Triangulated Dialogic Space in Arts and Design’s Studio Pedagogy

Embodied Knowing: How Trans Critique Creates Liberatory Pedagogical Possibilities

This dissertation engages in a cultural analysis of how systems of power can be created, reinforced, and transformed in learning environments in ways that create liberatory praxis by bringing Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and Trans Pedagogy into conversation with one another. In this work, Cultural Studies offers a framework to analyze how power and culture shape classrooms. Critical Pedagogy advances this aim to analyze and propose re-structurings of the classroom that center critical engagement and lateral learning structures. Through my engagements with Critical Pedagogy and Trans Pedagogy, hierarchical learning models and binaries of “inside” and “outside” of the classroom are collapsed. To contextualize my contributions, I present the first comprehensive genealogy of the nascent field of Trans Pedagogy published to date. As an offering to the growth of the field of Trans Pedagogy, this genealogy covers the intervening texts of the field between 2008-2024. Through my research of Trans Pedagogy, I present the emerging themes and questions of this field in this genealogy. The second half of this dissertation details my contribution to Trans Pedagogy. Through an autoethnographic approach, I also develop a “Liberatory Trans Pedagogy” as my contribution to the growth of the field of Trans Pedagogy. A Liberatory Trans Pedagogy offers an “educator’s toolkit” in which I detail nine elements as to what engaging in this pedagogical praxis can entail. As evidenced by my dialectical and student-forward approaches in the classroom, education through a Liberatory Trans Pedagogy becomes a praxis that is critical, meaningful, and generative for both instructors and students. Together, my students and I pedagogically collapse hierarchical structurings of the classroom to instead be rooted in lateral frameworks of engagement. By inviting my students into the process of the co-construction of understandings and class engagement, students become active agents in our course, their educations, and beyond. A Liberatory Trans Pedagogy attends to students’ needs and interests while simultaneously preparing them to be critically engaged citizens beyond the classroom. Liberatory in this work is a critical pedagogical praxis in which students are invited to foster their understandings of power, norms, and strengthen their community collaboration, advocacy, and intellectual interdependence. In this work, “trans” embodies multiplicity as a crossing between disciplines, transformation of classroom dynamics, and transcendence from traditional academic norms and pedagogical hierarchies through engagements with a Liberatory Trans Pedagogy.

INTEGRATING SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM AND VISIBLE THINKING IN VIRTUAL DRAMA CLASSROOM: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The proposed framework demonstrates how drama pedagogy, integrated with the underlying social constructivist principles and VT routines, can stimulate collaboration, creative and reflective thinking and thus engagement amongst learners.

‘It’s actually changed my perspective’: spaces for genuine dialogic surprise within the initial teacher education curriculum

In this article, we draw on Martin Buber’s idea of dialogical surprise in educational experiences to consider curriculum design in initial teacher education. We argue that the current policy environment in England fosters a monological approach, stifling meaning-making and innovation. Contributing to conversations around initial teacher education curriculum design within a constricted policy environment in England, the research presents findings on initial teacher education curriculum experiences of Year 3 Primary Education undergraduate student teachers who completed one of three module electives (Thinking and Philosophy for Children; Creativity in Education; Early Years Education). These modules form part of the wider initial teacher education curriculum design at the institution in which the research was undertaken, aiming to develop student teachers’ critical thinking, reflection and personal philosophies. The study investigates student teachers’ reflections on participating in dialogue, which involves recognising their own and other perspectives. When curriculum design enabled spaces for new meanings to emerge, the possibility for an interplay of voices was allowed. Arguing that dialogic spaces are effectively closed down within the Department for Education’s main prescribed initial teacher education framework, we add our voices to the urgent call for a less prescriptive framework which recognises the professional expertise of teacher educators in curriculum design.

“Not Just Boring Adult Stuff” Issue-Based and Critical Pedagogies for Civic and Political Learning in Welsh Primary Classrooms

A Classroom Discourse Analysis of Technology Integration Practices in Higher Education

The rapid infusion of modern technology into educational environments has irreversibly reconfigured the nature of classroom discourse, reshaping how knowledge is produced, negotiated, and validated in higher education settings. This qualitative study examines the discursive patterns that emerge when instructors and students engage with innovative digital tools including generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, immersive extended reality (XR) environments, and adaptive learning management systems (LMS), within university classrooms. Grounded in a critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework and informed by sociocultural theory, the study draws on multi-site ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and documentary analysis conducted across five Nigerian universities over an eight-month period. Findings reveal four thematic discourse formations: (1) techno-epistemic repositioning, wherein digital tools disrupt traditional authority structures; (2) collaborative innovation talk, characterized by emergent peer-to-peer knowledge co-construction; (3) resistance and negotiation discourse, reflecting tensions between institutional norms and technological affordances; and (4) reflective meta-discourse, wherein learners and instructors interrogate the implications of AI-mediated knowledge. The study contributes to a growing body of literature on technology-mediated pedagogy by revealing how innovation discourse in classrooms is simultaneously emancipatory and constraining, offering practitioners, policymakers, and educational technologists a nuanced understanding of the sociolinguistic dynamics underpinning twenty-first-century learning.

Material-discursive dimensions of early narrative learning in a kindergarten classroom

This study applies posthuman theory and materiality to early literacy learning to support shifts in school-based practices from human-centered, developmental models using scripted curricula to one that acknowledges literacy as an intra-active, material-discursive process. The research was conducted in a kindergarten public school classroom where, twice per week, children listened to read alouds and crafted narratives using paper-based and digital tools. The intra-actions recognized children, books, recordings, and writing tools as active participants in the learning process. Learning was entangled with children’s bodies, voices, emotions, and memories. The material-discursive engagements altered the children’s becomings as literate beings. The findings challenge a narrow view of literacy and the child as the sole agent of literacy, highlighting how objects, gestures, playfulness, and cultural stories intra-act to shape learning. The study reimagines storytelling as a dynamic, embodied, and relational practice that disrupts conventional literacy pedagogies.