STEPWISE Collaborative Action Research and Outreach
This page provides brief overviews of collaborative action research that is used to learn more about STEPWISE and ‘outreach‘ (seminars & workshops) to share our findings and pedagogical resources.
To continuously improve teaching approaches like STEPWISE, we use collaborative action research (CAR); e.g., with cooperation among many ‘stakeholders.’ In doing so, we typically focus on possible ’cause –> result’ relationships like those here and here. For example, in the video at right/below, a teacher describes his ongoing reflective practice for teaching about actor-network theory, a key concept used in STEPWISE. Some general results of our action research – including for teacher & student outcomes and for our research purposes – are summarized below and here. If you would like to learn more about and/or become involved in our CAR, write to me at: larry.bencze@utoronto.ca.
Reflective Practice for Teaching Actor-Network Theory
CAR has helped us to learn more about effectiveness of the STEPWISE pedagogical framework in several contexts – and appears to have benefited many students and teachers. With reference to the schema at right/below (and the elaboration here), for example, we have explored students’ approaches to representing (and suggesting changes in the world) and their efforts at bringing about significant changes in the world – through, for example, design & development of more ecojust engineering products & services. In doing this work, we have worked with teachers and others to generate numerous teaching & learning resources – and we have published many scholarly and practical reports about our findings.
Although we have provided open-access (e.g., via this website) to many of our teaching & learning resources and we have published our research findings in numerous refereed and non-refereed outlets, we (perhaps including one or more of our team members) also can share STEPWISE-related resources and research findings in seminars and workshops we are invited to conduct (paying only for ‘long-distance’ travel) – like that shown in the video at right/below. Topics, broadly, can address one or more of the STEPWISE outcomes and related pedagogies. If this interests you, write to me at: larry.bencze@utoronto.ca.