Video and the pedagogy of expansive learning : Insights from a research-intervention in engineering education

Moffitt, Philip and Bligh, Brett (2021) Video and the pedagogy of expansive learning : Insights from a research-intervention in engineering education. In: Video Pedagogy : Theory and Practice. Springer, Cham, pp. 123-145. ISBN 9789813340084

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Abstract

Video is used in pedagogy in diverse ways and celebrated in scholarship for its sensuous and multimodal potential. Yet its use rarely challenges established pedagogical goals, and dominant research narratives seek to analytically isolate video or document its application in bounded tasks. In this chapter, by contrast, we scrutinise the use of video across a wider pedagogical process—an expansive learning process in which participants strive to overcome existing practices and construct culturally novel knowledge. We analyse data from a Change Laboratory project in an undergraduate engineering setting. A joint team of learners, lecturers and institutional managers collaborated in a series of task-based workshops to develop new ways for learners to collaborate with external engineers, in ways previously obstructed by institutional technologies and policies. Video played a range of roles, especially when participants described problems, negotiated procedures and imagined future ways of working. Importantly, video use oscillated as participants’ goals shifted and developed, and the chapter is thus structured to examine video use longitudinally throughout the pedagogical process. The narrative also reflects on how participants’ use of video diverged, sometimes substantially, from our prior design expectations. We conclude by highlighting the importance of conceptualising video as part of a wider constellation of mediating artefacts, whose alignment is consequential; recognising the validity of learners’ goals where they regulate unanticipated uses of video; and understanding how people build relationships with video artefacts cumulatively, through sequences of interaction and meaning-making.