Marianne Grace Araneta

Breve presentazione personale e professionale e interessi di ricerca: I am currently pursuing my PhD in Pedagogical, Educational and Instructional Sciences: Research on Inclusion, Well-being and Sustainability in Education at the University of Padova. My research is focused on virtual exchanges and their potential for transformative sustainability learning. I also work as a learning designer at the Office of Digital Learning and Multimedia, where I develop Massive Open Online Courses for the university. So my work and research is centred mainly on technology-enabled forms of learning. Prior to my research, I was a secondary school teacher for nearly ten years. 

Abstract progetto di dottorato:

In the age of “education for the end of the world as we know it (Stein et al, 2022 p. 275)” there is an urgent call to shift to more sustainable ways of living, and education is seen to be at the frontlines of this call. This transformation also applies to emerging modes of education such as those supported by Web 2.0 technologies, one of which is Virtual Exchange (VE). By leveraging technology to connect learners representing diverse cultural and geographical contexts, it gives importance to the engagement of multiple epistemologies to enrich the learning process (Helm & Van Der Velden, 2020). Using a qualitative methodology grounded on Critical Realism (CR), the research will explore how VEs can engender transformation towards sustainability through the Transformative Sustainability Learning (TSL) framework. 

Education that promotes TSL should engage learners’ cognitive (head), psychomotor (hands), and emotional domains (Sipos et al., 2008) and impact their practical, political, and personal spheres (O’Brien, 2018). TSL is not a teaching strategy but a “metacognitive epistemology” (Wolff & Ehrstrom, 2020, p. 7) that sees education as a means to empower learners to question and change problematic frames of reference through “interactive, integrative, and critical forms of learning” (Rieckmann, 2018, p. 48) that become the groundwork for transformative paradigmatic change. However, transformations are disorienting and sometimes threatening, so the role of educators is to create “safe enough spaces” (Singer-Brodowski et al., 2022, p. 2) where students can probe difficult issues, engage in critical conversations, and question others and themselves. Only at the convergence of different—even conflicting meaning perspectives can paradigmatic tensions emerge and be subject to the critical reflexivity and discourse that engender radical transformation (Scoones et al., 2020; Finnegan, 2022; Singer-Brodowski, 2023).

One potential example of such a transformative space is VE, a term that refers to the “engagement of groups of learners in online intercultural interactions and collaboration projects with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of their educational programme” (O’Dowd, 2018, p. 1). VEs have been shown to positively impact learning (O'Dowd, 2018; Helm & Van der Velden, 2020) and could also be a solution to the environmental cost of international mobility. While VEs have already been explored through the lens of transformative learning and sustainability, they remain unexplored as a TSL approach. 

This research attempts to fill that gap, looking into not only what students learn about sustainability, but also how  they do so via VE and whether it is learning of a transformative kind. It will investigate how transformative VE is by asking “through the lens of Critical Realism, how does virtual exchange foster transformative sustainability learning in higher education?” To answer this question, it will explore the following sub-questions: (1) How does the VE activate the learning conditions—cognitive, affective, psychomotor—necessary for transformative sustainability learning? (2) How does VE enhance and/or undermine students’ pedagogical experience? (3) Which elements in the VE either support or hinder transformative social change? In addition, this study will contribute to CR (Bhaskar, 2008) research by demonstrating the concept in use, utilizing a qualitative methodology (Fletcher, 2017; Fryer, 2022) coherent with the metatheory’s ontological foundations. 

References

Bhaskar, R. (2008). Dialectic: The pulse of freedom. Routledge.

Finnegan, F. (2022). The Pulse of Freedom and Transformative Learning: Winding Paths, Blind Alleys, and New Horizons. In A. Nicolaides, S. Eschenbacher, P. T. Buergelt, Y. Gilpin-Jackson, M. Welch, & M. Misawa (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Learning for Transformation (pp. 59–74). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84694-7_4

Fletcher, A. J. (2017). Applying critical realism in qualitative research: methodology meets method. International journal of social research methodology, 20(2), 181-194.

Fryer, T. (2022). A critical realist approach to thematic analysis: producing causal explanations. Journal of Critical Realism, 21(4), 365-384.

Helm, F., & van der Velden, B. (2020). Erasmus+ virtual exchange impact report 2019. Publications Office of the EU. doi, 10, 513584.

Lotz-Sisitka, H., Wals, A. E., Kronlid, D., & McGarry, D. (2015). Transformative, transgressive social learning: Rethinking higher education pedagogy in times of systemic global dysfunction. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 16, 73-80.

O’Brien, K. (2018). Is the 1.5 C target possible? Exploring the three spheres of transformation. Current opinion in environmental sustainability, 31, 153-160.

O'Dowd, R. (2018). From telecollaboration to virtual exchange: State-of-the-art and the role of UNICollaboration in moving forward. Research-publishing. net, 1, 1-23.

Rieckmann, M. (2018). Learning to transform the world: Key competencies in Education for Sustainable Development. Issues and trends in education for sustainable development, 39, 39-59.

Scoones, I., Stirling, A., Abrol, D., Atela, J., Charli-Joseph, L., Eakin, H., Ely, A., Olsson, P., Pereira, L., Priya, R., Van Zwanenberg, P., & Yang, L. (2020). Transformations to sustainability: Combining structural, systemic and enabling approaches. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 42, 65–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.12.004

Singer-Brodowski, M. (2023). The potential of transformative learning for sustainability transitions: Moving beyond formal learning environments. Environment, Development and Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02444-x

Sipos, Y., Battisti, B., & Grimm, K. (2008). Achieving transformative sustainability learning: engaging head, hands and heart. International journal of sustainability in higher education, 9(1), 68-86.

Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Suša, R., Ahenakew, C., & Čajková, T. (2022). From “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54(3), 274-287.

Wolff, L. A., & Ehrström, P. (2020). Social sustainability and transformation in higher educational settings: a utopia or possibility?. Sustainability, 12(10), 4176.

Supervisore: Professor Monica Fedeli

Partecipazioni in qualità di relatore o co-relatore a convegni/seminari nazionali e internazionali extra offerta formativa:

Pubblicazioni:

Millour, A., Araneta, M. G., Konjik, I. L., Raffone, A., Pilatte, Y. A., & Fort, K. (2019, May). Katana and Grand Guru: a Game of the Lost Words. In 9th Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics (LTC'19).

Araneta, M. G., Eryiğit, G., König, A., Lee, J. U., Luís, A., Lyding, V., ... & Sangati, F. (2020, November). Substituto–a synchronous educational language game for simultaneous teaching and crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning (pp. 1-9).