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Item Open Access From Simulation to Imitation: Controllers, Corporeality, and Mimetic Play(2014-09-16) de Castell, Suzanne; Jenson, Jennifer; Thumlert, KBackground. We contend that a conceptual conflation of simulation and imitation persists at the heart of claims for the power of game-based simulations for learning. Recent changes in controller-technologies and gaming systems, we argue, make this conflation of concepts more readily apparent, and its significant educational implications more evident. Aim. This article examines the evolution in controller technologies of imitation that support players’ embodied competence, rather than players’ ability to simulate such competence. Digital gameplay undergoes an epistemological shift when player and game interactions are no longer restricted to simulations of actions on a screen, but instead support embodied imitation as a central element of gameplay. We interrogate the distinctive meanings and affordances of simulation and imitation and offer a critical conceptual strategy for refining, and indeed redefining, what counts as learning in and from digital games. Method. We draw upon actor-network theory to identify what is educationally significant about the digitally mediated learning ecologies enabled by imitation based gaming consoles and controllers. Actor-network theory helps us discern relations between human actors and technical artifacts, illuminating the complex inter-dependencies and inter-actions of the socio-technical support networks too long overlooked in androcentric theories of human action and cognitive psychology. Conclusion. By articulating distinctions between simulation and imitation, we show how imitative practices afforded by mimetic game controllers and next generation motion-capture technologies offer a different picture of learning through playing digital games, and suggest novel and productive avenues for research and educational practice.Item Open Access Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory(Taylor and Francis, 2014-04-14) Thumlert, K; de Castell, Suzanne; Jenson, JenniferBuilding upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an educational theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research.Item Open Access Affordances of Equality: Ranciere, Emerging Media, and the New Amateur(Taylor and Francis, 2015-11-25) Thumlert, KThis article extends a recent educational engagement with the work of Jacques Rancière by linking his meditations on 19th-century worker emancipation to present cultural contexts and media forms. Taking Nick Prior’s (2010) notion of the “new amateur” as point of departure, I argue that new media and attendant production contexts offer an unprecedented occasion for rethinking the educational experiments of Joseph Jacotot (the subject of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 1991). By bringing Jacotot’s “method of equality” into relation with present forms of cultural production, I elaborate a notion of affordances of equality that updates Jacotot’s practice of “experimenting with the gap between accreditation and act” (Rancière, 1991, p. 15) —a method that invited learners to improvise in the gap between an expert role and a talent imitable by anyone at all. In conclusion, I ask what educational theory might learn from the new amateur, from the emerging media these amateurs are engaging, and from the production literacies they enact.Item Open Access Transforming school culture through inquiry-driven learning and iPads(Emerald Publishing, 2018-01-17) Thumlert, K; Owston, Ron; Malhotra, TaruPurpose –The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a commissioned research study that analyzed a schooling initiative with the ambitious goal of transforming learning environments across the district by advancing innovative, inquiry-driven pedagogical practices combined with 1:1 iPad distribution. The paper explores impacts of the initiative on pedagogical innovation, twenty-first century learning, and related impacts on professional learning, collaboration, and culture change in the pilot schools analyzed in the study. Design/methodology/approach –A multi-dimensional case study approach was used to analyze how the initiative was implemented, and to what extent teaching, learning, and professional cultures were transformed, based on action plan inputs and “change drivers”. Research methods included structured, open-ended interviews conducted with randomly selected teachers and key informants in leadership roles, focus groups held with students, as well as analysis of policy documents, student work samples, and other data sources. Findings –The authors found evidence of a synergistic relationship between innovations in inquiry-driven pedagogy and professional learning cultures, with evidence of increased collaboration, deepened engagement and persistence, and a climate of collegiality and risk-taking at both classroom and organizational levels. Based on initiative inputs, the authors found that innovations in collaborative technology/pedagogy practices in classrooms paralleled similar innovations and transformations in professional learning cultures and capacity-building networks. Practical implications –This initiative analyzed in this paper provides a case study in large-scale system change, offering a compelling model for transformative policies and initiatives where interwoven innovations in pedagogy and technology mobilization are supported by multiple drivers for formal and informal professional learning/development and networked collaboration. Challenges and recommendations are highlighted in the concluding discussion. Originality/value –The transformative initiative analyzed in this paper provides a very timely case-model for innovations in twenty-first century learning and, specifically, for enacting and sustaining large-scale system change where inquiry-driven learning and technology tools are being mobilized to support “deep learning”, “new learning partnerships”, and multilevel transformations in professional learning (Fullan and Donnelly, 2013). This research advances scholarly work in the areas of twenty-first century learning, identifying relationships between technology/pedagogy innovation and professional capital building (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012). Keywords - Professional learning, Collaboration, Professional capital, Whole system transformation, Technology innovation, Inquiry-based learning, Pedagogical innovation Paper type - Research paperItem Open Access Pathways to sustainable futures: A “production pedagogy” model for STEM education(Futures, 2019-02-19) Alonso Yanez, Gabriela; Thumlert, K; de Castell, Suzanne; Jenson, JenniferSTEM education initiatives currently pervade the global landscape of educational reform.Unfortunately, the rush to adopt STEM reforms in North American schools and develop students for competitive 21st century knowledge economies has encouraged an uncritical embrace of underlying STEM narratives and purposes, thus foreclosing critical discussion, alternative models, and new perspectives on doing science education differently. Here, we unpack narratives and practices informing STEM education that induct learning actors into ‘anticipatory regimes’ that advance neoliberal ends and techno capitalist ideologies. We argue first that STEM narratives of progress, competition, and innovation increasingly obscure the urgent ecological, ethical and social justice conditions students confront daily. Ironically, this prepares them for a future rendered unsustainable by scientific and technological orthodoxy. We then draw upon critical sustainability studies (CSS) to articulate new axiological orientations that reposition science and technology learning. Lastly, we describe and illustrate an approach aligned with these critical principles–production pedagogy–whose theories and practices re-vision science and technology education. These strategies will situate students in agentive roles now, in this present, using real-world tools in authentic sociotechnical contexts. They can then confront their own capacities and limitations to engage in personally relevant ways, as producers, with techno-scientific knowledge.Item Open Access Past tensions and future possibilities: ARCYP and children’s media studies(Journal of Children and Media, 2016-01-18) Poyntz, Stuart R.; Coulter, Natalie; Brisson, GenevièveThe year 2007 marked the beginning. The same year JOCAM was launched, an interdisciplinary group of Canadian scholars formed a scholarly association to address the needs of researchers working with young people’s texts and cultures across Canada. In this paper, three members of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People’s (ARCYP’s) Executive examine current and future tensions within children’s media studies by drawing on lessons from ARCYP’s opening decade. Both ARCYP and JOCAM emerged during a time of productive intersections between the fields of children’s studies and media studies. Here, we draw on ARCYP’s history as part of an examination of ongoing lacunae that have arisen as sites of common concern have emerged. These tensions—having to do with notions of textuality and authority, consumption and children’s agency and citizenship and power—point to lacunae in the field of children’s media studies. ARCYP’s history of development is thus taken up as a lens to see the past and imagine the future priorities of our research field.Item Open Access Selling the Male Consumer the Playboy Way(Popular Communication, 2014-08-06) Coulter, NatalieUnder the direction of Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine’s early success was predicated upon the unique marketing strategies of forging the persona of an idealized, imaginary reader called the playboy, with particular lifestyles and taste preferences. At the same time, it sold the value of men’s participation in the hedonistic pleasures of accessible connoisseurship of the postwar marketplace by aligning consumer desires with sexual desires as innate components of modern masculinity. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how this persona is visually and discursively articulated throughout the entire Playboy empire, from the content of the magazines including the dewy centerfolds and the What Sort of Man Reads Playboy? campaigns to the brand’s clubs and television shows. The persona undertook the dual tasks of attracting a lucrative male readership and its corresponding advertisers, while simultaneously redefining male consumer culture.Item Open Access Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Mythology of DWYL in the Neoliberal Marketplace of Academic Labour(ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2014-12-01) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access Separate Playgrounds: Surveying the Fields of Girls’ Media Studies and Boyhood Studies(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012-07-01) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access “Missed Opportunity”: The Oversight of Canadian Children’s Media(Canadian Journal of Communication, 2016-02-16) Coulter, NatalieCanadian communication studies have largely ignored Canadian children’s media as a field of study. The children’s cultural industries in Canada are rich and diverse. This article argues that these cultural industries need to be constitutively integrated into scholarship on the Canadian mediascape, as does the presence of young people as active participants in Canadian media culture. Focusing primarily on English-language television to illustrate this point, the article first outlines the long history of children’s media production in Canada, then discusses reasons why such scholarship is missing from the field, and concludes by outlining the impacts of this oversight.Item Open Access Locating Tween Girls(Girlhood Studies, 2018-03-01) Kennedy, Melanie; Coulter, NatalieWe reflect on the media coverage of Amy “Dolly” Everett’s death by suicide to highlight the continued spectacularization of tweenhood as an idealized form of white feminine beauty tied to consumer culture, and one that shores up contradictory notions of the can-do/at-risk girl binary. We consider contemporary tweenhood’s continuities with the visibility and concerns of girlhood from the 1990s while questioning what a definition of tweenhood in the age of digital media and beyond the boundaries of whiteness, heteronormativity, able-bodiedness, and the Global North might look like. Calling for a discursive approach to understandings and conceptualizations of tweens, we introduce the eight articles in this special issue that range from media representations of the tween to lived experiences of actual tween girls.Item Open Access From Toddlers to Teens: The Colonization of Childhood the Disney Way(Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2012-01-01) Coulter, NatalieItem Open Access Elementary School Language and Literacy Education for Civic Engagement: An Evolving Playbook for Postmodern Times(Language and Literacy, 2017-08-03) Lotherington, HeatherThis paper argues for the need to postmodernize literacy education for civic engagement in an emerging new world order where humans are globally-connected in an invisible digital dimension, yet physically dispersed in greater degrees of complexity. The paper summarizes a university-school collaborative learning community’s evolving playbook on experimental multimodal and plurilingual language and literacy education, and illustrates project-based learning, inclusion of children’s linguistic and cultural knowledge in classroom learning, immersive ludic activities, collaborative problem-solving, and agentive participation in an elementary school classroom project.Item Open Access “Frappés, friends, and fun”: Affective labor and the cultural industry of girlhood(Sage Journals, 2018-10) Coulter, NatalieIn the cultural industries of girlhood, tween girls are almost always shown to be having fun. This article focuses mainly on tween retailer Justice, its corporate communications materials, the images in its online retail spaces, and the slogans on the T-shirts that the company sells. I argue that fun is a commercial epistemology that reaffirms the boundaries between the separate market segments of youth and legitimates market incursions into girlhood. As a result, fun becomes a political action that functions as a means to depoliticize girlhood. This article builds upon Sara Ahmed’s work on the happy housewife as a fantasy figure that obscures the unequal divisions of labor in patriarchal capitalism in its assertion that the tween girl is a fantasy figure of the 21st century consumer culture whose fun is a form of commodified, depoliticized girl-power that reifies girls as productive economic subjects.