Thursday 28 February 2008

Thinking about doing a Literaure Review?

You may remember that I am a member of the Learn Higher Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning www.learnhigher.ac.uk - go there for information and resources that might support your APPROACHES to to study!!!

Personally, I am undertaking research in to student reading and notemaking strategies - and also producing teaching & learning resources in these areas.

This year I have commissioned the production of an ON-LINE LITERATURE REVIEW.

The Literature Review is on the topic of student Reading issues - and you are very welcome to read the Review for its content - and to join in the BLOG discussions that go with it. this sort of activity helps you to feel part of a lively academic community - this is a good thing!

ALSO - you may want to go there to see what a good literature review should look like - and how you can build one over time...

FINALLY - you might like to go there to read the CONTENT - for much of this review will be covering issues of POWER & CONTROL in relation to education - and you may be interested in these areas - and in the related research - to help you with your case study.

On-line Literature Review
http://litreview.pbwiki.com/

for the blog:<http://onlinelitreview.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html>

Best,
Sandra

my essay topic (i think)

I want to look at the Somali community of north east London, focusing on the psychological and social aspects of the educational issues they face as forced migrants. I plan to relate these to the 'ecological' theory of development proposed by Bronfenbrenner - could using this perspective help us to view the issues these refugees face, and the responses they require, in a different way?

... or something like that!
i don't know if i will be able to answer this yet!

beccy

Tuesday 26 February 2008

Refugee Camp Simulation

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7262658.stm

Oxfam set up Refugee Realities in Australia.

Word document

I have tried to attach a word document and have found it difficult so will email you the document.

Victoria

Monday 25 February 2008

Get searching!!

Remember my tip in last week's notes re a great GOOGLE search.
Put
government + policy + education + refugees
in the search box.
A couple of clicks will get you to Jill Rutter's Policy Document on this - with case studies of good practice.

Best,
Sandra

Friday 22 February 2008

oops, i should have said, rappel - victoria has your copy of the article. ta, beccy
hi, beccy here.
thanks for the articles.
the one i gave out the copy of - for info, this is the last chapter from
Hamilton, R. & Moore, D. (Eds). Educational interventions for refugee children. Routledge Falmer.
i have that book out of the library at the mo and have found it interesting. There are eight chapters in all - on things like 2nd lang issues, trauma, and policy - but the chapter i copied was quite a good summing up of everything in the book.
cheers
beccy

Thursday 21 February 2008

Paper on Enthnographic research methods - narratives

Dear All,
I am so happy that we got the Blog up and running last night - many thanks to James for getting us set up so swiftly and with so little fuss.

I note that Jamie has already started the ball rolling wth a post on a useful journal article for us.

EVERYONE: please remember to post NOTES on your research and reading EVERY WEEK. It would be useful if you can give: Author (date) TITLE, location;Publisher - and a summary of the key points of the piece that you read - indicating how useful - or not - it was - and how it fits into field.

Below I have pasted the Abstract from a paper that uses student narratives as a research methodology. Obviously what we are really looking for in a paper like this is a model of how someone else has justified their methodology...
If you would like a copy of the whole paper, please email me s.sinfield@londonmet.ac.uk

-----------------------------------------------
Telling tales: a fresh look at student experience and learning in higher education
Dr Dilly Fung (University of Exeter) D.Fung@exeter.ac.uk

BERA Conference 2006 Reference Number: 0498
Session: Parallel Session 5 Date: 08/09/2006 from 09:00 to 10:30

Abstract
Drawing on sequences of oral narratives by first year university students, the primary research study on which this paper is based (Fung, 2007) brings a new perspective to some of the key ideas found in today’s literature on ‘learning and teaching in higher education’. The notions of student experience, students’ approaches to learning and their conceptions of learning frequently arise in today’s research into higher education (HE). Proponents of the ‘deep and surface learning’ model (Marton et al.,1997) and the related notion of ‘constructive alignment’ (Biggs, 2003) offer advice for educational developers and teachers in HE, with a view to encouraging ‘deep’ level learning for meaning, rather than ‘surface’ learning which aims only to reproduce; this approach has been referred to as a ‘new paradigm’ (Entwistle, in Marton et al., 1997). Underpinned by phenomenographic methodology, the field has raised useful questions about ‘student experience’ regarding students’ individual differences in approach to and conceptions of learning, and about the implications of these for practitioners.
However, this recent narrative research (Fung, 2007) takes a fresh look at the issues, using personal stories as a means of gaining a richer description of the lifeworld of students and their learning. Twenty-two first year students, arriving at an ‘old’ university to take English or English-related undergraduate degrees, were invited to talk at length on three occasions (at the beginning, middle and end of the first year) about their experience. No specific questions were asked; rather, narrative prompts such as ‘Can you tell me about this term?’ were given, encouraging students to talk as fully as possible about their learning within the wider context of their experiences of university. This resulted in 60 personal narratives, totalling more than 400,000 words. In this era of Widening Participation, half of the narrators were ‘traditional’ students and half ‘non-traditional’; a hermeneutic analysis (Gallagher, 1992) based on Chatman’s approach to narrative analysis (Chatman, 1993) of the transcribed narratives was then conducted, and the stories of students from different backgrounds juxtaposed.
As students represent at length their experience, it is noticeable that, whilst the traditional and non-traditional students express some differences in terms of their representations of experiencing HE culture, participants show a marked and common emphasis on the social and interactive dimensions of their approaches to learning. The centrality in the texts of the collective dimension of the learning experience raises strongly the importance of the notion of ‘education as relation’ (Bingham and Sidorkin, 2004), for students from all backgrounds. In turn, structural issues arise for those designing and delivering programmes of study, and some practical steps are proposed that may be taken by institutions, departments and lecturers to focus afresh on the importance of this dimension of the students’ experience, and its importance for their ‘learning’, and education more broadly.

-----------------------------------
Best,
Sandra

Wednesday 20 February 2008

Burmese Refugees in Japan

http://0-ejournals.ebsco.com.emu.londonmet.ac.uk/RemoteRedirect.asp?IsPaginated=0&ContentType=Article&ArticleID=10484700&ContributionFullTextIndex=1&RemoteURL=FullTextDelivery%2Easp%3Fformat%3Dfulltext%26ciid%3D10484700%26ftindex%3D1

(Link to PDF file of article from the Journal of Refugee Studies; you will need to log in to access it).
Hie everyone,

I hope all the students have been doing some reading cause I didnt as I wasnt well, I know its no excuse but if the rest read then we can always share with the sick of the group. Just to let you know that when I phoned Rappel today, his girlfriend said he wasnt well too.

At the moment I do not have a computer at home and this a warning to all; you will all be tired of reading from me! Be warned!

Victoria

tom.

Research methods. Hello group and welcome to research methodology. This is sometimes a confusing and enraging subject. However by engaging creatively at this stage of the module and course, these sessions will not only prepare you for this assignment but also for your research proposal module and dissertation. Hope you enjoy the challenge.
Best.
Tom

test post

Hello.

--Jamie
this is me testing to see if i'm doing this right. beccy

The new last refuge blog

Hope that everyone was able to add a new post!

lastrefuge

Welcome to the last refuge blog