Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

English is one of the most widely spoken languages around the world, so it is necessary to teach it in all institutions. This study focused on identifying realities of English language education in a rural school of Latacunga. This research was a qualitative descriptive study that used semi-structured interviews and observation as data collection methods. The results of interviews conducted to seven members of the educational community revealed that the lack of teaching resources, the scarcity of English teachers, the low students’ motivation, and poor educational environment are some of the most common problems that this school faces. Moreover, data collected by means of observation reveals that the school facilities need to be improved to promote better learning experiences. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize the effort made by the school community in maintaining a stable institution.

Introducción: Las estrategias de aprendizaje se convierten en actividades planificadas acorde a las necesidades de los estudiantes, en tanto que la tecnología es un aliado ineludible dentro del proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje. Objetivos: El objetivo del presente artículo es describir la estrategia metodológica para el uso de los recursos tecnológicos en el aprendizaje de Lengua y Literatura en la básica general. Metodología: Fue desarrollada bajo un enfoque mixto, cualitativo – cuantitativo, asimismo fue de tipo descriptivo apoyado en el diseño no experimental. La muestra estuvo conformada por 18 docentes quienes por ser conocedores de la problemática acorde a su actividad educativa. Resultados: Pudo detectarse que las estrategias metodológicas hacen posible el desarrollo del aprendizaje de los diversos ejes integradores en el aprendizaje de Lengua y Literatura, además, la frecuencia de uso de los recursos tecnológicos en el área de Lengua y Literatura es bimensual, fue unánime la respuesta de los docenes al afirmar que debe cambiarse la manera de enseñanza tradicional. Conclusiones: Las estrategias metodológicas son procesos planificados cuyo direccionamiento conlleva al logro del aprendizaje significativo por parte de los estudiantes, debe ser aplicado de forma flexible; los recursos tecnológicos son herramientas de mucha importancia dentro del proceso educativo que permite reforzar el proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje; por último, la asignatura de Lengua y Literatura tiene implícito la comunicación oral, porque permite a los estudiantes la exposición de diversos puntos de vista. Área de estudio o rama de la ciencia: Educación Básica.

Introduction. The inverted classroom is a modern didactic methodology that seeks to break with the paradigms of traditional education. It seeks to place the student as the protagonist of the teaching-learning process. This option is being implemented more in higher education, since in recent years there have been numerous challenges to the sector, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual education, limited access to the Internet, materials, and curricular gaps. Objective. The objective is to promote the use of the inverted classroom methodology in higher education to achieve significant learning for students. Methodology. Based on a restructuring of a research methodology, a mixed approach was applied to contemplate the manipulation of descriptive and numerical data. Subsequently, the data were consolidated and interpreted based on the researchers' criteria. Results. It is of utmost importance to create new methodological strategies that keep students motivated. This methodology allows them to build their own knowledge, based on their abilities and skills. Conclusion. The inverted classroom focuses on the educational environment, seeking that students develop innovative activities that allow meaningful learning and long-term memory. It depends on the teacher's ability to evaluate and know how to use specifically in certain subjects because in certain areas of knowledge there is difficulty in its application. General area of study: Education. Specific area of study: Significant learning.

This article presents an artistic practice-led visual design research project that employs a reflective inquiry methodology to write and design a series of outcomes responding to a rhetoric approach that looks at how a female designer can develop connections to nature and how the design outcomes can empower women to care for themselves and the planet. A vast amount of literature articulates nature's healing powers (Miyazaki, 2018; Hardman, 2020). There is also an emergency in thinkers discussing the connections between environmentalism and feminism, looking into the ways nature and women are similarly deemed inferior by patriarchal structures (Escobar, 2018; Gruen, 1993). This research project aims to bring these two views together, looking into the benefits of appreciating nature as a form of self-care to empower and strengthen young women and subsequently increase a desire to care for the depleting natural world. Therefore, this thesis asks: how can communication design strategies and conventions encourage young women to connect with a dialogical relation with nature, fostering wellbeing and ecological consciousness? The study is positioned as a reflective inquiry, meaning that the research process utilises the researcher's personal experiences and writing, with reflections about action, in action and after action, as well as stories and photographs anonymously retrieved from other young women. These inspired an exploration of handmade collages and a graphic set, which led to the generation of a series of outcomes that seek to empower young women to care for themselves through nature. The project has been influenced by overarching issues facing women and nature but approaches them through optimism and positivity. It seeks to highlight the fact that small changes matter, and activism starts from caring for your life and the lives of others, which is what the final outcomes seek to instill in the lives of young women facing an uncertain future.

This article presents an artistic practice-led research project that asks: How can communication design be used to raise awareness about the effect of microplastics on coral reefs, encouraging a shift in the mentality of single-use plastic? The study highlights the scale of the issue of micro-plastics, where environmental pollution stemmed from the throw-away society, intending to ignite action – from micro-plastics to micro-changes. An opportunity arose to visually communicate how such a desirable product, the micro plastic, is destroying ecosystems. The project employs a reflective inquiry methodology supported by a heuristic approach, surfacing the tacit and the experiential to heighten self-awareness within the researchers' practice. This approach enables the researcher to draw connections between the subconscious and unconscious mentality, challenging the stigma and pre-existing assumptions. The project explores risograph printing, a digital screenprinting method, complimented with the use of laser cutting to encourage the reader to engage with the artefact and shift the mindset from unconscious buying patterns to become a conscious consumer. In exploring these methods, the project draws on visual inspiration through contextual knowledge. Gathering information and understanding the scale of the issue contributed to the originality and the essence of artefact. The design artefact takes the form of a risograph publication design, embracing the tactility and sustainable practices of the risograph printer in responding the research question. The artefact encompasses the essence of microplastics, uncovering the truth that lies within its aesthetic appearance. Significantly, the project is a conscious, self-reflective inquiry that contributes to the field of knowledge surrounding designing for good, and to giving the ocean personhood. It contributes to discourse about practice-led research in graphic design to engage the reader in behaviour change.

 This article presents a practice-led design project that asks how the effects of the lockdown can be articulated through illustration and poetry to narrate a personal story using an autoethnographic approach to retail high levels of dignity and originality? The research project aims to create a visual narrative, advanced through illustrations and poetry, that reflects the researcher’s experience of lockdowns imposed by COVID-19. The narrative adopts the form of an illustrated storybook to tell the story of the researcher herself, who faced restrictive experiences while being locked down in China during a homeland visit. As a result, the researcher was unable to return to New Zealand due to travel restrictions. During the time the researcher had to wait in China to be able to return to complete her study in New Zealand, the lockdown produced feelings of isolation, distancing, anxiety and other emotions. This design project is aimed to express these feelings, responding to their pressures using creatively illustrations and poems, created in a way to articulate the psychological pressures one can go through during this unprecedented time. The illustrations and poems encapsulate an artistic response to a historical moment, drawn into being through poetic writing and imagery. The project is a historical document of an era where all that is certain becomes uncertain. Illustrations are used through an autoethnographic approach to give voice to personal experiences through design. The research contributes to the exploration of poetic writing and illustration to document, understand and express a moment of crisis in human history.

The spaces women take up in society have been shrouded in shame, disenfranchisement, and contention, with the kitchen as a focal point of this argument. This article aims to suggest ways in which women can take up space in the kitchen, this integral pillar of society that upholds connection and creativity as an art form. Adjacent to this subversive shift of connotation is the shifts within feminism, as feminist perspectives on women within kitchens develop alongside the historical movement. In this project, the researcher has utilised a post-positivist paradigm under an auto-ethnographic methodology to document, analyse, and celebrate the variations within feminist perspectives on creativity within domestic spaces through textile and publication design. In order to shift perspectives on these domestic spaces, the design outcomes paid tribute to feminist artists who made the kitchen their studio and others who captured the kitchen as an artistic contribution to the feminist perspectives on these spaces. Through heuristic methods of testing, experimentation, and physical outputs, the researcher curated a series of design artefacts that distil the visceral experiences of how women take up space in kitchens. Through publication design, there is a documentation of the shifting feminist perspectives on women's domestic spaces through contrast and analysis of articles, poems, recipes, and artist insights. These contexts are supported by the tactility of the physical design outcome made using textile, pottery, and printed matter. The research distils and provides a destination for the celebration of ways in which women take up space within the kitchen and the integral artistic creations within those spaces.

This article presents a practice-led artistic research project that asks: How to represent an international Chinese student’s sense of belonging (or not belonging) through the aesthetics of visual poetry? The project looked into concrete poetry as a visual strategy to develop a design outcome consisting of two publications using an experimental typographic layout and two corresponding posters. This research employs autoethnography and heuristic inquiry as a methodological approach to the creative process to achieve high levels of originality. Based on personal experience, this research project explores the lack of sense of belonging faced by a Chinese student in an unfamiliar place when initially studying in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a design response to this temporary loss of belonging, the project investigated profiled individuals to analyse two specific negative emotions: restless and lonely. In addition, the study applies poetic writing to self-narrative to enhance the potential of personal expression, metaphorically telling stories while creating a visual typographic artefact that breaks with the traditional written prose form. The project is a retrospective of the self, graphically articulating two unforgettable emotions arising from two of the most profound periods affecting the researcher. On the one hand, the project takes a further step towards self-understanding and helps the viewer understand the issues of belonging experienced by Chinese students in a foreign country. On the other hand, it contributes to the discussion of autoethnography and heuristic inquiry to achieve originality in graphic design.

There is increased interest in recent literature on the disfluency effect in an effort to contextualize the outcomes for typography research that is grounded in functional readability. Recently, a small group of typographic and legibility researchers have begun to call for more collaboration to generate knowledge that is useful and practical ( Thiessen, Beier & Keage, 2020). This article presents a practice-led design research project that utilises iterative drawing and typographic arrangements through an autoethnographic approach, to convey personal experience with dyslexia. The project reflects on the question: How can iterative drawing and typographic composition be used to graphically express one’s subjective dyslexic learning experience? As a secondary question that is particularly focused on practice, is how the project can contribute to provide insights to a non-dyslexic audience of the word comprehension and typographic disfluency facing people with dyslexic conditions. The research is informed by a range of contextual practice, practitioners, and literature, into the states and conditions of the dyslexic experience, the use of typographic adaption and Risograph printing. The project is grounded as a practice-led approach, where creative practice and research are complementary but distinctive. The research is based within the world of concern defined by practice while the practitioner researcher is at the centre of the research (Vear, 2022). To elicit a dyslexic perspective, the project employs autoethnography as a strategy for gathering and evidence interpretation through a critical illustration and typographic design process. The research contributes to current discourses to areas such as those related to the typographic principles of visual cuing and emphasis as well as other broader areas such as how we may be able to determine threshold for disfluency, and what impact graphical distractions have on the disfluency effect.

The turn to indigenous epistemologies is one of the most exciting and revolutionary shifts to happen in the university within the last three decades and is nowadays accelerating in influence in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is bringing with it dynamic new ways of thinking about research and new methodologies for conducting it, a raised awareness of the different kinds of knowledge that indigenous practice can convey and an illuminating body of information about the creative process. Indigenous practice provide access into other ways of knowing, and alternative approaches to conducting and presenting knowledge. This article discusses one Māori project in this context, that is intended to challenge indigenous people to (re) evaluate post-colonial environmentally harmful practices in the death space. The project explores the concept of rangatahi (Māori youth) attitudes to revitalising ancient Māori death practices to inform the development of design intervention aimed to challenge mortuary colonial practices. As such, it is part of a larger research that is supported by Marsden Fund from Royal Society of New Zealand. The project outcome includes the design of modern urupā tautaiao (natural burial) commemoration site, applying technology such as tribal social media platforms regarding death, and GPS mapping of wāhi tapu (sacred sites). Death is highly tapu (sacred) to Māori and requires strict observations of rituals to ensure spiritual safety. The revitalisation of tribal knowledge is not just the prerogative of the elders, the voices of indigenous youth must be heard as they are the future, of the planet and the people. This project contributes to the understanding of research that navigates across philosophical, inter-generational, territorial and community boundaries, evidencing theories and methodologies that inform to culture studies and creative practice.