Stephen Ritchie

Transnational education (TNE) has grown significantly in developing countries but providing quality and scaling to large student numbers is a challenge for universities. Blended learning offers a potential solution for scaling at high quality. A large-scale project delivering a blended learning programme for TNE students in South-East Asia was evaluated. The aim of this research was to assess the students’ perceptions of the changes from predominantly face-to-face to blended mode. A student voice survey based on self-determination theory was administered to participating students (n = 1718) to assess their needs, satisfaction and frustration levels. All students found the online resources useful. Students who had experienced the previous delivery of education experienced higher levels of frustration. Conversely, students commencing after the changes had been implemented reported higher levels of satisfaction and lower frustration. Furthermore, mature-age students who attended evening classes perceived the blended approach more positively.

Objectives: To determine if lopinavir/ritonavir +/- hydroxychloroquine will reduce the proportion of participants who survive without requiring ventilatory support, 15 days after enrolment, in adult participants with non-critically ill SARS-CoV-2 infection. Trial design: ASCOT is an investigator-initiated, multi-centre, open-label, randomised controlled trial. Participants will have been hospitalised with confirmed COVID-19, and will be randomised 1:1:1:1 to receive lopinavir /ritonavir, hydroxychloroquine, both or neither drug in addition to standard of care management. Participants: Participants will be recruited from >80 hospitals across Australia and New Zealand, representing metropolitan and regional centres in both public and private sectors. Admitted patients will be eligible if aged ≥ 18 years, have confirmed SARS-CoV-2 by nucleic acid testing in the past 12 days and are expected to remain an inpatient for at least 48 hours from the time of randomisation. Potentially eligible participants will be excluded if admitted to intensive care or requiring high level respiratory support, are currently receiving study drugs or their use is contraindicated due to allergy, drug interaction or comorbidities (including baseline QTc prolongation of 470ms for women or 480ms for men), or death is anticipated imminently.

The aim of the study was to explore the types and sources of positive emotions experienced by first year university students studying to become primary school teachers, during collaborative science learning. Fun science activities, designed to enhance students’ motivation for science, provided the context for examining the relationship between group members’ shared positive emotions and their engagement in collaborative learning of scientific concepts. Data for this study were: self-reports of emotions in several activities (class) and video footage of groups’ interactions with follow-up interviews (selected groups). The identification of distinct types and sources of emotions supported Fredrickson’s (1998, “What Good are Positive Emotions?” Review of General Psychology 2 (3): 300–319) case for distinguishing between joy-related and interest-related positive emotions. Students’ emotional experiences and degree of subsequent engagement in collaborative learning of scientific concepts appeared to be influenced by the characteristics of the groups and of the activities (e.g. if competitive). The critical importance of harnessing joy-related emotions and promoting interest-related emotions in collaborative science learning is highlighted.

For far too long, the study of learning in school classrooms was undertaken as if this could be achieved independently of learner emotions and contexts. A research focus on the role of learner emotions in school contexts was overdue. More importantly, the confluence of cognition and emotion, as observed in events that punctuated classroom structures dramatically, necessitated theorization of events. Applying what philosophers, sociologists and historians have learned about major historical events, my colleagues and I began a program of research to investigate classroom events as the unit for analysis. Emotional energy of the classrooms and discrete emotions of individuals were outcomes of salient learning events studied. We learned that eventful learning occurs dramatically for all to see, and un-dramatically over time and in ways less visible to other classroom participants. Eventful learning then involves both cognition and emotion and, as the cases reported in this book show, in classroom activities designed to engage learners emotionally.

A rich array of social and cultural theories constitutes a solid foundation that affords unique insights into teaching and learning science and learning to teach science. The approach moves beyond studies in which emotion, cognition, and context are often regarded as independent. Collaborative studies advance theory and resolve practical problems, such as enhancing learning by managing excess emotions and successfully regulating negative emotions. Multilevel studies address a range of timely issues, including emotional energy, discrete emotions, emotion regulation, and a host of issues that arose, such as managing negative emotions like frustration and anxiety, dealing with disruptive students, and regulating negative emotions such as frustration, embarrassment, disgust, shame, and anger. A significant outcome is that teachers can play an important role in supporting students to successfully regulate negative emotions and support learning. The book contains a wealth of cutting edge methodologies and methods that will be useful to researchers and the issues addressed are central to teaching and learning in a global context. A unifying methodology is the use of classroom events as the unit for analysis in research that connects to the interests of teacher educators, teachers, and researchers who can adapt what we have done and learned, and apply it in their local contexts. Event-oriented inquiry highlights the transformative potential of research and provides catchy narratives and contextually rich events that have salience to the everyday practices of teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. Methods used in the research include emotion diaries in which students keep a log of their emotions, clickers to measure in-the-moment emotional climate, and uses of cogenerative dialogue, which caters to diverse voices of students and teachers.

Learning science can be an emotional experience. Recent research reveals that middle-years students experience negative emotions such as frustration and anxiety while learning science. Strategies to help students manage their emotions in science classes are emerging, but require further investigations to ascertain their effectiveness. In this study, an intervention, which adopted short deep breathing exercises to help students manage their emotions was trialled in a Year 10 science class. The aim of the study was to determine students’ emotional responses as well as the practicalities for implementing such an intervention. We conducted research using an ethnographic case study method where the teacher implemented short episodes of deep breathing exercises with students during each science lesson for seven weeks. Salient themes emerged from the analysis of video and audio files, field notes, students’ emotion diaries, 19 individual student interviews, and two teacher interviews. We present one main finding in this chapter; that is, students who experienced the negative emotions of frustration/anxiety reported that the breathing exercises changed their emotions. On the basis of this finding we suggest that teachers could use deep breathing exercises to help students experiencing negative emotions in class to ameliorate their emotions.

Learning science in the middle years can be an emotional experience. In this study, we explored ninth-grade students' discrete emotions expressed during science activities in a 9-week unit on chemistry. Individual student's emotions were analyzed through multiple data sources including classroom videos, interviews, and emotions diaries completed at the end of each lesson. Results from three representative students are presented as cases within a case study. Using a theoretical perspective drawn from theories of emotions founded in sociology, three assertions emerged. First, students experienced frustration when learning new chemistry concepts. Second, frustration was resolved through student-student and teacher-student interactions. Third, frustration was transformed when students were afforded time to revisit new concepts. Furthermore, the teacher's identification of students' emotions enabled differentiation of learning through individualized interactions. Finally, we explain how the temporality of emotions emerged as an important phenomenon and suggest an elaboration to Turner's theorization of emotions.

We investigated the expression of emotions while teaching in relation to a teacher’s physiological changes. We used polyvagal theory (PVT) to frame the study of teaching in a teacher education program. Donna, a teacher-researcher, experienced high levels of stress and anxiety prior to beginning to teach and throughout the lesson we used her expressed emotions as a focus for this research. We adopted event-oriented inquiry in a study of heart rate, oxygenation of the blood, and expressed emotions. Five events were identified for multilevel analysis in which we used narrative, prosodic analysis, and hermeneutic-phenomenological methods to learn more about the expression of emotions when Donna had: high heart rate (before and while teaching); low blood oxygenation (before and while teaching); and high blood oxygenation (while teaching). What we learned was consistent with the body’s monitoring system recognizing social harm and switching to the control of the unmyelinated vagus nerve, thereby shutting down organs and muscles associated with social communication – leading to irregularities in prosody and expression of emotion. In events involving high heart rate and low blood oxygenation the physiological environment was associated with less effective and sometimes confusing patterns in prosody, including intonation, pace of speaking, and pausing. In a low blood oxygenation environment there was evidence of rapid speech and shallow, irregular breathing. In contrast, during an event in which 100% blood oxygenation occurred, prosody was perceived to be conducive to engagement and the teacher expressed positive emotions, such as satisfaction, while teaching. Becoming aware of the purposes of the research and the results we obtained provided the teacher with tools to enact changes to her teaching practice, especially prosody of the voice. We regard it as a high priority to create tools to allow teachers and students, if and as necessary, to ameliorate excess emotions, and change heart rate, oxygenation levels, and breathing patterns.

This study explored pre-service secondary science teachers’ perceptions of classroom emotional climate in the context of the Bhutanese macro-social policy of Gross National Happiness. Drawing upon sociological perspectives of human emotions and using Interaction Ritual Theory this study investigated how pre-service science teachers may be supported in their professional development. It was a multi-method study involving video and audio recordings of teaching episodes supported by interviews and the researcher’s diary. Students also registered their perceptions of the emotional climate of their classroom at 3-minute intervals using audience response technology. In this way, emotional events were identified for video analysis. The findings of this study highlighted that the activities pre-service teachers engaged in matter to them. Positive emotional climate was identified in activities involving students’ presentations using video clips and models, coteaching, and interactive whole class discussions. Decreases in emotional climate were identified during formal lectures and when unprepared presenters led presentations. Emotions such as frustration and disappointment characterized classes with negative emotional climate. The enabling conditions to sustain a positive emotional climate are identified. Implications for sustaining macro-social policy about Gross National Happiness are considered in light of the climate that develops in science teacher education classes.

The enactment of learning to become a science teacher in online mode is an emotionally charged experience. We attend to the formation, maintenance and disruption of social bonds experienced by online preservice science teachers as they shared their emotional online learning experiences through blogs, or e-motion diaries, in reaction to videos of face-to-face lessons. A multi-theoretic framework drawing on microsociological perspectives of emotion informed our hermeneutic interpretations of students’ first-person accounts reported through an e-motion diary. These accounts were analyzed through our own database of emotion labels constructed from the synthesis of existing literature on emotion across a range of fields of inquiry. Preservice science teachers felt included in the face-to-face group as they watched videos of classroom transactions. The strength of these feelings of social solidarity were dependent on the quality of the video recording. E-motion diaries provided a resource for interactions focused on shared emotional experiences leading to formation of social bonds and the alleviation of feelings of fear, trepidation and anxiety about becoming science teachers. We offer implications to inform practitioners who wish to improve feelings of inclusion amongst their online learners in science education.