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To improve the quality of field experience, support field experience cooperation and streamline field experience management, the purpose of this paper is to describe the experience in using Activity Theory to design and develop a web-based field experience tracking system for a special education program.

The authors used Activity Theory to design and develop a web-based field experience tracking system for a special education program. An in-depth evaluation of the developed web-based system including usability testing and actual use of the system was conducted.

The evaluation and data analysis results demonstrate the value of Activity Theory and show that a web-based tracking system is a valuable tool to support the management of pre-service teachers’ field experiences.

This is the first paper to discuss the design and development of field experience tracking system using Activity Theory. This paper can be used to motivate other developers to use Activity theory to design campus-wide information system. The system and methodology the authors used in this project has wider applicability and generalizability, and can be applied to the management of other competency and field based professional training in areas such as nursing, social work and medicine.

To share the library school field experience paradigm that the authors developed after their successful participation as a supervisor and student.

A review of field experience literature is provided. The field experience paradigms and perspectives pertaining to the supervisor and the student are explained. The paradigm is suggested as a model for field experience participants and their supervisors.

The field experience paradigm for the supervisors elucidates the stages – planning, training, mentoring and evaluation. The paradigm for students explains the phases – awareness, interests, planning and participation.

The focus of the field experience, from which the paradigm emanated, was to train and prepare the student for agricultural librarianship in an academic library. The application of the paradigm may vary for different situations.

The paradigm is expected to be useful for supervisors and students of field experience programs.

This paradigm stems from the participation of the authors as a field experience supervisor and student. The steps and methods the authors followed will help advance future field experience programs.

Recently, various policies have been implemented in Saudi Arabia to reform science teaching at K-12 levels in order to focus on critical thinking, inquiry-based learning, and problem solving. Research is needed to explore the adequacy of teacher preparation programs to determine whether these programs sufficiently prepare Saudi science teachers to teach according to these new reforms. This study explores the challenges that Saudi pre-service science teachers face in these higher education programs. Results indicated that graduates of the programs studied were satisfied with their experiences; however, various concerns were expressed by some pre-service teachers regarding the theory-practice gap between their university coursework and field experiences, and the supervision structures and functions in place for the professional experiences component. Modifications to the teacher preparation programs are suggested in order to address these concerns and to successfully enact reforms in science education in Saudi Arabia.

This paper provides a researcher's account of fieldwork experience in conducting audit research in China. By illustrating on-site fieldwork encounters, the paper reflects stages of access negotiation and management in the fieldwork, reveals the researcher's embodied “affects” in the fieldwork and reasserts the value of researcher's openness and attention in the fieldwork.

This paper uses autoethnography as its overall epistemology. Fieldwork diaries and vignettes are written in the first-person voice to present the researcher's embodied account of fieldwork experience, researcher’s learning and coping skills in managing the fieldwork.

The research findings are not detached from the researcher's experience of the fieldwork. The fieldwork experiences in this study highlight that the fieldwork access is an ongoing process. Different stages of access negotiations, from rejection to acceptance, reveal the tensions between researcher and participants. This study draws attention to the online platform, WeChat, in connecting with auditors to learn from them and suggests openness to the fieldwork encounters and a resilient engagement with auditors.

In reflecting on the researcher's transformation during the fieldwork, this paper argues for a relational and engaged way of conducting fieldwork, rather than a disengaged and judgemental approach in studying auditors' working lives. The paper pays attention to fieldwork as a process and how the knowledge learned in the field is infused with researcher's fieldwork experiences.

Uncertainty about Intellectual Property Regulations (IPR) is prevalent in today’s knowledge-based and creative industries. While prior literature indicates that regulatory uncertainty affects creative processes, studies that systematically analyze the effects of IPR on the experiencing of involved actors in creative processes across fields are rare. We ask how core professional actor groups including creators, legal professionals and managers involved in creative processes experience regulatory uncertainty in the fields of music and pharma. By studying practices of engaging with, circumventing and avoiding regulatory uncertainty about IPR, we show how creative processes in both the music and pharma fields are entrenched with emotional-cognitive experiences such as anxiety, indifference and hope that vary by professional group. Our findings point toward managers and legal professionals observing, exposing and cultivating emotions by ascribing experiences to other actor groups. We conclude that comparing regulation-related emotions of involved actors across fields helps to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamics of creative processes.

Researchers often face challenges in locating and obtaining relevant and meaningful information during qualitative international business (IB) field research in other countries. This process constitutes an immensely critical phase, which determines the success or failure of the research endeavour. The purpose of this paper is to discuss “access” as a multidimensional and contestable concept that poses particular challenges in international and multicultural research contexts.

This paper builds on the experience as field researchers in China/Hong Kong (120 in-depth interviews) and the need to disseminate acquired field experiences, in particular concerning “access”. The multifaceted issue of “access” is rarely featured on the IB methodological agenda, and has become a silent feature of qualitative IB research.

This paper is devoted to this nexus: the lack of focus on “access” issues, and the rich sources of acquired, but mostly veiled, field experiences that feature in both IB and management research programmes. A plausible explanation for this circumstance relates to the influence of mainstream positivist and objectivist paradigms in which researchers are not recognised as having an impact on research processes, hence taking this silent feature for granted.

By viewing the multiple dimensions of “access”, we move beyond the mainstream understanding that merely relates it to the question of gaining access to a physical site and/or the time of an individual, and in which “access” is only an enterprise of securing pre-existing, tangible information. Drawing upon specific international field research experiences, this paper contributes to the methodological debate concerning “access” – beyond “technicality” and towards a concept of socio-cultural and multidimensional research practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the actions of different senses on visitors’ embodied experience in dark tourism “field,” including embodied emotions/cognitions.

This research uses qualitative analysis by applying tourists’ reviews from two main Chinese tourism websites and the software of MAXQDA. It identifies the senses applied in the embodiment process in dark tourism “field” and matches these senses to the specific types of embodied emotions/cognitions.

This research identifies four main senses. The visual sense has the greatest influence on 27 embodied emotions and 7 embodied cognitions. Auditory and temperature sense create particular emotions. This research also points out the phenomenon of “banned behavior.” At last, to achieve accessibility/acceptability, Nanjing Memorial Hall applies two strategies to distance the extreme historical events from visitors: the construction of aesthetic elements and the way it shows historical objects.

It uses both qualitative and quantitative data to identify the classifications and degrees of senses, emotions and cognitions as well as the relations between them. However, there are difficulties in the coding process because of the language differences, which requires a good understanding of the context of the tourism experience.

The research results could be used as a psychological reference and in the design of dark tourism product.

It provides a specific understanding of the way in which visitors interact with dark tourism objects and environment.

This is the first research that explains the dark tourism experience from the perspective of embodiment. It provides conceptual as well as empirical reference for a new research topic.

The field experience placement is an integral part of teacher education programmes. It is ostensibly meant to provide a place for teacher candidates to enact pedagogical theory gained during coursework under the supervision of an experienced host teacher. In reality, the field placement is a source of considerable tension for teacher candidates, as they struggle to reconcile their prior assumptions about teaching and learning and their prior identities as students with the demands of school culture that requires teachers and students to act in particular ways. The field experience is emotional work that has a considerable impact on the development of new teachers’ identities. In this chapter I will focus on how two new teachers learn during the field experience placement, with a particular emphasis on the roles of emotion and the development of professional identity in learning to teach. Cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) will provide a useful lens to interpret some of the challenges of learning to teach during the field placement.

Place-based, social studies teaching and learning has the potential to foster engaged citizens connected and committed to improving their communities. This study explored the research question, “In what ways do classroom and field-based experiences prepare teacher candidates (TCs) to make connections between place-based education and elementary social studies education?”

This qualitative case study examined how elementary TCs learned about, researched, curated and created place-based social studies educational resources related to community sites. Data collection included TCs’ Pre- and Post-Course Reflections as well as Self-Evaluations, which were analyzed using an inductive approach and multiple rounds of concept coding. Several themes emerged through data analysis.

The authors organized their findings around three themes: connections (i.e. place becomes personal), immersion (i.e. learning about place to learning in place) and bridge building (i.e. local as classroom). The classroom and field-based experiences in the elementary social studies methods course informed the ways in which TCs learned about and connected to the concept of place, experienced place in a specific place (i.e. downtown Statesboro, Georgia), and reflected upon the myriad ways that they could utilize place in their future elementary social studies classrooms.

TCs (as well as in-service teachers and teacher educators) must become more informed, connected and committed to places within their local communities in order to consider them as resources for elementary social studies teaching and learning.