Digital Resources: The Humanizing Deportation Archive

Humanizing Deportation is a community archive of digital stories (testimonial video shorts) that recounts personal experiences related to deportation and deportability. The largest qualitative archive in the world on this topic, its bilingual (English/Spanish) open access website, as of March 2020, holds close to 300 digital stories by nearly 250 different community storytellers and continues to expand. All digital stories are created and directed by the community storytellers themselves. While the vast majority of the stories were created by Mexican migrants currently living in Mexico’s largest border cities (Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez), and other major urban metropolitan regions (Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey), it also includes some stories of migrants living in the United States, as well as other migrants, many in transit, passing through Mexico from such countries as Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, and as far from North America as Cameroon. Launched in 2017, Humanizing Deportation’s teams of academic facilitators remain active, and the archive continues to grow.

Exploring within the ‘black-box’ of leadership to make sense of the performative dynamics of conversation

This study emerges from a co-constructed autoethnography by a practitioner and two academic facilitators studying the leadership-as-practice processes within a small-to-medium sized private wealth business. The study set out to explore the performative dynamics of conversation constituted in, and emerging from, socially engaged talk through leadership in the flow of practice, referred to as ‘in-flow-ence’. The study proposes a dynamic metaphor theory that builds on in-flow-ence to capture the complexities of conversation and offer thoughts about ways to reconstitute leadership practice to bring about changes in trajectories of social action.

Evaluation of a compulsory reflective group for medical students

ABSTRACT INTRODUCTIONThe ability to reflect – reflection – taking time to stop, think and evaluate is an important professional skill to develop. AIMTo evaluate a compulsory reflective group activity to determine whether compulsory participation enabled students to constructively share emotional clinical experiences and develop ethical and professional behaviour. METHODSThis was a case study with mixed methodology. Participants were Years 5 and 6 medical students at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Data collection included pre- and post-reflective group questionnaires with Year 5 and 6 students, questionnaires with general practice academic facilitators, and audiotapes of the reflection group discussions. RESULTSStudents shared emotional experiences that were organised into three themes: (i) witnessing unprofessional behaviour; (ii) meeting difficult clinical scenarios for the first time; and (iii) the hierarchy of medicine. They reported positive learning experiences relevant to their future practice and valued the opportunity to share their experiences safely. Facilitators thought the groups provided unique educational opportunities that students appreciated. Eighty-two percent of participants would like to repeat the activity during their medical school training. CONCLUSIONSelf-reflection is an essential condition for professionalism. Use of reflective groups can help students become ethical and professional doctors.

Networked e-Learning: The changing facilitator – learner relationship, a facilitators’ perspective; A Phenomenological Investigation

This phenomenological case study investigates the lived experiences of a group of virtual learning environment (VLE) postgraduate academic facilitators at Irish Universities where they have indicated that the nature of their relationship with learners is shifting. It aims for a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the changing facilitator – learner relationship in a Networked e-Learning environment (an asynchronous VLE with discussion forums, virtual labs and collaborative assignments). The author’s role as a highly experienced facilitator provides particular and specific insight into the guiding facilitator’s experiences during a time of institutional transition to Networked e-Learning. A theoretical framework based on Beaty and Howard (2010) is used to explore the networked relationship, i.e. their core set of boundary characteristics, central to the way networked learning is conceptualised and experienced which are the characteristic of expertise, the boundaries of the facilitator-learner relationship, communication and content and the professional development of Networked e-learning facilitators. Conclusions are presented as four themes describing how participants perceived the impact of Networked e-Learning on the changing facilitator – learner relationship. These themes highlight the differences between the current interpretative phenomenological analysis and the initial framework of Beaty and Howard (2010): (1) Expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality depending on activity, participant roles and technological context; (2) Boundaries traditionally placed around facilitators and learners are shifting; (3) Communication like content is considered highly important for both facilitators and learners; (4) Professional development for facilitators must be re-conceptualised. Recommendations include the requirement to initiate revised forms of professional development for Networked e-Learning facilitators. Limitations included the relatively low number of participants.

Tensions in communication— Teachers and academic facilitators in a critical friendship

This paper concerns the complex relationships between external facilitators and teachers in action research, as they work in a critical friendship to develop interaction in specific ways that open up rather than shut down communication and learning. The aim is to contribute with knowledge about interpersonal communication between academic facilitators and teachers in a development process where the teachers had a lack of influence in the initial phase of the project. The findings reveal that communication in a context of incompatible positions and professional distance did not lead to further communication, whereas communication in a context of confidence, mutual reliance, and challenge opened up possibilities for further dialogue. We identified three aspects affecting communication: absence of ownership of specific problems, trust without relationship, and courage before trust. Implication for the action research community is the importance of making strategies for critical friendship explicit. This assists for teachers to internalize the role.

Take care of well-being: how facilitators and engagement predict performance of university students

<p>The interest in developing a high quality educational system requires constant research of the variables involved in the teaching-learning process. Among these variables, social and academic facilitators are important because there is empirical evidence about their positive relationship with engagement, commitment, self-efficacy, happiness and satisfaction in the academic context. Moreover, the psychological well-being of university students (i.e., engagement) showed to positively affect future academic success. In line, the aim of this study is twofold. First, the relevance of social and university academic facilitators was analyzed depending on the faculty of belonging. Second, the effect of social (e.g., Good relationship with classmates) and academic facilitators (e.g., Updated website with new information and easily accessible) as well as academic engagement on academic performance (i.e., GPA) was tested. The sample consisted of 965 University students. The ANOVAs’ results showed the existence of statistically significant differences in social and university academic facilitators among the different faculties. Regression analyses demonstrated that social (but not university’s) facilitators and academic engagement were positively related to academic performance. Additionally, the interaction between social facilitators and academic engagement was positively related to academic performance. The effect was also significant when controlling for gender and faculty. The identification of different facilitators allows to develop different activities depending on the faculty, as well as leading to the optimization of teaching-learning process. Moreover, academic facilitators do not affect academic performance. From a practical view, it means that specific interventions can be implemented during the course so that students’ social facilitators and engagement increase.</p>