Spatial Visualization And Professional Competence

Spatial Visualization and Professional Competence

The computer graphics (CG) industry is an attractive field for undergraduate students, but employers often find that graduates of CG art programmes are not proficient. The result is that many positions are left vacant, despite large numbers of job applicants. This book investigates how student CG artists develop proficiency. The subject is important to the rapidly growing number of educators in this sector, employers of graduates, and students who intend to develop proficiency for the purpose of obtaining employment. Educators will see why teaching software-oriented knowledge to students does not lead to proficiency, but that the development of problem-solving and visualisation skills do. This book follows a narrow focus, as students develop proficiency in a cognitively challenging task known as ‘NURBS modelling’. This task was chosen due to an observed relationship between students who succeeded in the task, and students who successfully obtained employment after graduation. In the study this is based on, readers will be shown that knowledge-based explanations for the development of proficiency do not adequately account for proficiency or expertise in this field, where visualisation has been observed to develop suddenly rather than over an extended period of time. This is an unusual but not unique observation. Other studies have shown rapid development of proficiency and expertise in certain professions, such as among telegraph operators, composers and chess players. Based on these observations, the book argues that threshold concepts play a key role in the development of expertise among CG artists.

Resources in Education

Handbook of Anti-Discriminatory Education

This comprehensive handbook addresses issues related to anti-discriminatory education as it relates to children, youth, young adults, families, and practitioners across a series of age groups, sectors, communities, and countries. It seeks to map a holistic interdisciplinary overview of the field examining how policies, practices, and initiatives within unique social, political, and cultural contexts have been enacted to advance anti-discriminatory education for improved equity, diversity, and inclusion outcomes leading to thriving school-community ecosystems. The work draws on a range of theoretical frameworks, hybrid perspectives, and research projects to provide multiple examples about the challenges, complexities, and nuances involved in theorizing and doing the work of anti-discriminatory education in local communities and on a macro institutional level. With intentionality, authors from various backgrounds, identities, fields, and positionalities describe and discuss various social justice and equity issues and how they strategize, mobilize, and navigate unique micro and macro dynamics affiliated with power and privilege for the purpose of advancing the field of anti-discriminatory education. Overall, the chapters cover a range of topics and issues from various practitioners and community perspectives around the intersectionality and divergence of navigating micro lived experiences and macro institutional policies and practices to bridge the gap between theory and action with respect to anti-discriminatory education. The book is divided into 4 sub-sections: Early Childhood Education (Early years up to approx. 10 years old), Elementary and Middle School Years (approx. 11 to 14 years old), Secondary Schools (approx. 15 to 19 years old), and Higher Education (Post-Secondary).