| 241. |
- Sellberg, Charlott, 1974
(författare)
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Training to become a master mariner in a simulator-based environment: The instructors’ contributions to professional learning
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In higher education programs that aim to prepare students for professional performance in safety-critical work activities, the introduction of simulators is seen as a fundamentally restructuring of the ways in which professional skills are developed and assessed. This, in turn, creates new challenges and possibilities for both teaching and learning a profession. This thesis examines maritime instructors’ work in supporting students’ collaborative training to become professional seafarers in simulator-based learning environments. The empirical material is based on ethnographic fieldwork and video data of simulator-based training sessions in a navigation course. The thesis consists of four studies. Study I is a literature review and synthesis of previous research on the use of simulators in master mariner training. Study II focuses on the overall organisation of simulator-based training (i.e. briefing–scenario–debriefing) and the instructor’s work throughout the three training phases. Study III examines the organisation of instructions during the scenario phase, while exploring the practice of training to apply “the rules of the road at sea” in the simulator. Study IV connects to an on-going debate on the realism and knowledge transfer of simulator-based training with respect to the work practices on board seagoing vessels for which the students are training. While previous research on the use of simulators in maritime training argues that the current training system favours training towards simulator-based tests rather than to help students become competent professionals, the findings of this thesis point in a different direction. The results of the empirical studies reveal an instructional practice and training model founded on the need to account for the general principles of good seamanship and the anti-collision regulations in maritime operations. The meaning of good seamanship and the rules of the sea are difficult to teach in abstraction, since their application involves an infinite number of contingencies that must be considered in every specific case. Based on this premise, the thesis stresses the importance of both in-scenario instruction and post-simulation debriefing in order for the instructor to demonstrate how general rules for action apply to practical situations in ways that develop students’ professional competences. Moreover, based on the findings, I argue that the relevance of simulator-based training to work contexts is a dialogical phenomenon of relating between practices. Such interactional accomplishments draw on both the students’ access to work contexts and the instructor’s ability to systematically address the similarities, differences and irregularities between practices during training in the simulator.
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| 242. |
- Sheridan, Sonja, 1952
(författare)
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Pedagogical quality in preschool : an issue of perspectives
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The main aims of this thesis on the pedagogical quality in preschool are: to define and describe a pedagogical concept of quality; to explore how quality is experienced and valued from different perspectives; to find out what characterises a pedagogical environment of high quality; and to discuss how those characteristics can be used to improve the quality of preschool. The thesis comprises four studies, a meta-perspective of the results of these and a theoretical framework. Two studies were part of a project, which aimed to improve the pedagogical quality in 20 preschools. The use of both external and self-evaluations of quality with ECERS gave an opportunity to compare these evaluations with one another as well as using the results to plan the content of a targeted development programme. In the third study, three preschools evaluated to be of low quality and three of good quality were selected for in-depth studies. Thirty-nine five-year-old children were interviewed about their conceptions of decision-making and how they experienced their possibilities for exercising influence in their own preschool. In a comparative study between Germany and Sweden, researchers made parallel and independent evaluations of the quality with ECERS in 20 preschools, 10 in each country. The underlying perceptual process was documented and reconstructed and presented in the form of five different themes. From a meta-perspective of the results, the concept of pedagogical quality is defined and described on a primary level, which can be seen as one step in the development of a theory of pedagogical quality. The results confirm that high quality in preschool is related to the competence of the teacher and show that activities in the participating preschools are rarely learning-orientated. This indicates that there is a difference between the children’s experience of exercising influence and the level of quality and shows that it is vital for the children to be involved in decision-making. The results clearly show that external and selfevaluations of quality differ, and that there is a tendency for teachers in low-quality preschools to overrate their own quality, while teachers in high-quality preschools seem to evaluate their quality lower than the external evaluator. The results confirm that structural aspects are no guarantee for high quality and show that low-quality preschools are more vulnerable to decreases in resources. Further, the results show that the quality in preschool can be enhanced through competence development even while organisational changes and financial cutbacks are taking place. To allow these conditions to exist and develop, at least four perspectives must be focused on during research on quality and in the development work, that is: the quality of interactions, the perspective of the teacher, the perspective of the child, and the perspective of society. The study suggests that a theory of pedagogical quality needs to be developed, to define the concept further, and that the complexity of pedagogical quality requires broad research approaches and an inclusion of different perspectives.
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| 243. |
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| 244. |
- Signert, Kerstin, 1949
(författare)
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Variation och invarians i Maria Montessoris sinnestränande materiel
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this study was to analyse the Montessori pedagogy with the objective to theoretically describe and explain the Montessori pedagogical method. The aim has been to find an answer to what still makes the Montessori pedagogy, after more than one hundred years, successfully spread to schools all over the world. Using older and newer theory formations, primarily a number of variation theoretical concepts, empirical data of small children using Montessori material were analysed. The study show that nothing will come from nothing. Maria Montessori was a child of her time, and not alone in her aspirations. She made use of many of the current events and ideas, and transformed them into her own. The pedagogical methods that Montessori developed, when she met intellectually challenged, under stimulated children in the hospital, came about at a time when measures for these children were discussed from a medical and educational perspective. Later, when the education in the regular school was debated throughout society, she turned to these children to develop the methods that she had been inspired to by the two doctors Jean Itard and Edouard Séguin. The common characteristics of their method were variation and invariance, a method that they in turn were inspired to use by Jacob Rodriguez Pereira. The result shows that Montessori too made a system of variation and invari¬ance in the training with the sensorial material, which also shows that the method Montessori used for sensorial education can also be appreciated within the scope of variation theory. The Montessori pedagogy is based on a carefully thought-out principle on learning that also proves to be built in to the sensorial material. This is not an antiquated and vague theory but processed though and practices that corresponds with current science. The materials one can literally touch, allows the theory and method to live on relatively unchanged over time and space.
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| 245. |
- Sivenbring, Jennie, 1975
(författare)
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I den betraktades ögon. Ungdomar om bedömning i skolan.
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present study examines how young students in the last year of comprehensive school make sense and use of the formal assessments they are given regarding their school performance. By interviewing 28 students in year nine of the Swedish compulsory school, ”talk about assessments” is analyzed as speech acts enabled by the assessment discourse. The research questions are: What meanings do the students attribute to education and the formal assessments? How are the students affected by assessments? What alternatives do the students have to navigate among the assessments made in school? The study has a specific interest in illuminating how assessments impact on subjectification and condition student’s possibilities in school. The study takes a discourse analytical approach, and a theoretical framework based on the theories of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman is used to analyze how students’ possibilities are conditioned by assessments. The result shows that students are aware of constantly being under their teachers’ gaze. They consider the assessments to be serious and fair and depict their will to follow the guidelines given to them through assessments. However, the assessment discourse creates and reaffirms teacher and student positions. This means that students adapt to teachers’ expectations in order to receive positive evaluations and better grades. Thus the assessment discourse contributes to disciplining and normalizing students and their everyday life in school. The language used in the assessment discourse is an obstacle for the students when it comes to gaining full access to the tools for improvement and change, which they understand is expected of them
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| 246. |
- Sjöberg, Marlene, 1973
(författare)
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Samtal om undervisning i naturvetenskap - Ämnesdidaktisk kollegial utveckling i lärarutbildning och lärarprofession
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall aim in this thesis is to explore professional conversations about science teaching experiences, both in an educational setting with student teachers, and in a local professional development project with a science teacher team, regarding possibilities for developing professional knowledge in a collegial setting. Two empirical studies were conducted. Study 1, focusing on student teachers’ conversations in the educational setting of a one-year complementary teacher education program for student teachers with an academic degree in science, technology and/or mathematics. The empirical material was collected from non-compulsory additional meetings involving three to six student teachers, which were audio-recorded. In Study 2, the empirical setting was a collaboration with a science teacher team and researchers in a two-year project for local professional development, in which four science teachers at a lower secondary school met for teaching planning once a week. Study 2 includes four of these meetings, which were audio-recorded, at which the science teachers focused on both designing and following up on a summative test in the eighth grade involving the human body. Both studies were designed to establish reflective conversations about science teaching and student learning, including considerations for teaching a specific science topic, based on teaching experiences in science classrooms. A phenomenographic approach was used to identify qualitative differences in the conversations. In addition, the content of the student teachers’ reflective conversations about teaching experiences was further investigated in terms of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The findings show how professional conversations about science teaching experiences for teaching build on two central and interdependent dimensions: the qualitative content of the discussion, and the establishment of a common object of discussion. Collegial development of professional knowledge for science teaching by way of conversations requires contemporaneity and interplay in both dimensions of the conversation. The varying character of discussions when it comes to the interplay between their central dimensions implies varying possibilities for learning and development, for both individuals and their colleagues. This thesis highlights challenges in establishing structured and reflective conversations based on science teaching experiences, which implies the importance of offering student teachers possibilities to participate in conversations, with the aim of preparing them for future professional development. In the context of teachers’ professional development, the contemporaneity in complex content and interaction needs to be considered and not taken for granted, in order to contribute to the possibilities for developing professional knowledge in a collegial setting for teaching science.
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| 247. |
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| 248. |
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| 249. |
- Sträng Haraldsson, Monica, 1948
(författare)
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Yngre elevers lärande om naturen. En studie av kommunikation om modeller i institutionella kontexter
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of the study is to draw attention to and examine how young students (approximately 5-13 years) are involved in communication about nature, what approaches to nature are mediated in the social practices of preschool, school, and a science center, and how functional these approaches may be as providing learners with tools for making sense in other situations in everyday life and society. Empirical investigations were carried out by observations, tape recordings and video recordings of interaction in different educational contexts and presented in three studies. The first study is about a group of preschool children (5 years old) and their teacher visiting an exhibition about the water flow at a science center and the teacher communicating with the children about their visit during circle time at the preschool. The second study is about conversations about the water cycle between teachers and young students (8-10 years old) at a primary school, with a prop in the form of a photograph taken in a real rainforest. The third study is about students (12-13 years old) working in pairs in a computer-simulated micro world of ecological processes on an African savanna. Taking a sociocultural perspective, the results indicate that in all the studied contexts, the conversations between the students and teachers were characterized by being indistinct, i.e. not being conducted within a distinct discourse. The students had difficulties following the teachers’ communication strategies. It seemed to be important for the teachers that the students themselves understood what the conversation was about and to arrive at the right answer. Students’ possibility to express their knowledge is closely dependent on the adults’ strategies. The most successful strategy for students is to follow the teacher’s way of speaking. This leads to the fact that some students succeed to talk in such a way that is expected by the teacher in the conversation. When the teacher is absent the students make sense by referring to their previous experience. Without support by the teacher the students thus thematize nature on their own terms. In the investigated activities the models are handled as if being self-illustrative. Models, as such, and how they are related to what they refer to was never explained by the teachers in the studied activities.
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| 250. |
- Svensson, Malin, 1976
(författare)
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Hoppet om en framtidsplats. Asylsökande barn i den svenska skolan
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis explores how accompanied refugee and asylum-seeking children experience everyday life in Sweden. During the asylum process, as part of a policy for promoting ‘normal life’, these children have the same right to education as permanently resident children. An ethnographic approach brought out data from combining interviews with participant observation and visual material produced by children. Methodological inspiration was sought in the new sociology of childhood and in its potential to make an eclectic analysis of the empirical data. Study I explores how spatial and temporal dimensions theoretically may guide dialogue with refugee children and interpretation of their visual material. The findings point to how children negotiate opportunities for the future where everyday life takes place, and how conditions for education are perceived in relation to their future prospects. Inquiring into the meaning of school, Study II explores the sense of possibility as perceived by asylum-seeking children, and shows how school is a social place that provides structure, a sense of belonging and a learning environment. Paradoxically, schools’ limited attention to the children’s predicament risked accentuating the ambivalent social position of being an asylum seeker and thus weakening the benefits of their right to education. Study III examines the challenges teachers face, as street-level bureaucrats, in catering to the needs of asylumseeking pupils and demonstrates how conflicting goals of education policy and asylum policy conditioned teachers’ work and risked undermining the compensatory pedagogical task. In sum, through analyses that encompass how an unsecured residence permit does not prevent children aspiring to their futures, as envisioned in the present, creating a home can be understood in terms of hope. While the asylum process conditions ideas of the future, the thesis contributes to an understanding of how it also shapes how children and teachers, as social actors, construct what is considered to be ‘normal life’ during the asylum process.
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