| 11. |
- Olander, Clas, 1956
(författare)
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Towards an interlanguage of biological evolution: Exploring students´ talk and writing as an arena for sense-making
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to explore what is involved when learning science, by focusing on students’ appropriation of the school science language. The aspiration is to explore relations between, on the one hand, content-oriented aspects of making sense of a specific area in school biology, and on the other hand, more generic patterns that are linked to learning in general: the influence of different social languages, and also the conceptual, epistemological, and ontological constituents of learning something. The strategy for empirically exploring what is involved when students make sense of biological evolution from a language perspective includes examination of instances in the classroom where meaning and sense of terms as well as semantic patterns are articulated in writing and talking. The analytic attention is on, on the one hand, students’ individual writing, and on the other, students’ talk in peer group discussions. The latter has guided the main part of the work, and one conclusion is that the students frequently shift between different social languages, mainly a colloquial and a scientific language. Both languages are a productive resource in students’ appropriation of the school science language. This is understood to rely on the establishment of an arena, an interlanguage discourse, where scientific terms and theories may be introduced, negotiated, and made sense of, in particular in relation to colloquial language and everyday experiences. In that way, this interlanguage discourse is an arena for sense-making. The students most frequently start their talk as a negotiation concerning conceptual notions that is linked to a discussion about epistemological pattern and sometimes the talk also is linked to ontological framing. The students negotiate the meaning of conceptual notions, which has both colloquial and scientific origins, for example variation, randomness, need, and development. Irrespective of the origin of the notions they are an asset in the students’ sense-making process. Epistemologically the students make their argumentation plausible by referring to resources, for example names or theories. Furthermore, they structure their explanations both with internal logic, for example causality or teleological reasoning, and external linking between specific examples and general ideas. In each of these dimensions, the argumentation can have different quality. Links between the general and specific can be systematic rather than sporadic, explanations can be causal rather than teleological, and resources can be theories rather than names. Ontological framing is mainly done as negotiations about what is allowed to talk about or whether agency matters in a school science discourse.
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| 12. |
- Runesdotter, Caroline, 1951
(författare)
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I otakt med tiden? Folkhögskolorna i ett föränderligt fält
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Folk high schools have often been out of synchronisation: both behind the times and as pioneers, and always eager to keep up with their unique identity. There have been variations over time and simultaneously. Folk high schools are diverse. Folk high schools are economically vulnerable and dependent on external funding. Reduced governmental subsidies and new forms of governance introduced in the 1990s have challenged the institutionalized ways to consider and to run the Folk high schools. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate changes in instutituional logica and identities over time. As the title of this thesis, Folk High Schools in a changing field, suggests, one of the key concepts of the discussion is organizational fields. Organizational fields are perceived as organizations with common structures and aims, operating in a nonlocal environment, kept together by a common meaning system and the conviction that they need each other. The concept of organizational fields is one of the fundamental ideas developed within new institutionalism in organization theory. New institutionalism’s focus has shifted from the individual organization to interaction between organizations and the environment. An organizational field is kept together by cultural frames or patterns of meaning. By employing the concept of organizational field as a tool it has been possible to analyze how the ideas and identities of folk high schools are constructed. The results show that a comprehensive diversification of folk high schools has taken place. The schools have differentiated themselves over time and from each other in terms of their activities and owners. Their relations to the environment are increasingly based on business commissions. The results also show that the school’s activities are increasingly short term focused and quickly carried out. This leads to new and more temporary relations. In the long term, this challenges the common meaning system and the very idea about folk high schools’ uniqueness.
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| 13. |
- Vigmo, Sylvi, 1958
(författare)
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New Spaces for Language Learning. A study of student interaction in media production in English
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis project takes as its starting point an interest in foreign language learning as a social and cultural activity. Globalisation and digital media have contributed to changed conditions, especially for learning English. These changing conditions offer opportunities and new arenas as well as a challenge for current educational practice. Against this background, the research questions aim to explore foreign language learners’ activities to contribute to our understanding of these changing conditions. The context the digital media environment represents differs from the educational context, and holds different spaces for language activities. The overarching aim in this thesis has been to investigate the linguistic activities of a group of learners of English in school as they engage in a film production. The foreign language learner is here seen as a producer of language and as participating in several practices. Of specific interest was to explore emerging hybrid practices through the analyses of foreign language learners’ activities in an educational context that integrates adolescents’ media literacy repertoires. These research interests were realised by means of an intervention study, Design-based Research (DBR), at upper secondary level. The intervention in existing practice also involved the teacher as the designer of the foreign language-learning task itself. The empirical data mainly consist of video data, which captured the foreign language learners’ activities in one specific case when engaged in a film production. Other empirical data produced during the study consist of classroom observations, learners’ artefacts e.g. paper-based storyboards, teacher interviews and the learners’ final film production. Interaction analysis was applied for the analysis and the foreign language learners’ spoken interaction was analysed in-depth during the production process: from a focus on characters, a narrative, to the editing of their footage. The results from this study demonstrate diverse language learner foci, which display various interrelationships between the digital media resources, adolescents’ media repertories and the language learners’ linguistic production. Digital media offered new spaces and opportunities for language production, spoken and written, and for representing language in use, but were also shown in some cases to constrain the learners. Improvisation and scripted talk during the digital media production led to negotiations and strategies, which involved a playful approach to words, code switching and the use of adolescents’ media experiences as resources. The results from the analyses discuss emerging hybrid practices and potential implications for foreign language education, and point to reasons for looking beyond the common classroom discourse for further research and development.
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