title: Repositioning teachers and learners in senior science for 21st century learning

authors: Trask, Suzanne Adele

subjects: assessment

abstract: This thesis explores how the turn towards ‘21st century learning’ might influence senior secondary science education in the context of high stakes summative assessment in Aotearoa New Zealand. Significant in the set of assumptions and ideals associated with 21st century learning is the expectation that learning is more personalised to address and allow for diverse student needs and interests. However, in the reality of classroom life, a question remains as to if and how 21st century ideals might translate into practice.
A social constructionist theoretical orientation directed attention to the way 21st century learning as a discourse constructs certain conditions of possibility for teaching and learning. In turn, these conditions were viewed as shaping different possibilities for teacher and student positions and identities. 
Four macro-level elements of curriculum, assessment, physical spaces, and digital technologies were used to frame an examination of the ways in which the discourse of 21st century learning might play out in senior secondary science. Interpretations of science as a key learning area in the New Zealand curriculum (NZC) and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) as the New Zealand secondary school exit qualification provided the contexts for elements of curriculum and assessment. Research was conducted in schools designed as open, shared, flexible learning spaces (FLS), incorporating wired and wireless technologies. This provided the context for the elements of physical space and digital technologies. 
The research was designed in two phases. In phase one, three case studies were undertaken to ask: What does senior secondary science learning look like in FLS schools when teachers and students are focussed on NCEA assessment? In phase two, three cycles of collaborative action research were undertaken over eight months with one teacher and her year 12 science class to explore: What could senior science learning look like? Qualitative data generated from interview and participant observation in both phases was analysed using thematic analysis to understand what science learning looked like or could look like. Social constructionist ideas of discourse, positioning, and identity were used to theorise and explore the overarching research question of how the discourse of 21st century learning might influence notions of senior secondary science to reposition teachers and learners of science.
Findings show how the multifaceted identities taken up by teachers and students were shaped by the pedagogical possibilities created and available within the dynamic interplay between the four elements. Teachers and students could be seen to be positioned by and to position themselves within discourses of 21st century learning as personalisation and choice, and traditional science schooling, in action and tension. Some aspects of NCEA assessment acted to strengthen the traditional science schooling discourse which foregrounds science as knowledge-based and supports identities of teacher-expert as transmitters of knowledge. Other aspects of NCEA provided openings in line with science as inquiry as advocated in the NZC. Some aspects of FLS environments did not support some teachers’ view of traditionally effective approaches to science teaching and practical work. However, the affordances of digital technologies and the fluidity and social flow of flexible spaces enhanced possibilities for many forms of learning choices. Flexible spaces supported team teaching of larger groups and collaboration of teachers across science disciplines. 
Teachers responded to these openings by scaffolding different types of learning choices for diverse senior students in what, why, where, how, and with whom to learn, at different levels of openness in science inquiry. However, some students did not take up the full scope of the opportunities offered, especially where these were in tension with students’ ideas of how best to be successful in terms of achieving credits in NCEA. Findings reinforce the importance of the teacher’s role in scaffolding student autonomy to make choices and to achieve in student-directed inquiries. Overall, and in spite of the challenges and tensions that teachers and students faced, this research identifies opportunities for broadening the definition of ‘good’ science teacher and learner to include the offering and uptake of a range of learning choices in senior science inquiry as part of high stakes assessment. 
This research contributes insights in the form of situated stories of the struggles and achievements of teachers and students: what was happening and what did happen as they were positioned and as they acted to reposition themselves to take on different science teacher and learner identities in contexts of high stakes NCEA assessment in 21st century FLS environments. A range of implications for learning space design, curriculum and assessment policy, and directions for further research into science inquiry and digital pedagogies are outlined.

text: Repositioning teachers and learners in senior science for 21st century learning This thesis explores how the turn towards ‘21st century learning’ might influence senior secondary science education in the context of high stakes summative assessment in Aotearoa New Zealand. Significant in the set of assumptions and ideals associated with 21st century learning is the expectation that learning is more personalised to address and allow for diverse student needs and interests. However, in the reality of classroom life, a question remains as to if and how 21st century ideals might translate into practice.
A social constructionist theoretical orientation directed attention to the way 21st century learning as a discourse constructs certain conditions of possibility for teaching and learning. In turn, these conditions were viewed as shaping different possibilities for teacher and student positions and identities. 
Four macro-level elements of curriculum, assessment, physical spaces, and digital technologies were used to frame an examination of the ways in which the discourse of 21st century learning might play out in senior secondary science. Interpretations of science as a key learning area in the New Zealand curriculum (NZC) and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) as the New Zealand secondary school exit qualification provided the contexts for elements of curriculum and assessment. Research was conducted in schools designed as open, shared, flexible learning spaces (FLS), incorporating wired and wireless technologies. This provided the context for the elements of physical space and digital technologies. 
The research was designed in two phases. In phase one, three case studies were undertaken to ask: What does senior secondary science learning look like in FLS schools when teachers and students are focussed on NCEA assessment? In phase two, three cycles of collaborative action research were undertaken over eight months with one teacher and her year 12 science class to explore: What could senior science learning look like? Qualitative data generated from interview and participant observation in both phases was analysed using thematic analysis to understand what science learning looked like or could look like. Social constructionist ideas of discourse, positioning, and identity were used to theorise and explore the overarching research question of how the discourse of 21st century learning might influence notions of senior secondary science to reposition teachers and learners of science.
Findings show how the multifaceted identities taken up by teachers and students were shaped by the pedagogical possibilities created and available within the dynamic interplay between the four elements. Teachers and students could be seen to be positioned by and to position themselves within discourses of 21st century learning as personalisation and choice, and traditional science schooling, in action and tension. Some aspects of NCEA assessment acted to strengthen the traditional science schooling discourse which foregrounds science as knowledge-based and supports identities of teacher-expert as transmitters of knowledge. Other aspects of NCEA provided openings in line with science as inquiry as advocated in the NZC. Some aspects of FLS environments did not support some teachers’ view of traditionally effective approaches to science teaching and practical work. However, the affordances of digital technologies and the fluidity and social flow of flexible spaces enhanced possibilities for many forms of learning choices. Flexible spaces supported team teaching of larger groups and collaboration of teachers across science disciplines. 
Teachers responded to these openings by scaffolding different types of learning choices for diverse senior students in what, why, where, how, and with whom to learn, at different levels of openness in science inquiry. However, some students did not take up the full scope of the opportunities offered, especially where these were in tension with students’ ideas of how best to be successful in terms of achieving credits in NCEA. Findings reinforce the importance of the teacher’s role in scaffolding student autonomy to make choices and to achieve in student-directed inquiries. Overall, and in spite of the challenges and tensions that teachers and students faced, this research identifies opportunities for broadening the definition of ‘good’ science teacher and learner to include the offering and uptake of a range of learning choices in senior science inquiry as part of high stakes assessment. 
This research contributes insights in the form of situated stories of the struggles and achievements of teachers and students: what was happening and what did happen as they were positioned and as they acted to reposition themselves to take on different science teacher and learner identities in contexts of high stakes NCEA assessment in 21st century FLS environments. A range of implications for learning space design, curriculum and assessment policy, and directions for further research into science inquiry and digital pedagogies are outlined.

year: 2019

title: Deep learning in diabetic foot ulcers detection: A comprehensive evaluation

authors: Yap, Moi Hoon

subjects: computer science

abstract: There has been a substantial amount of research involving computer methods and technology for the detection and recognition of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), but there is a lack of systematic comparisons of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection frameworks applied to this problem. DFUC2020 provided participants with a comprehensive dataset consisting of 2,000 images for training and 2,000 images for testing. This paper summarizes the results of DFUC2020 by comparing the deep learning-based algorithms proposed by the winning teams: Faster R–CNN, three variants of Faster R–CNN and an ensemble method; YOLOv3; YOLOv5; EfficientDet; and a new Cascade Attention Network. For each deep learning method, we provide a detailed description of model architecture, parameter settings for training and additional stages including pre-processing, data augmentation and post-processing. We provide a comprehensive evaluation for each method. All the methods required a data augmentation stage to increase the number of images available for training and a post-processing stage to remove false positives. The best performance was obtained from Deformable Convolution, a variant of Faster R–CNN, with a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.6940 and an F1-Score of 0.7434. Finally, we demonstrate that the ensemble method based on different deep learning methods can enhance the F1-Score but not the mAP.

text: Deep learning in diabetic foot ulcers detection: A comprehensive evaluation There has been a substantial amount of research involving computer methods and technology for the detection and recognition of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), but there is a lack of systematic comparisons of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection frameworks applied to this problem. DFUC2020 provided participants with a comprehensive dataset consisting of 2,000 images for training and 2,000 images for testing. This paper summarizes the results of DFUC2020 by comparing the deep learning-based algorithms proposed by the winning teams: Faster R–CNN, three variants of Faster R–CNN and an ensemble method; YOLOv3; YOLOv5; EfficientDet; and a new Cascade Attention Network. For each deep learning method, we provide a detailed description of model architecture, parameter settings for training and additional stages including pre-processing, data augmentation and post-processing. We provide a comprehensive evaluation for each method. All the methods required a data augmentation stage to increase the number of images available for training and a post-processing stage to remove false positives. The best performance was obtained from Deformable Convolution, a variant of Faster R–CNN, with a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.6940 and an F1-Score of 0.7434. Finally, we demonstrate that the ensemble method based on different deep learning methods can enhance the F1-Score but not the mAP.

year: 2021

title: Poetic lives: Verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand

authors: Anderson-O'Connor, Aimee-Jane

subjects: Verse

abstract: Bringing together a selection of Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographies, and drawing on perspectives deriving from decolonizing methodologies, and from historical and feminist revision and reclamation, as well as my own experience as a creative practitioner, this thesis explores verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand, with special reference to common thematic and personal preoccupations, and the settings in which these play out.  I am led in this research by a few key questions. What techniques are available to the verse biographer, and what opportunities for innovation and intervention do these techniques afford? What limitations remain? What key settings shape and are shaped by the lives of those who live here? What can we learn by exploring the relationship between the individual life story and the cultural stories which take shape in what Philip Fisher has called the ‘privileged settings’ of any national literature? I focus in particular on a selection of longer verse biographies: Allen Curnow’s ‘An Abominable Temper’ (1973), Ian Wedde’s ‘A Ballad for Worser Heberley’ (1993), Robert Sullivan’s Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002), Airini Beautrais’s Dear Neil Roberts (2014), Chris Tse’s How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014), Gregory Kan’s This Paper Boat (2016), Karen Zelas’s The Trials of Minnie Dean: A Verse Biography (2017), and Nina Powles’s collection of chapbooks collectively titled Luminescent (2017). I have chosen longer works because of the scope they offer to trace the broader sense of the life story and pick up on imagery and voices which repeat and echo within the texts. I am also interested in the way that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers often extend their subject’s life story beyond the barrier of death and imagine their subjects’ afterlives in sensory poetic terms. While this selection is diverse, and showcases a wide range of subject matter, poetic approach and voices, each of these verse biographies dramatizes the subject position of the poet, and partakes in a poetics of intersectional revision and reclamation. 
 My exegesis identifies and explores the fundamental role of setting in the canon and analyses the energizing concerns that verse biographers unpack in these settings. I am interested in the ways that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers maintain attention to key local settings throughout their works, and critically engage with the cultural stories which persist in and around them. I am especially interested in the way these poetic explorations afford space for decolonial and feminist approaches. Four major settings appear often. The beach is a space of encounter in which ongoing processes of colonisation and crossing unfold. The home is marked by instability and hidden harm, in which domestic disorder is unearthed. The police station is exposed as a space of class and gender power imbalance which informs law making and enforcement. The beyond constitutes a liminal space of exchange and unrest, as the poets grapple with cultural exchange and complexities of life and death.
The final portion of my thesis takes the form of a creative practice component. It consists of a verse biography titled Keepsake, centred on the lives of my paternal grandparents, Kevin Buxton O’Connor and Mary Helen O’Connor (née Fryer). It engages explicitly with the issues raised in the analytical component of my thesis. Keepsake is a collection shaped indelibly by the sudden death of my grandmother midway through my thesis, and my experience of weathering the seasons of grief with my grandfather, and our shared attempts to find the words to hold tight to her life. Like many of the other verse biographies in Aotearoa New Zealand, it operates as a poetic and historiographic record of my research process and the time in which the thesis was written. It has allowed me to deepen my understanding of the ways in which verse biography allows for a simultaneous autobiographical exploration, examining the role of the verse biographer as researcher and intermediary between the past and the present. The process has especially strengthened my appreciation for verse biography as a form which takes us into the beyond and affords a space where we might speak to the dead and hold space for an answer, where we might make a home of language, ripe for haunting.

text: Poetic lives: Verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand Bringing together a selection of Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographies, and drawing on perspectives deriving from decolonizing methodologies, and from historical and feminist revision and reclamation, as well as my own experience as a creative practitioner, this thesis explores verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand, with special reference to common thematic and personal preoccupations, and the settings in which these play out.  I am led in this research by a few key questions. What techniques are available to the verse biographer, and what opportunities for innovation and intervention do these techniques afford? What limitations remain? What key settings shape and are shaped by the lives of those who live here? What can we learn by exploring the relationship between the individual life story and the cultural stories which take shape in what Philip Fisher has called the ‘privileged settings’ of any national literature? I focus in particular on a selection of longer verse biographies: Allen Curnow’s ‘An Abominable Temper’ (1973), Ian Wedde’s ‘A Ballad for Worser Heberley’ (1993), Robert Sullivan’s Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002), Airini Beautrais’s Dear Neil Roberts (2014), Chris Tse’s How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014), Gregory Kan’s This Paper Boat (2016), Karen Zelas’s The Trials of Minnie Dean: A Verse Biography (2017), and Nina Powles’s collection of chapbooks collectively titled Luminescent (2017). I have chosen longer works because of the scope they offer to trace the broader sense of the life story and pick up on imagery and voices which repeat and echo within the texts. I am also interested in the way that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers often extend their subject’s life story beyond the barrier of death and imagine their subjects’ afterlives in sensory poetic terms. While this selection is diverse, and showcases a wide range of subject matter, poetic approach and voices, each of these verse biographies dramatizes the subject position of the poet, and partakes in a poetics of intersectional revision and reclamation. 
 My exegesis identifies and explores the fundamental role of setting in the canon and analyses the energizing concerns that verse biographers unpack in these settings. I am interested in the ways that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers maintain attention to key local settings throughout their works, and critically engage with the cultural stories which persist in and around them. I am especially interested in the way these poetic explorations afford space for decolonial and feminist approaches. Four major settings appear often. The beach is a space of encounter in which ongoing processes of colonisation and crossing unfold. The home is marked by instability and hidden harm, in which domestic disorder is unearthed. The police station is exposed as a space of class and gender power imbalance which informs law making and enforcement. The beyond constitutes a liminal space of exchange and unrest, as the poets grapple with cultural exchange and complexities of life and death.
The final portion of my thesis takes the form of a creative practice component. It consists of a verse biography titled Keepsake, centred on the lives of my paternal grandparents, Kevin Buxton O’Connor and Mary Helen O’Connor (née Fryer). It engages explicitly with the issues raised in the analytical component of my thesis. Keepsake is a collection shaped indelibly by the sudden death of my grandmother midway through my thesis, and my experience of weathering the seasons of grief with my grandfather, and our shared attempts to find the words to hold tight to her life. Like many of the other verse biographies in Aotearoa New Zealand, it operates as a poetic and historiographic record of my research process and the time in which the thesis was written. It has allowed me to deepen my understanding of the ways in which verse biography allows for a simultaneous autobiographical exploration, examining the role of the verse biographer as researcher and intermediary between the past and the present. The process has especially strengthened my appreciation for verse biography as a form which takes us into the beyond and affords a space where we might speak to the dead and hold space for an answer, where we might make a home of language, ripe for haunting.

year: 2022