Meaning-making and sense-making are generally assumed to be part of students’ personal vocational knowledge development, since they contribute to both students’ socialisation in a vocation and students’ personalisation of concepts, values and beliefs regarding that vocation. However, how students in vocational education acquire meaning and make sense of vocational knowledge is not explained. Furthermore, examples of what these processes entail in the context of vocational education are lacking. A multiple case study was performed to explore students’ meaning-making and sense-making in classroom interactions in Dutch senior secondary vocational education. Our results show that meaning-making is a process in which students interpret vocational knowledge by explicating and clarifying this knowledge. Sense-making is perceived to be a process in which students concretise vocational knowledge by testing and justifying this knowledge. A research model was developed to describe how students make meaning and sense of vocational knowledge in interaction with practitioners.
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Through video-materials of use-in-practice we present and discuss NOOT, an interactive tool that supports sense-making during creative sessions. The project investigates how ‘cognitive scaffolding’ may support such sense-making.
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In media audience research we tend to assume that media are engaged with when they are used, however ‘light’ such engagement might be. Once ‘passive media use’ was banned as a reference to media use, being a media audience member became synonymous with being a meaning producer. In audience research however I find that media are not always the object of meaning making in daily life and that media texts can be hardly meaningful. Thinking about media and engagement, there is a threefold challenge in relation to audience research. The coming into being of platform media and hence of new forms of media production on a micro level that come out of and are woven into practices of media use, suggests that we need to redraft the repertoire of terms used in audience research (and maybe start calling it something else). Material and immaterial media production, the unpaid labour on the part of otherwise audience members should for instance be taken into account. Then, secondly, there is the continuing challenge to further develop heuristically strong ways of linking media use and meaning making, and most of all to do justice, thirdly, to those moments and ways in which audiences truly engage with media texts without identifying them with those texts.
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