Thematic Teaching of Augmented Reality and Education for Sustainable Development in Preschool—The Importance of ‘Place’

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

The paper reports on an exploratory case study about teaching preschoolers sustainable development goals (SDG) using place-based pedagogy and Augmented Reality (AR) tools. The topic seems very interesting since it focuses on significant content (SDG) through promising pedagogy and innovative technology that might enhance preschoolers’ understanding. However, the authors need to elaborate on the manuscript to make it more transparent and accessible to the reader.

1. Introduction

The authors introduce the reader to their study quite well. They start with the need to explore digitalization concerning ESD in preschool, and they go on to present critical concepts of their study, such as thematic teaching, place-based teaching, and meaning transduction. 

-   “1.2 Thematic teaching”: the authors may wish to give a brief example of how the same topic would be introduced through the three types of thematic teaching they are talking about (multi-, intra-, and trans-disciplinary).

-  Lines 120-121: “… and how a failure to consider places as products of human decisions makes us view them as inevitable.”. Not clear enough. Please elaborate.

-   Lines 130-131: “The connection of content and different places leads to a didactic of representations and the handling of different semiotic resources.”. This is not clear either. Readers may understand it after reading the whole manuscript but not when they first encounter it in the text.

-  Lines 130-144: This last paragraph on transduction is hard to follow. For starters, the authors may need to consider giving the explicit definition of transduction much earlier than in lines 137-139, where it is right now. What do they mean in lines 139-141? It would be purposeful for the authors to elaborate on the whole paragraph, ensuring that the points they wish to make do reach the reader.

 

2.   Aim and RQs

-   The aim of the study is possibly presented in more general terms than it should be. It would be better to articulate the aim more modestly, i.e., based on an affirmative version of the RQS. In other words, to say that the study aims at exploring how two experienced preschool teachers describe their first class experience with AR-supported, place-based SD thematic teaching and how they perceive the role of “place” and the role of meaning transduction from one representation to another in the teaching and learning process.

-  I expected the authors to talk later in the paper about shifting between AR-provided representations and physical ones and vice versa. This did not appear to be the case until “4.4 What is real and what is not”. But then again, what I got from their discussion is that by AR representations, they just mean the SDG symbols in an AR app (lines 506-508: “The children have transduced their knowledge and meaning of the SDG:s between representations in the physical world, such as local places, paper drawings  and recycled materials, and the digital world, with the colorful SDG symbols in AR applications.”

 

3. Methods

The authors should start the section by stating explicitly the methodological identity of the study (This is an exploratory case study that…), which they mention elsewhere in the paper. Moreover, they should give more information about the teachers’ and the preschoolers’ profiles (e.g., how many years of teaching experience they had, how familiar they were with teaching about SD, how many children they had in their class, how familiar were these children with using any technological tools for learning at kindergarten, what was the children’s age). Finally, the authors should give a brief but clear view of what happened in these classes (what was the context, the teaching-learning goals, how exactly AR was integrated into the process, and with what content); mixing info like this with the Results does not seem a good idea. And, of course, more information about the interviews (time, protocol, context…) is also needed.

 

 4. Results

The authors claim that they analyzed the two teachers’ teaching plans, final reports, and interviews in 4 axes (thematic teaching, children’s agency, teachers’ perspective, and AR) and discussed them in relation to place and transduction.  However, the Results section seems to be more of a description of what happened (i.e., info that should be integrated into the methodology section enriched) and less of what the authors’ analysis revealed about the teachers’ reflection on their first AR-supported, place-based SD teaching.  

-  Was it multi- or inter- disciplinary? The authors need to talk about this and justify it explicitly. They do it against the type of thematic teaching they rejected (trans-disciplinary) but should also do it for the one they finally used.

- Lines 210-221 do not sound like this study’s results but as general claims. The authors should ground their results on their data, which were the plans, the reports, and the interviews.

- Lines 227-229: Not clear. The same goes for how they shifted from clean water to hunger elimination (lines 226-234) and, more generally, how they were engaged in the SDG hunt.

- Lines 235-236: “The children took photographs of the places they associated with an SDG and used an AR application to place the symbol of the corresponding SDG in the picture.”. Is AR needed for something like this? Is this the added value of its use? The authors must explain what happened to avoid misunderstandings like this.

- Lines 236-239: “The preschool teachers’ statements on this are examples of transduction, where the meaning of one representation, the SDG, is transduced to another representation, e.g., the local food store representing ‘Zero hunger.’”. So, it seems that we have one physically accessed representation which is the SDG symbol, one physically accessed place which the local food store, the abstraction “from the food store to the goal food for everyone” which is an SDG, and finally the association of the SDG-symbol with the photo of the food store (the place) with AR. If this is the case, it is not clear why AR is supposed to be uniquely beneficial.

- Lines 257-260: It is not clear what you mean. Which are these different representations? The SDG symbols and children’s constructs/models of several places? It would be best if you elaborated the whole description.

-  Lines 344-346: This sounds good. But how is it achieved?

- Lines 352-354: This kind of phrasing fits the Results section. The reader needs to know the teachers’ reflections because the authors’ RQs relate to this.

 

5. Discussion & Conclusions

The authors discuss their results in light of their theoretical framework for place-based education and thematic teaching.

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The use of English is good.

Author Response

Please see the uploaded file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The conclusions in this article are not new, there are several articles that have more or less the same conclusions. The title does not effectively convey the specific focus of the research, which is on the thematic teaching of Augmented Reality (AR) and Sustainable Development (SD) in the preschool setting, with a special emphasis on place-based education. The conclusion also lacks a concise summary of the main findings and their significance. It does not effectively tie together the key points discussed in the document and provides a clear takeaway for the reader

Author Response

Please see our comments in the response-file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors complied with most of the comments. They elaborated on the manuscript and resolved many of the issues raised in the review.  Although there is still room for improvement (e.g., adding the missing info about the interview protocol, structuring the results according to the RQs as expected, moving the information about the didactic intervention from the results to the methods where they belong, highlighting more the added value of AR in the teaching), the revised manuscript is significantly improved.