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    Designing hybrid spaces for learning in higher education health contexts
    (Springer Nature, 2021-10-23) Green JK
    In Aotearoa New Zealand, undergraduate, professional health courses include social work, nursing, and biosciences courses that focus on learning how to support people with physical, mental, spiritual, and psychosocial/relational health and well-being concerns. Recently, the need for a nuanced understanding of how technologies might extend students’ experiences across and beyond physical classrooms has emerged. Drawing on contemporary ecological perspectives in education, this paper emphasises that design for learning involves a complex web of elements. Anchored in practice theory, the paper uses the analytical lens of the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework to explore how tools, tasks, and various social arrangements influence student learning activity. A multiple case study investigated the experiences and insights of five higher education teacher-designers, discussing the relationship between features of course design and their perceived impact on emergent learning activity. Design elements are also discussed in relation to the experience of teacher-designers adapting and transitioning to hybrid environments during Covid-19, whilst working with diverse learners in different contexts and disciplines. Interviews with teacher-designers revealed what they believe contributes to productive learning activity, such as the importance of creating safe learning environments, an overall appreciation for the opportunity to use technology for teaching and learning, and their use of a heutagogical approach, which emphasizes the development of knowledge and skills for teaching in hybrid learning environments. The paper argues for practical and targeted support to acknowledge, encourage, and enhance teacher-designers’ capabilities for transformational use of hybrid learning environments in health education.
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    Dialogic activity : a study of learning dialogues and entanglements in a vocational tertiary setting : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Education at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2022) Simpson, Ann Middlebrook
    New Zealand’s economic growth continues to place major pressure on the trades sector. To meet future demand for qualified builders, plumbers, electricians, and engineers, trades education has become available at no cost to students for two years. To attract student interest further, tertiary institutions now offer courses in a range of delivery options. Blended learning (BL) is one of these delivery modes and involves a combination of traditional face-to-face and digitally mediated approaches. This research explored students’ dialogic activity in a BL environment, within a trades educational institution. The dialogues that emerged during trades training courses were examined in relation to a complex assemblage of elements, which included interactions between students and teachers, and the digital and materials artefacts in the BL environments. The research used an interdisciplinary lens, employing theories of socio-materialism and dialogism, to unpack forms of dialogic activity that emerged within the BL environment. That same lens was used to reveal the part that material and digital artefacts played in the emergent dialogic activity. Conducted as a multiple case study, the research involved observations of instructors and student participants from three Level 3 pre-apprentice trade programmes, which provided a wide range of data over the course of one semester. Datasets from Automotive Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, as the three cases involved, were analysed to explore the contextual meaning of the learning dialogues and activities in action. The findings revealed that learning dialogues occur in multiple contexts and environments. Artefacts and their properties, BL designs, open and flexible learning spaces, environmental conditions, health and safety considerations, embodiment, multiplicity, mediation, and class culture, all have a significant influence on dialogic activity. The findings offer important insights about the link between course design and learning and identify dialogic activity as an interdisciplinary phenomenon that warrants further investigation.