor (thanks, Jordanne!) gave the permission I needed to change the framework to that of place-based learning.

Place-based learning (Gruenewald, 2014) is a better fit as a framework as all the pieces of this project relate to and can be understood in that context. I would have liked to have included some Indigenous perspective around place-based learning in the proposal itself, but found myself unsure as to what might be inappropriate use of that knowledge and worldview, and did not incorporate it in the end. The beautiful thing is that in trying to understand whether/how it would fit meant that I’ve spent the last two weeks or so reading about Indigenous issues in academia, worldviews, connection to place and research methodologies (particularly Kovach [2009], Meyer [2013], Shawanda [2020], and Simpson [2014]). It’s been a wonderful reason to have some very enlightening conversations with colleagues and friends, and has helped me uncover more understanding of my own colonial ways of thinking, and how endemic colonialization is in this culture (and our schools). I’m getting better at seeing in terms of relationship, but it is taking time. Each thing I read gives a new perspective, a better understanding and peels back another layer to reveal clearer thinking.

The unfortunate side effect is that Indigenous worldviews and sense-making continue to be erased in my own work due to my own discomfort with including it poorly.

Through conversation with Jordanne, and growing understanding of methodology, I made a shift from modified action research to that of exploratory research (Stebbins, 2001). Because of the timelines and goals in my project, I’ll not really get to go through a cycle of action research, and the project I’m building is not one that would be implemented in my own workspace, but in an adjacent one. Exploratory research, particularly innovative exploratory research keeps the focus narrow, with the purpose of creation of a product (in my case, a [hopefully] effective OER).

Finally, the methods by which I hope to do the primary research piece have shifted from survey into semi-structured interview. Survey was, after further consideration, a limiting way of gathering the kind of information that I’m after. Semi-structured interview allows for more generative conversation, hopefully mitigating my own limitations and allowing the participants to expand the data in ways that I could not have foreseen.

I’m excited about this next piece, getting into the gathering and building aspects of the project.

Cheers.

References:

Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. A. (2014). Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity. Routledge.

Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies : Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. ProQuest Ebook Central. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=4672931

Meyer, M. A. (2013). Holographic Epistemology: Native Common Sense. China Media Research, 9(2), 94–101. http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=88863314&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Shawanda, A. (2020). Baawaajige: Turtle Island Journal of Indigenous Health, 1(1), 37–47. https://doi.org/10.33137/tijih.v1i1.34020

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3). https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22170

Stebbins, R. A. (2001). What is exploration. Exploratory research in the social sciences, (pp, 2-17). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.