September marked the beginning of the field research concretization diligences. The recruitment of five educators for a longitudinal participation in this work is intended: three from public schools of the municipality of Lisbon – each representing a socioeconomic context level -, one from a private school in the same region following an alternative, more informal learning-based pedagogy, and one from a public school outside a metropolitan area.
Aligning this objective with that of developing the comprehension of the current practice of educators, semi-structured interviews with primary school educators of five pre-selected public school clusters/schools (D. Dinis, Marquesa de Alorna, Rainha Dona Leonor, Cadaval and Cooperativa A Torre) are being formally requested. These interviews are to be focused on the tools used for school-home communication, to qualitatively complement the results of the online survey about this topic conducted in May 2022.
However, accessing the educators in public schools is being a struggle and a bottleneck for further research developments. The authorisation for the conduction of these interviews was submitted and approved by the General Directorate of Education of the Portuguese Ministry of Education by the end of September. Since then several contact attempts have been made to get an authorisation from the school clusters, which are then to recruit the participant educators, with only one response so far – leading to the selection of participants and scheduling (in progress). As an attempt to agilize the process, a participation interest form directed to the educators, hosted in this website, was shared in public Facebook groups of primary school educators, but also with no results so far.
This waiting time has been used to explore the candidate technologies to be used in the development phase planned for the second semester of this year and to prepare the next stage of field research, intended, among other objetives, to characterise the participant households regarding their informal learning activity opportunities’ recognition and partaking. The plan is to provide households with a physical medium where they can register the activities done that they recognize as having informal learning value.
This period has also been used to research and develop a first draft of a proposal for the sistematization of informal learning activities, which is to be discussed and tested with educators and households in these field research initiatives planned.
| Activity Type | Learning Type | Skill Developed Type | Space Type | Provision Type | Occurence Type | Participation Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purposeful; Social; Constructive; Self-Expressive; Physical; Cultural; Explorational; | Acquisition; Inquiry; Discussion; Practice; Collaboration; Production; | Empathy; Awareness; Fine-Motor; Gross-Motor; Focus & Concentration; Self-Regulation; Communication; Language; Problem Solving; Cognitive; Technical; Curiosity; Creativity; | Domestic; Outdoor; Indoor; | Autonomous; Caregiver Provided; Third-Party Provided; | Single; Recurring; | Solo; Adult(s) Partnership; Child(ren) Partnership; |
This systematization is intended to define a learner model on which the proposed game can be built.
Meanwhile the educators have to be selected prior to reaching households, as the households should be linked to them. If no developments occur in this process until the end of November an alternative plan – possibly consisting of a least participative approach to the design process of this phase, unfortunately – will have to be defined.
