Category: Understanding Learning

Develop an understanding of how learners learn in order to cultivate effective learning environments

Hoop Check-In – Final Video!

November 24, 2019 / knikolich / 0 Comments

Well, I did my best

I set out this semester to learn how to choreograph and perform a routine in the aerial hoop (lyra) discipline. I came in with some knowledge of my strengths and weaknesses in the hoop, and with some practice under my belt, but with no experience putting together a routine or moving to music in the hoop. Through online resources, the generous help of my mentors and coaches, and listening to that song until I couldn’t anymore, I was able to put together a routine that played to my strengths while also challenging me to improve in my weaker areas. I practiced and practiced, filming periodically along the way, until I arrived at the end of the semester (and the end of my filming opportunities with Eve at Studio 4 until the new year).

This is by no means the best I can do, and I’m going to keep working at it – with a different song this time though! That said, I’m fairly proud of what I was able to accomplish, and moreover, I forced myself a long way toward getting over my aversion to being filmed.

With enormous thanks to everybody who supported, guided, and ooh’d and aah’d me through the process, here’s what I have so far:

SkySafari: Finding Place in the Universe

November 8, 2019 / knikolich / 0 Comments

What Is SkySafari?

SkySafari is a free app that uses augmented reality and a massive historical and knowledge database to allow the user to learn about every star, constellation, and astral body in the sky at all times of day and year, and compare it to what was happening minutes, hours, days, or years ago! I think this counts as an environmental app for place-based learning, especially because stories and legends about the stars and the cosmos are so important to the culture of a place. We see different stars here than people do in Australia, and experience the motion of the planets differently than somebody in Colorado, for instance. The way we see the stars is very specific to place, and learning more about how and why we see them that way is important to understanding the place you’re in.

Close-up Selection view of Mars, including its moons! Image by kyu3 on Photozou, under CC BY-SA 2.5.

How to use it for education

There are a ton of tools on this app. Using Compass, the phone’s screen turns into a planetarium, with an overlay of stars and other astral bodies that updates as you turn 360 degrees or change the angle of your phone up toward the sky or down toward the ground. The phone orients to the four compass directions, and uses GPS to locate the phone’s latitude and longitude, as well as the exact local time. At any time of day or night, the user can select any star in the sky that is shown on the app, and not only learn its name and what constellation it’s in, but using the Selection tool will open an information page with everything known about that astral body and its history. The International Space Station, all the planets in our solar system, Pluto, the Sun, and the Moon are also included and have a ton of info available. Using the Time tool, the user can see what was happening in the cosmos at any time over the last several decades. Using these tools, students can explore the ‘night sky’ at any time of day, wherever they are – including in the classroom!

The solar system lies along a flat plane called the ecliptic, which you can discover using the orbit of the planets, sun, and moon over time. Image by PlanetUser on Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0).

A cool lesson with this app could be using paper cut-outs and string to represent the movement of certain stars or planets over a year. This could apply to art, science, or even English (explaining the principles of astronomy to make sense of Shakespeare’s “star-crossed lovers” maybe?)! In Social Studies, you could have a ‘day at the planetarium’ by dimming the lights in your classroom and using the app to mark the constellations on the wall to link them to Greek and Roman mythology. You could even find some Indigenous stories about the stars and bring those viewpoints into the conversation!

There are some other cool features as well, like the Night setting (switches the phone’s display to all red light for night viewing), the Tonight tool (shows the rising and setting time of planets, satellites, and notable stars coming up that night), and Notifications (pops up when an interesting event like a planetary transit, comet sighting, or ISS visible, is about to happen).

Pros

Free (although there are pop-ups advertising in-app purchases, these are easily dismissed)
Cross-platform (Available on Play Store for Android and App Store on Apple devices)
Versatile, with many tools for students to explore
Works day and night, any time of year
Contains seemingly limitless extra information on every visible object in the night sky
Can go ‘back in time’ using the Time function to understand planet/star movements
Unlike some stargazing apps, it has the outer planets and Pluto

Cons

Uses WiFi, but would require data if outside or out of WiFi range
Does not contain every star in the sky (but has most of the easily-visible ones)
The download is big, and will take up precious space on students’ devices
Some pre-knowledge of where to find things will help, but is not really necessary once you start exploring!

Hoop Check-In – Week 8

October 30, 2019 / knikolich / 0 Comments

I Blame Dr. Albert Bandura

This week, I’ve switched up my classes at Island Circus Space. I’ve found the classes I was taking weren’t helping me to learn or improve new skills, and similarly were not allowing me time to polish skills I already have, or that I am using for my routine. Dr. Lucinda Brown would be so pleased, because it all had to do with…

Self-Efficacy!

The idea of self-efficacy being important in teaching and learning has been on my radar for some time. As a tutor for UVic’s Learning Assistance Program, self-efficacy training (including the four components of teaching for increased self-efficacy) was part of how we learned to help our students take charge of their own learning. I’ve been hearing about the importance of self-efficacy again in Psychology of Classroom Learning (ED-D 401), and it’s made me realize how little of it I’ve been getting from my hoop and trapeze classes.

Image: Reciprocal Determinism by EDCU320RHT on Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0).

I started at this studio taking intermediate hoop/trapeze, considering that I had a year of experience in the hoop. It turns out that I’m halfway between their version of ‘beginner’ and ‘intermediate’, and being in a class full of folks that are much more experienced, and only practicing skills that are new to me, has been really impacting my self-confidence with this discipline. I know as a teacher that this is not how I can learn optimally, so I’ve decided to switch up my schedule to take the beginner-level hoop/trapeze class, as well as an extra strength-training class to get me up to speed with the intermediate class. This is a different angle that might yield the same results, but in a way that I can feel much more comfortable with my progress.

I’ve really begun to reflect on how teaching a skill like aerial arts is intrinsically the same as teaching science or English or anything else in a classroom. Once I start thinking about it, the principles of pedagogy start turning up everywhere!

(Featured image: Psychologist Albert Bandura in 2005 from Fridolin freudenfett on Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Project-Based Learning at Esquimalt High

October 30, 2019 / knikolich / 0 Comments

As part of our Multiliteracies class, we had the opportunity this past month to work with a group of students from Esquimalt High School on a project that they were passionate about. This was an open inquiry-style project, and the projects that grew out of it represented emergent learning. I had the opportunity to work with another of the pre-service teachers in the program on a project that interested both of us. I learned a lot during this experience about how to relate to today’s students, how to build trust and rapport with them, and how to enable them to do work that they couldn’t do on their own by providing effective scaffolding and collaborations.

Our Students

Image from PxHere (Public Domain).

My colleague and I ended up attaching ourselves to a group of four students who were all passionate about organizing a class trip to Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park. All four had strong opinions about the logging of old-growth forest on Vancouver Island, and wanted their classmates to see the beauty of the forest (and the devastation of the surrounding clear cuts) for themselves. These students were part of a challenge program, and so were already very high-achieving youth that are in their final year of high school. In addition to this project, they are all dealing with the stress of graduating, applying to university, and finishing their year with strong grades. They were fantastic resources for us, as they knew the school and the staff within it well, and were able to access the resources within the school that we needed.

As challenge students that are very involved in their school and community, our group were already quite comfortable interacting with adults, which made it easy to establish a respectful rapport with them. They were able to clearly articulate their ideas, and were also very aware of their own strengths. With very little prompting, they were able to put together a plan of action and self-organize into loose but interchangeable roles: the researcher, the artist, the designer, and the logistics handler.

Our Project

The group agreed that their goal in this project was to win their class over to the cause, in order to prepare a field trip proposal to take to the administration for approval. As outdoor educators, my colleague and I were both able to advice on the kinds of logistics required, as well as offer suggestions toward a ‘save the forest propaganda campaign’. This campaign came together as follows:

The students contacted a researcher at the Pacific Forestry Center and arranged for him to come in and talk to the class about the importance of preserving old growth rainforest.
The students independently researched and produced multimodal publication (called a ‘zine, pictured below) aimed at informing their classmates about the issues facing the Carmanah and Walbran valleys.
With minimal input, the students explored arrangements for camping accommodations, transportation, and possible dates for the field trip, to begin the process of their application.

Front and back cover of ‘zine. Photo by me.

Inside of ‘zine. Photo by me.

Opportunistic Collaboration

It so happens that another pre-service teacher in our cohort is a member of the Friends of Carmanah Walbran collective, and was in possession of some cedar with which the organization was planning to make trail marker signs. We were able to take advantage of the opportunity for our students to design these signs themselves, as the colleague I was working with is also a visual artist and had access to the CNC router at UVic’s Digital Fabrication Lab. Using a free design program, our students produced another product: two trail marker signs that the class will take with them on their field trip and install in the Carmanah (pictured below).

Photo by me.

This was a phenomenal experience, and I hope that our students keep in touch about the results of their efforts!

Hoop Check-In – Week 6

October 18, 2019 / knikolich / 0 Comments

The Path So Far

I’d like to take a moment, halfway through this free inquiry project, to say that I’m learning a lot. This is not my usual way of learning: as an academic, I have had few opportunities to track my learning in certain skills, as opposed to concepts. Learning to do something has different metrics than learning to know something. Back in September, I enjoyed playing in the hoop or trapeze or silk hammock, but had no idea how one would actually perform such a thing. I knew a few cool poses, and had built up some strength, but until I started watching videos of performers late one Friday night, I hadn’t dreamed that I could put those moves to music, let along choreograph a whole song!

Look at this goober.

Undergoing this free inquiry has helped me understand that ‘learning’ doesn’t have to be reading peer-reviewed articles or writing a paper. It turns out that video editing isn’t as daunting when you’re editing a video of you having fun and doing something cool! My biggest sources of knowledge in this endeavour have been my instructors at Island Circus Space, where I’ve been practicing weekly, and my amazing mentor Eve Carty, who has taught me not just hoop combos but how open pedagogy can be as easy and natural as breathing. The structure for my project came from a dance blog that breaks choreography down into 6 steps. Those steps have been working really well to structure my process, and so far I’ve completed four steps:

Pick a song and listen to it like crazy (I actually did this twice, as I’ve since switched my song to On the Arrow by Rachel Rose Mitchell [a cover of the original by AFI])
Get actively inspired (by watching videos of others, talking to my instructors, and listing the moves I could do so I could put them in order)
Freestyle! (At practice every week, I got the feeling of new moves and new ways to combine and move between ones I already knew)
Piece combos together by ‘chunking’ (I did this by first choreographing moves to pieces of the song that were really poignant or important, or to certain lyrics that spoke to me. After that, I filled in the rest of the song)

Next Steps

There is no way to not make this look awkward.

The next two steps will be covered over the following weeks:

5. Polish execution of the moves (in free jam sessions with Eve, I’ll drill the choreography and film it for my reference so I can make it look awesome)

6. Make edits – but not too many (If there are moves that I’m not as comfortable with, or that take longer than I expect to get into even with practice, I might have to adjust the choreography a bit)

In addition, I’d like to do an audio interview with one of my instructors so I can work on my audio editing skills. I’m still attending weekly practices and biweekly sessions for filming, and I am amazed at how this project is coming together. I’ll check in next week with another video, this time hopefully my first attempt at the full song!