Using participatory design to inform cyber/bullying prevention and intervention practices: Evidence-Informed insights and strategies

Bullying and cyberbullying are global phenomena negatively impacting on children’s and young people’s (CYP’s) mental health and wellbeing and affecting their school social experiences and learning outcomes. Many interventions and prevention approaches have been employed over the decades, most impacting differentially, with some success in certain contexts and situations but not universally, suggesting the need for more contextualised, nuanced approaches at the whole school, community, individual and peer-group levels. The recognition of the importance of student and teacher voice in recent years has heralded interest in co-design practices to deliver more context-relevant interventions and prevention strategies. This article considers how participatory design and co-design practices can form part of the prevention and intervention repertoire for schools, teachers, counsellors and psychologists in their quest to understand and reduce cyberbullying and/or bullying (C/B) behaviours. Two case-study exemplars are provided that reflect the importance of context and student-centred relevancy to inform practice.

Leading system transformation: A work in progress

Internationally, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly disrupted the education sector. While NSW has avoided the longer periods of remote learning that our colleagues in Victoria and other countries have experienced, we have nonetheless been provoked to reflect on the nature of schooling and the systemic support we provide to transform the learning of each student and enrich the professional lives of staff within our Catholic learning community. At Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta (CEDP), a key pillar of our approach is to create conditions that enable everyone to be a leader. Following the initial lockdown period in 2020 when students learned remotely, we undertook an informal teacher voice piece with the purpose of engaging teachers and leaders from across our 80 schools in Greater Western Sydney to reflect on and capture key learnings. This project revealed teachers and leaders reported very high feelings of self-efficacy, motivation and confidence in their capacity to learn and lead in the volatile pandemic landscape. These findings raised the question: how do we enable this self-efficacy, motivation and confidence in an ongoing way? This paper documents the systematic reflection process undertaken by CEDP to understand the enabling conditions a system can provide to activate everyone to be a leader in the post-pandemic future and the key learnings emerging from this process.

Integrating Feminist Theory, Pedagogy, and Praxis into Teacher Education

This article discusses suggestions for integrating feminist epistemology, theory, pedagogy, and praxis even more intentionally into existing U.S. teacher education curricula. The premise is that in light of recent 21st century women’s empowerment movements, such ideas should be examined and integrated fully in justice-oriented teacher education programs. Supporting them with a review of the relevant literature, the author offers additions to existing frames within teacher education in U.S. programs. The author suggests emphasis on establishing authentic teacher voice through intentional pedagogy that incorporates feminism, through establishment of community, and through praxis and reflection. With these aspects firmly established in teacher education as essential to justice-oriented teacher education, the author advocates for counter-hegemonic conversations and storylines that encourage feminist voice and feminist praxis in teacher education.

Forms of participation and teacher voice. Self-appraisal in Academy schools.

Since 2010, privatisation of English state funded schools has accelerated. This is an educational policy that continues to shift accountability for effective teaching away from central government and local authorities towards schools and individual teachers. New models of network governance continue to exacerbate old tensions between ideas of professional accountability and contractual accountability. In this context quality assurance mechanisms have displaced opportunities for personal development and job satisfaction.The phenomenon of participation has been conceptualised here as teacher voice and as the means of reducing professional conflicts in secondary schools. This discussion draws on empirical evidence from teacher interviews and teacher self-appraisal submissions in order to answer the question, ‘What are teachers’ experiences of participation in their performance appraisal in English Academy schools?’, where ‘evaluation has become an embedded practice giving less room to local actors’ (Kauko and Salokangas, 2015). Voice is described with reference to reflective writing for self-appraisal. Institutional forgetting is described in relation to reductions in professional dialogue and professional autonomy. Keywordsprivatization, self-appraisal, participation, voice, active, passive, compliance, non-compliance, forgetting, knowledge, stratification, separation, compartmentalization

The Learning of Teaching: A Portrait Composed of Teacher Voices

In this portrait, Irene Liefshitz considers learning as an aspect of teaching—how teachers learn to teach, what they learn about teaching, and how they are transformed by teaching. Because unsolicited, free-ranging, teacher-to-teacher conversation about teaching rarely makes it to education research, the author analyzes conversations between teachers recorded for the StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative to inquire how teachers talk about learning and what they say about it when no researcher is guiding their conversation. Such centering of teacher voice is a practical and political stance and positions education research as an act of listening. By transmitting and interpreting teachers’ talk, the author makes a case for focusing research agendas on teacher learning based on what teachers say is important to them, for promoting a scholarship of voice in research on teaching, and for further use of the StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative as a rich data source of teacher voice.

Table Teacher: Voice Based Application for Learning Tables using Amazon Alexa

With the evolution of sophisticated NLP algorithms and cloud based solutions, virtual assistants started to reach every home and office in the city. This paper proposes a technique for teaching basic mathematical tables for kids. The device will ask the questions and expect the answer in number format in return. The input received from the kid will be processed and validated. In case of correct answer, the next question will be asked. If answer is wrong, the kid is suitably notified. This ability to interact with the device in natural form like voice would keep the kid engaged to the process of learning. Proposed skill is available for enabling for all the echo family users and the result of customers using the skill is analyzed. The skill used AWS server less service Lambda as backend and Amazon Voice Service for front-end.