Abstract
Educational systems endemic of demotivation might signify a stagnating rather than nurturing ecology of learning, due in part to an obstruction in the loops of shared information between the organisms within these systems, i.e., teachers, educational researchers, teacher educators, school administrators, and educational policymakers. Working within the ecology of English as a foreign language education in Japan, we have been endeavoring over several years to open loops of communication with students through a learning-teaching-researching process we call critical participatory looping (CPL). We reported successes in various publications about how CPL has improved our students’ motivations, and this paper elaborates upon two recent examples to provide a grounding of CPL in practices that support activating ecological adaptability. First, we theorize that individuals and groups (classes) can be seen as socially intelligent dynamic systems, and examine this perspective in relation to intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics of students needing nurturing loops of open communication in order to foster greater self-awareness and mutual care. Then we suggest that through soft assembling expansive learning, students and teacher-researchers might open communications explicitly about themselves and their contexts, deepen mutual appreciation and understandings, and act purposefully as agents toward promoting healthy qualities in themselves. Finally, we show with two examples that the social life of valuable information can be extended by looping it not only back to those that created it but also by looping it forward (similar to paying it forward) across expanding networks that might benefit from it with ecological adaptability.
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We extend our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.
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Falout, J., Murphey, T., Fukuda, T. et al. Whole-Class Self-Referential Feedback from University EFL Contexts to the World: Extending the Social Life of Information by Looping it Forward. Asia-Pacific Edu Res 25, 1–10 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-015-0227-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-015-0227-4