Jeremy Price – Assistant Professor, IU School of Education at IUPUI
Today we welcome current Mosaic Fellow, Jeremy Price, to the blog. He is Assistant Professor of Technology, Innovation and Pedagogy in Urban Education at the Indiana University School of Education-Indianapolis at IUPUI whose research and teaching focuses on orienting the use of technology in education for purposes of equity, inclusion, and justice.
In his blog, Jeremy shares how he uncovers student experiences and perceptions of their Mosaic classroom through their drawings. If you’ve ever wondered if your classroom space influences your students’ learning, Jeremy discusses how you could learn the answer to this question.
When we conduct research in our classrooms to understand all of the dynamic interactions that provide the conditions for teaching and learning to take place, it is important to investigate the meanings that actors bring to and negotiate around the classroom experience. When doing this kind of inquiry, I look to the anthropologist James Spradley. He wrote that to find out what something means to a research participant, the researcher should ask what it looks like (Spradley, 1979). Although Spradley was writing about ways to conduct interviews, another method for collecting this kind of rich and meaning-laden information about meaning is through visual data: drawings by students. Learners can communicate a great deal of meaning and power through drawings that would have been more difficult to convey otherwise, promoting student voice in educational change efforts (Haney, Russell, & Bebell, 2004).
In order to understand how my undergraduate students experienced my class and to see the meanings that they make of the dynamics and interplay between learning, teaching, and classroom environment, I asked my students on the last day of the semester to imagine a “typical” day in class, and then to draw a picture of what this looks like. This research and evaluation process builds off previous work I have done with both K12 students (Price, 2017; Price & Barber, 2014) and undergraduate students (Price & Hewitt, 2015).
My class at IUPUI is EDUC-W200, a course for current undergraduate students and future K12 teachers to lay the foundations for integrating technology into their emerging teaching practices. I teach my class in a Mosaic classroom, a room specifically designed to facilitate active learning when matched with the appropriate pedagogical practices.
In terms of analyzing the drawings, I use a form of recursive and comparative qualitative content analysis (QCA; Mayring, 2000). QCA provides a holistic approach for understanding the meanings expressed in participant-generated illustrations. A holistic approach involves going back and forth between taking notice of the details and the “whole picture” to understand the dynamics involved in the illustration (Haney et al., 2004). I look at low- to mid-inference features (Freeman & Mathison, 2008), only those elements that are clearly exhibited in the drawings themselves, to make sense of what the drawings say about the classroom dynamics. It is the patterns of similarities and difference in these features that provide the contours of the reported meanings and experience in the classroom.
So, what kind of information, when coupled with a methodological analysis, can these illustrations provide? I will demonstrate some of the themes that emerged from examining the drawings of my students through four illustrations.
Student drawing 1; Instructor: Jeremy Price
The first drawing, shown here, was fairly typical of those provided by my students. You can see that the setup of the room (ES 1117) is represented pretty faithfully, with 3/4 oval tables set against the wall arrayed around the perimeter of the room. Students (the smaller stick people) are seated around these tables, while the professor (me) is standing—and represented as slightly larger, holding some sort of pointing stick or a marker—at the front of the room. Each table has a white board with writing on it; these were taken off the wall adjacent to each table, one of the features of this particular Mosaic room. Over the course of the semester, I engaged students in collaborative activities using their tables’ whiteboards. Some examples included collaborative brainstorming, concept mapping, and developing shared definitions of concepts and terms.
The next illustration delved a little more deeply into the pedagogical structure of the class itself. I worked to develop a set of class routines over the course of the semester to promote an environment conducive to learning and to model these routines so they may incorporate them when they become teachers themselves. This student represented some of these routines in the drawing. We started each class with a “warm up” as a way to make the transition or to bridge the threshold between class and wherever they came from, and this is depicted in the first frame of the illustration. (“The eye” is the classroom camera used to video record class sessions through Kaltura for both research purposes and as a resource for students so they can go back and revisit class time.) The middle frame of the drawing represents a class discussion which included online research. A second routine was represented here, the use of three paper signs: “Working,” “Need Help,” and “Done.” This routine was introduced to me in one of the Mosaic Fellowship sessions as a way to allow students to engage in group work and request assistance as necessary without the instructor “hovering” over the student groups. Lastly, this student illustrated the instructor (me) directly in the last frame. In addition to the room setup itself, I also work to mindfully position myself over the course of class time. Sometimes I do lecture in the front of the room, and sometimes I step out and act more as a facilitator. I work to model both the “sage on the stage” and the “guide on the side” depending on what the particular situation calls for.
Student drawing 2; Instructor: Jeremy Price
The third illustration is very similar to the second one, in that this student chose to draw examples of the pedagogical structures of the course. The first frame, again, demonstrates a warmup. Whereas the previous student depicted a discussion, this student drew a lecture-type scenario in the second frame. Again, as mentioned above, I made decisions about how to structure these full-class interactions based on what seemed to be necessary given the goals of the particular class time. This student made mention of several of the important concepts that were revisited several times over the course of the semester, such as Universal Design for Learning, scaffolding, and backwards design. In the last frame, this student depicts project group work. In each frame, I, as the professor, am drawn in the front of the room, facing the students and the back of the room.
Student drawing 3; Instructor: Jeremy Price
Lastly, the fourth illustration takes a similar, yet slightly different tact and introduces a new aspect of the course. The first frame depicts the familiar layout of the classroom and the warm-up activity. The second frame demonstrates a class discussion with students engaged in dialogue, responding to each other and the professor prodding the students to discuss the topic more deeply. The student illustrates a new aspect of the course by drawing the screen of a laptop, with some of the online tools we used in class on the screen in separate browser tabs. Canvas is pulled up on the screen with “Reading 7” displayed. Helping students understand the relationships between what we do in class and the readings that I assign outside of class has been a challenge for me. I was heartened to see this connection made here in this drawing, and I am focusing on this challenge in the coming semester.
Student drawing 4; Instructor: Jeremy Price
From these drawings, it can be seen that the arrangement of the room, held in a Mosaic classroom, was indeed a significant feature of a “typical” day in class. The students were also able to demonstrate some of the pedagogical routines and practices that I brought to the class, bringing me hope that they will bring some of these ideas with them as they themselves become teachers. Their drawings provide rich and meaningful feedback for evaluating the class as experienced through the eyes of students in a way that a course evaluation survey could never do. In addition these drawings provide a solid data source for understanding the salient features, pedagogical practices, and core concepts that students are more likely to carry with them beyond this particular class.
The dynamic relationships between classroom, instructor, students, pedagogical practices, curricular activities, and subject matter are all clearly on display in my students’ drawings. The students indicated, however, that as the actual work of collaborative and active learning went into full swing, the features of the room itself faded into the background, and they focused more on the relationships and dialogue between people. In a sense, this is the whole point of an “active learning classroom.” I like to think about the classroom as a medium for teaching, learning and relationship-building. The reason the room exists is to provide a foundation for active teaching and learning to occur, but not to so overly structure it so that the room itself—with its layout, furniture, and technologies—becomes an end in itself. My students, when drawing a “typical” day in class, agreed.
References and Resources
Freeman, M., & Mathison, S. (2008). Researching Children’s Experiences. New York: Guilford.
Haney, W., Russell, M., & Bebell, D. (2004). Drawing on Education: Using Drawings to Document Schooling and Support Change. Harvard Educational Review, 74(3), 241–272.
Mayring, P. (2000). Qualitative Content Analysis. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(2). Retrieved from http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1089
Price, J. F. (2017). Understandings the Meanings Secondary Biology Students Construct Around Science Through Drawings. In P. Katz (Ed.), Drawing for Science Education: An International Perspective (pp. 205–215). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
Price, J. F., & Barber, J. (2014). What Students See: Understanding The Impact Of One-To-One Tablets Through Student Drawings. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Philadelphia.
Price, J. F., & Hewitt, A. M. (2015). What Teaching with Technology Looks Like for Undergraduate Teacher Candidates: Understanding Imagined Practices of Teaching. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago.
Spradley, J. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
-Jeremy Price
What would your students draw if you asked them to? Would it be the classroom experience you were hoping to build for them?And if you teach in an active learning classroom, do you think that would affect which parts of the class your students focus on? Jeremy’s experiences give us many points of reflection for our own teaching.
If you are interested in learning more about our Mosaic classrooms, Mosaic Fellows, or are interested in becoming a Mosaic Fellow, please visit us at https://mosaic.iu.edu. To stay up to date with all things Mosaic, including faculty, staff, student, and classroom perspectives, subscribe to the blog and get it sent directly to your email inbox. You can also follow us on Twitter @MosaicIU and Instagram @Mosaic_IU.
Elaine Monaghan – Professor of Practice, IU Media School
Today we welcome to the Mosaic Blog, Elaine Monaghan, Professor of Practice in Journalism and Public Relations at IUB’s Media School. She is our first of many faculty who will be sharing their experiences teaching in Mosaic and traditional classrooms across Indiana University. Below, Elaine, shares about teaching in one of the IU Media School’s Mosaic classrooms.
I first started teaching at IU’s Media School in spring 2015. Diving straight into a classroom after a 20-year career in journalism and strategic communications was no less intimidating than my first forays into conflict reporting. Think bullets are scary? Try walking into a classroom full of 26 journalism undergrads or 10 pointy-headed grads for the first time, knowing you have to teach them everything you’ve learned in 30 sessions without forgetting to change out of your slippers, save your PowerPoint, or fall off your chair more than once.
Yes. That last one happened. The hazards of moveable furniture. I didn’t yet know, that first semester, that those wheels that made my seat roll away from under me at lightning speed, sending me crashing down on my rear with a red-faced bump, were actually my friend. (Media and the Message Makers students, I owe you one for not laughing.)
Still, I knew what I wanted to teach, and thanks to my great Reuters journalism instructors, journalism colleagues at IU, and maybe the teaching gene in my family – I’m talking about you, Bryony Monaghan — more or less knew how I wanted to teach it. But I didn’t understand why some things worked better than others until I joined IU’s Mosaic Fellowship teaching community and started hanging out with pedagogical nerds I wasn’t related to like @TraceyBirdwell and Kelly Scholl @SchollHouseRock.
It was there that I first heard of active learning. The ink-stained cynic in me scoffed, “What other kind of learning is there?”
Easy to say, and of course, it’s far more complicated than that. I feel I’m just at the beginning of my learning curve, but the active learning I experienced myself in the Mosaic Fellowship put rocket fuel in my engines. During group work with my fellow instructors, feeling the frustrations that I now understand my own students feel, and experiencing that amazing high of knowing you’re learning exponentially more through collaboration, and the sheer fun of figuring out puzzles with people you wouldn’t otherwise work with, I was completely sold on this active learning malarkey.
Soon, I was spitting out acronyms that would have my beloved journalism trainer George Short turning in his grave. ALS this, CoLT that… but George, let me tell you, active learning spaces and collaborative learning techniques are some seriously good magic. And now I realize that that’s the way you taught, too. That’s why I succeeded at Reuters. So, like most days, I have to thank you again, George.
Still, I have to let you in on a secret about the life of a reporter, at least the one I grew up with, and a secret that often helps me when the technology gets the better of me, as it inevitably sometimes does: You can do a lot with a pencil and a notebook, or a whiteboard and an erasable marker.
When I covered the Kosovo conflict, my “office” was a crumbling balcony. The technical wizards who ran the satellite truck mostly parked beneath it scrawled the appropriately outmoded phrase “Elaine’s printing parlour” on a bit of gaffer tape and stuck it on the wall next to the creaky laptop I used to send out my stories, relying on material scrawled in curled-up notebooks in the Elaine Monaghan brand of shorthand legible only to me. I heaved a sigh of relief whenever the stories made it through to London, which they didn’t always the first time. I still have that piece of gaffer tape on a shelf in my office.
Of course, this is not the world you experience in Franklin Hall room 114.
It has an interactive video wall, four smaller collaboration screens, three whiteboards on the walls and a two-sided vertical whiteboard on wheels.
You can touch the video wall and make stuff on it move, like it’s a massive computer screen with endless screens and keyboards you can operate with your fingertips. Anyone inside or outside the room can share content on the wall by navigating to a given address and entering a short code.
In this classroom, not only do the chairs have wheels, but the individual tables do, too – and the tabletops are whiteboards. The tables also flip vertically, allowing students to share their ideas with their groups.
That’s what I call active learning. Students do most of the presenting, which is just as well, because they’re far better at making that video wall work! We share ideas we dig up online almost instantaneously. We use a collaborative learning technique where the students split up into groups and become experts on a given topic, then we shuffle the cards and one from each suit goes into a corner with one from every other suit and they share what they’ve learned. They leave traces of what they learned on the whiteboards around the room, or post it to a discussion board on Canvas for everyone to review later.
Students love it. They have complete control over their own content and always feel engaged in the process. And they have precious little reason to get lost in their laptops or phones because there’s way too much other fun to be had right there in the room.
Despite all the technology, I’ll never stop believing that you can report, learn and teach just as well with a pencil and paper – and I learned plenty skills at the Mosaic Fellowship that make me believe that no less.
But a video wall, moveable furniture and seated student groups that can form and reform in about 90 seconds, definitely hold many more possibilities and help everyone learn – and teach – faster.
And more importantly, I’ve not fallen off a piece of furniture in Franklin Hall 114 yet.
Clearly, I am doing something right.
-Elaine Monaghan
If you are interested in learning more about our Mosaic classrooms, Mosaic Fellows, or are interested in becoming a Mosaic Fellow, please visit us at https://mosaic.iu.edu. To stay up to date with all things Mosaic, including faculty, staff, student, and classroom perspectives, subscribe to the blog and get it sent directly to your email inbox. You can also follow us on Twitter @MosaicIU and Instagram @Mosaic_IU.
I’m excited to share that the call for 2018 – 2019 Mosaic Faculty Fellows is out! We will be accepting applications for the 6th and 7th cohorts of Mosaic Fellows until March 16, 2018.
Like previous cohorts of Mosaic Fellows, the next round of Fellows will:
explore a variety of active and collaborative learning approaches with Faculty peers
identify how to leverage their classroom spaces and affordances to support their own pedagogical approaches
engage the Learning Spaces team in the process of classroom design and redesign on their own campus
read and discuss the latest research on active learning classrooms and active learning.
Mosaic Faculty Fellows Meeting | Cohort 2
By becoming Mosaic Fellows, faculty will join a growing community devoted to rethinking spaces on their home campus. Through engaging the Learning Spaces team and working with Senior Fellows (Mosaic Fellows who have graduated the Mosaic Fellows Program), Mosaic Fellows lead the growing conversation about the intersections of space, technology, and pedagogy across Indiana University.
It has now been over two years since the launch of the Mosaic Initiative. During this time we’ve designed numerous new classrooms, developed faculty support for all IU learning spaces, launched various research projects, published articles, made presentations, and connected with people from all over the world looking to bring active learning spaces to their campuses.
I’m frequently asked to suggest a reading list for those who want to become familiar with the literature on active learning classrooms. I’d like to share a short list of seven foundational readings (in suggested order), along with suggested questions for discussion. These recommended readings would be great for a Faculty Learning Community, for a Learning Spaces Committee, for someone beginning their research, or for anyone wanting to gain a more evidence-based understanding of active learning classrooms:
Brooks, D. C. (2011). Space matters: The impact of formal learning environments on student learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(5), 719-726.
Stoltzfus, J. R., & Libarkin, J. (2016). Does the Room Matter? Active Learning in Traditional and Enhanced Lecture Spaces. Cell Biology Education, 15(4), 1-15.
Parsons, C. S. (2016). Space and Consequences: The Influence of the Roundtable Classroom Design on Student Dialogue. Journal of Learning Spaces, 5(2), 15-25.
Henshaw, R. G., Edwards, P. M., & Bagley, E. J. (2011). Use of Swivel Desks and Aisle Space to Promote Interaction in Mid-sized College Classrooms. Journal of Learning Spaces, 1(1), 1-14.
Petersen, C. I. & Gorman, K. S. (2014). Strategies to Address Common Challenges When Teaching in an Active Learning Classroom. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 137(6), 63-70.
Chen, V. (2015). From Distraction to Contribution: A Preliminary Study on How Peers Outside the Group Can Contribute to Students’ Learning. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 6(3), 1-16.
Baepler, P. & Walker, J.D. (2014). Active Learning Classrooms and Educational Alliances: Changing Relationships to Improve Learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 137(6), 27-40.
My notes about the readings:
The Brooks, Stolzfus, and Petersen articles focus on a clearly-defined category of active learning classroom known as SCALE-UP (in some of the readings they are referred to as ALCs). SCALE-UP classrooms are designed in a specific way: seven-foot diameter tables that seat nine students, with an associated screen and white board for the students at each table (each SCALE-UP room usually seats upwards of 100 total students).SCALE-UP classrooms are consistent in these characteristics and were originally conceived to combine the typically large enrollment physics lecture and its associated laboratory sections into single classroom sessions.
The Henshaw and Parsons articles explore other active learning classroom designs, beyond SCALE-UP. In recent years, active learning classrooms have evolved to include a greater variety of designs and affordances.
The Chen, Petersen, and Beaplar articles focus on how students and instructors interact in active learning classrooms, making their articles especially good to share with instructors who are seeking practical advice about teaching in these spaces.
Questions you might ask yourself or pose to your discussion group:
Brooks makes the case, in 2001, that space matters; however,later articles on active learning classrooms highlight the importance of pedagogy in the context of space. How much does space really matter? Under what circumstance? Does it matter more than pedagogy?
The earliest research on active learning classrooms focus on the SCALE-UP model. How does the broadening of design possibilities (in addition to the SCALE-UP design) for active learning classrooms influence the research questions we can begin to ask about active learning classrooms?
What are some practical suggestions that the Chen, Petersen, and Beaplar articles provide that you might highlight to your faculty for teaching in an active learning classroom?
Now that you’ve seen pictures of and read about various classroom designs, what would your ideal classroom look like?
Please visit mosaic.iu.edu for additional resources and information about our initiative. If you’re interested in possible collaboration opportunities or have any questions, send us an email at mosaic@iu.edu.
We’re excited to debut the Mosaic Initiative blog just two years after the launch of Indiana University’s active learning initiative in October, 2015. Through this blog we want to share our evolving story, including our successes and lessons learned, from the launch of the Mosaic Initiative to the present. We hope that no matter where you are on the journey to design and develop learning spaces and to support the instructors and students who inhabit them, you will find something useful here.
This blog is a platform for the many IU stakeholders — faculty, students, staff, and administrators–to share their contributions to the Mosaic Initiative.
IU Instructors
Our instructors will share examples of how they are teaching in our learning spaces, including their use of specific tools and technologies, example activities and suggestions for classroom management They will discuss their experiences in both encountering and overcoming obstacles (as well as working with obstacles that remain). IU instructors will also explain how they translate lessons learned in our Mosaic classrooms back to traditional learning spaces. And, they will reveal conceptual shifts in thinking about teaching as well as the epiphanies inspired by their engagement with active learning classrooms inspired.
Students
Students will share their experiences learning in active learning classrooms.. Students will talk about how they wish their instructors would leverage both active learning and traditional classrooms. And, students will share from their perspective, what they want instructors to know about teaching in these spaces.
Staff and Administrators
Mosaic Initiative staff, our learning spaces team, and other IU staff and administrators will share their stories about developing our active learning classrooms and support for faculty and students who teach and learn in these spaces.
Researchers
Those involved with research on active learning classrooms at IU, including instructors, staff and students, will share their findings. Broader resources for research on active learning classrooms – including articles, new research questions about learning spaces and tools for research – will also be shared here.
For more information about what the Mosaic Initiative is doing related to events, resources, research, and more; visit mosaic.iu.edu.
