| 1. |
- Strömberg Jämsvi, Susanne
(författare)
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Unpacking dominant discourses in higher education language policy : A critical study of language policy in Swedish higher education
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall purpose of the thesis is to investigate dominant discourses operating in the changing of HE concerning questions of language policy. It has been studied at a national level, analysing reports and government bills, and at an institutional level, analysing university language policy, taking Sweden as an example. The research questions address language ideals and language competences. The analyses reveal that discourse strands of economy/market, inclusion and success operate, often entangled with each other in discursive knots, in construing what and how languages are valued, and what kind of language competences academics and students need. An overall finding suggests that economic reasons and market values have become more and more salient in construing ‘language’, concurrently defining participation and prosperity. The findings show that it is primarily Swedish and English, i.e. as parallel languages, that are construed as language ideals. Swedish, as the national language, is constructed as essential for protective and democratic reasons. Academics are construed as protectors of Swedish scientific terminology and as facilitators of Swedish scientific learning. English, as the international language, is at present constructed as essential, or inevitable, for the interests of a liberalised research and educational market. However, the findings suggest a transformation from the 1970s when English was construed as important for reasons of solidarity and worldwide responsibility. English as an obvious and natural foreign language in Sweden is construed for professional, rational and participatory reasons. Multilingualism, beyond Swedish-English bilingualism, is not valued in HE in the 2000s, nor are minority languages or immigrant languages acknowledged in relation to HE. Instead of recognising the potential linguistic repertoire of multilingual students and academics, the findings indicate that perspectives of deficiency prevail. Transnational students and academics are construed as English proficient, and only as English proficient. English-language students are construed as important for universities. Market values and market forces incorporate success for students, but also for universities through these students. The constructs of language ideals and competences in language policy of Swedish universities are interdiscursively connected to the national level. A parallel Swedish-English language ideal construes Swedish as principle and English as more relevant as educational levels get higher. Ideas of linguistic progress for students and of subject-lecturers as language teachers are prevalent. The Swedish language ideal is to a large extent construed in relation to the plain language movement. Commodifying processes operate in the construals of language by externalising language from people, construing it as an added value, an instrument or a technical matter. Finally, the educational implications of the findings are discussed in relation to academic work.
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| 2. |
- Abraham, Getahun Yacob
(författare)
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Education for Democracy? : Life Orientation: Lessons on Leadeship Qualities and Voting in South African Comprehensive Schools
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study takes as its starting point how teachers understand, interpret and teach social development aspects of Life Orientation in South African comprehensive schools. The specific focus is on lessons on leadership qualities and voting for third grade learners in four schools, each dominated by either Black, Coloured, White or mixed groups of learners. Field work with an ethnographic approach and a qualitative strategy was used to gain access to empirical data. Policy and curriculum documents, guidelines and textbooks were used. Classroom observations in four classes and interviews with 14 third grade teachers were conducted. Theoretical concepts of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction are applied. Ulf P Lundgren’s Frame Factor Theory is used to study school organization. Basil Bernstein’s Pedagogical Devices are considered when examining the different levels of pedagogical activities. To be a teacher in South Africa one needs to attend at least two years of teacher education after completing high school. Teachers in the classes studied underwent their teacher education during apartheid years. Due to limited in-service training, they sometimes experience problems of understanding and interpreting the learning area, which they usually tackle by consulting documents, colleagues or school authorities. The learners’ understanding varied based on their family background and type of school they attended. There were enormous differences in material, financial and organisational resources between classes and schools. The resources for teaching leadership qualities and voting were not, however, different between the classes. The lessons were teacher dominated and direct transmission was used as a method. The way teachers facilitated the lesson on leadership qualities and voting varied but all showed some democratic shortcomings. Apart from answering questions, learners were neither invited nor encouraged to participate to further their understanding of the theme. Limited aspects of leadership qualities were discussed, individual leaders’ roles were emphasised and the teachers picked candidates for class leaders in three of the classes. It was also evident that the class environments were not suitable for critical or creative thinking and democratic upbringing. The schools reproduced norms, values, languages and cultures of the different groups. Officially, teachers emphasised the common national South African identity. This emphasis on national identity could disguise the injustice some groups experience in society.
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| 3. |
- Cronqvist, Marita
(författare)
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Yrkesetik i lärarutbildning - en balanskonst
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of the study is to examine and to increase the understanding of how student teachers implicitly (in action) and explicitly (through oral and written statements) express and learn professional ethics and what these expressions reveal about professional ethics. Previous research has indicated that professional ethics as phenomenon is difficult to separate and to view in the meeting between pedagogue and child. Professional ethics is often unspoken and based on personal feelings and not on formulated knowledge. In this study professional ethics is examined as the student teacher´s lived practice in the meeting with the child. The study is based on life-world theory and Reflective Life-world Research (RLR). This means for example that the phenomenon of professional ethics is examined as it present itself to student teachers and that the researcher must make efforts to be open to the phenomenon, reflect on it and to bridle preunderstandings. Ten student teachers with different orientations to preschool and elementary school have been followed, eight of them from second to fourth semester in periods when university courses and school-based education meet. Empirical data is collected from interviews, observations and different written statements. Findings are presented in three parts: Part 1 presents the issues for each individual student teacher. In part 2 the essence of professional ethics is formulated as seven elements of meaning: 1) that ambiguity requires an approach to responsibility, 2) that external factors can be obstacles, 3) that relationships and learning are interwoven, 4) that experiences should be for a child´s best interest, 5) that inclusion should be available to every child, 6) that authority should be exercised through an atmosphere of joy, respect and safety, and 7) that development occurs when theory and practice meet in reflection. Part 3 is a theoretical presentation. Reflection, self-reflection, judgment and student teachers as role models emerge as the primary tools of professional ethics. These tools are dependent on each other and intertwine cognition and emotion, experiences, theories and practice. In addition to the essence of professional ethics, my conclusion is that learning about professional ethics is based on the student teacher´s life world and takes place in a lifelong learning process. Consequently, teacher education needs to support meta-learning (learning how to learn) and build education on the student teacher´s individual life world as a resource. The student teachers as role models are developed through virtuous actions continuously being performed and through teacher educators acting as role models. Judgment and phronesis are also developed in practice through student teachers´ experiences of balancing between various factors in the complex situation. Since learning is developed in practice and from experiences, school-based education becomes valuable in order to stimulate learning. Another conclusion is that experiences must be discussed and analyzed thoroughly and systematically in education. In this process reflection is crucial. Based on the findings, a didactic model, Didethics, has been created in order to implement ethics in the same way as content (subject) and methods are included in didactics. Through asking questions, the model implements ethics, links it with content and methods and follows ethics through the planning, implementation and evaluation of the learning process.
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| 4. |
- Reis, Maria
(författare)
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Att ordna, från ordning till ordning. Yngre förskolebarns matematiserande
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A starting point for this study was an interest based in my earlier experience that most of the youngest children’s mathematizing in everyday life was unspoken and unknown. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge about how toddlers mathematize and develop mathematical knowledge and understanding through activities with concrete material. The theoretical framework is based on variation theory (Marton & Booth, 1997; Marton et al., 2004), combined with ideas offered by Gibson and Gibson (1955), Gibson et al. (1962) and Gibson and Pick (2000). This framework makes it possible to describe subtle differences in how children handle a mathematical content. It holds a non-dualistic ontological position, and sees phenomena from a second order perspective, focusing on ”children’s perspectives” and the object of learning. The collected data consists of 47½ hours of video documentation of 16 toddlers’ everyday activities and arranged situations in a longitudinal study. Situations chosen for analysis is a sub-sample from a larger corpus. “Fine-grained analysis” is performed of four toddlers’ activities with nesting cups and a ring tower and their verbal and non-verbal interaction. The design of the arranged situations was that a new material was introduced, a material similar to one well known to the children. The toddlers themselves chose the material (self chosen activities) and for how long time they wanted to use it. The materials consisted of rings and cups that could be ordered according to their size and slope in series or in a tower. The results show a variety of different ways that the toddler may handle the situation. From the analysis the following categories have been identified: Building a tower without apparent order, Making an order, Bringing and maintain size order, Challenging order, Creating new order to challenge peers’ knowledge. Based on previous knowledge the child distinguished by differentiation some dimensions of variation, particularly orientation, tower property and size, and values within these dimensions of variation. The results show that toddlers discern and open one dimension of variation at a time. The first dimension of variation the children identify and open is the orientation of the cups and rings. Then what tower a cup belongs to and later the size dimension are discerned by the toddler. Finally the toddler discerns that all cups and rings have a certain place in the order, and that all rings and cups are important for the ordering. A conclusion to be drawn is that a previous value within a dimension of variation is later identified as a new value or another dimension of variation. The interest of this research was to study toddler mathematizing “in situ” and focus on how children’s mathematical development is interactively constructed “here and now”. Toddlers’ activity of this kind is a crucial preparation for fundamental arithmetics such as properties of number and basic operations. Structuring and ordering in series are important in relation to sense-making in early mathematizing.
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| 5. |
- Zimmerman, Fredrik
(författare)
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Det tillåtande och det begränsande. En studie om pojkars syn på studier och ungdomars normer kring maskulinitet
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Att pojkar generellt presterar sämre än flickor i skolan har ofta hävdats ha en relation till normer kring maskulinitet. Normer kring maskulinitetens negativa inverkan på studievanor har observerats på skolor med en dominerande ”antipluggkultur” eller en dominerande ”ingen ansträngningskultur” bland pojkarna. Vidare har det på dessa skolor uppmärksammats att denna typ av normer även har en negativ inverkan på flickors möjligheter att prestera i skolan. Denna avhandling har sitt fokus på frågan om pojkars syn på studier har en relation med normer kring maskulinitet, samt om förmågan att studera är könad. Dessa frågor har undersökts utifrån en etnografisk ansats på en högstadieskola. Den valda skolan skiljer sig mot skolor med en dominerande ”antipluggkultur” eller en dominerande ”ingen ansträngningskultur”, då en ”pluggkultur” istället dominerar bland pojkarna. Inom denna ”pluggkultur” reproduceras normer som är mer tillåtande vad gäller flickors och pojkars studerande. Att pojkarna anser att man ska studera ambitiöst medför att handlingen ”studera ambitiöst” inte ses som feminin och därför behöver inte pojkarna iscensätta sin maskulinitet genom att ta avstånd från studier, något som är fallet inom exempelvis en ”antipluggkultur”. Dock visar studien att ”pluggkulturen” till trots, reproduceras samtidigt parallella och motsägelsefulla normer som könar förmågan att studera, det vill säga normer som begränsar pojkars möjlighet att studera ambitiöst.
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| 6. |
- Baldwin, Richard
(författare)
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Changing practice by reform : the recontextualisation of the Bologna process in teacher education
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of the thesis is to investigate a specific case of curriculum change; that of organizing teacher training courses around learner outcomes in line with the Bologna process. The investigation is an example of a practitioner research case study and looks at how official Bologna policy messages are re-interpreted and recontextualised at the local micro level. A variety of methods are used to collect and analyse the data produced. A form of discourse analysis, as well as a survey of research literature, is used to identify policy discourses connected with the Bologna process. At the local micro level, local documentation as well as teacher talk in planning meetings are analysed to throw light on how the Bologna process was implemented. A number of discourses were found in policy documents; including the need to modernize higher education and to move towards a more student centred approach to learning. The thesis shows that these discourses were mediated locally by a regulative discourse portraying teachers as role models who have the task of passing on knowledge that is essential for the students to obtain before entering the profession. Instead of challenging the pedagogic identities for teachers and students, the introduction of learning outcomes acted to strengthen the fundamental vertical relations between teachers and students, cementing and confirming the level of control that teachers had over all aspects of the curriculum. Changes made in connection with the introduction of learning outcomes had a minimal influence on practice and were contested by some teacher educators. Teacher educators resisted and mediated the changes made by continuing to use their traditional practices.
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| 7. |
- Bergnell, Anneli
(författare)
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Med kroppen som illustration : Hur förskolebarn prat-skapar naturvetenskap med hjälp av multimodala och kroppsförankrade förklaringar
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to combine three research areas, namely preschool, science and illustrations, in order to examine (a) how modes are combined when references to the body are made or the body as such are used to explain scientific concepts and phenomena in preschool science education, and (b) how do the children handle, explore, discuss and talk science when approaching multimodally illustrated scientific contents in the studied activities. Four studies were conducted, all of which were built on empirically generated questions and were theoretically grounded in cultural-historical and multimodal perspectives. Participants were preschool students, aged 4-6 years, from three preschool groups, as well as their teachers and two science centre guides. Specific focus was directed toward activities where adults and children use their bodies or refer to their bodies to illustrate scientific concepts, for example, “the water circle” in a board-and-dice-game (study I); “water has the power to lift,” in experiments relating to a life-jacket (study II); stability in a drama-play and related experiments (study III); and evaporation in embodied illustrations and hands-on activities (study IV). The empirical material consisted mainly of video recordings. A multimodal approach was adopted for the analyses.The results indicate that multimodal illustrations may be complicated for this target group. Difficulties were found to intensify, rather than decrease, by the fact that different modes and elements were often intricately combined in the same illustration, presumably with the intention of providing instruction as well as entertainment. From the four studies, it became evident that, even if the current natural science offered in preschool education often is conducted as “discovery learning”, the assumption that children can learn complex content without support cannot be left unquestioned. This thesis illustrates the crucial role played by a guiding teacher when it comes to concretizing abstract scientific phenomena for young children. A conscious introduction of bodily-based elements in multimodal illustrations may be useful on such occasions. However, even with such seemingly transparent components included, we cannot take adequate meaning-making for granted.
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| 8. |
- Holfve-Sabel, Mary-Anne
(författare)
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Attitudes towards Swedish comprehensive school : comparisons over time and between classrooms in grade 6
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The main aim of the study is to understand student attitudes towards different aspects of school using data from the late 1960s and 35 years later, and to analyze the impact both from teachers and students on classroom climate. Another important aim in order to accomplish this is to develop suitable instruments and methods. The starting point of the empirical work was a 40-item attitude questionnaire that was used in the Didactical Process Analysis (DPA) project conducted in Göteborg in the late... mer 1960s, which comprised 60 classrooms and 1600 grade 6 students. This attitude questionnaire was reanalyzed using two-level confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the reanalysis resulting in seven factors describing differences in student attitudes within classrooms, three factors describing attitude differences between classrooms. The original 40-item questionnaire was expanded with 31 new items concerning school environment, teaching and interaction between the students, and between the teacher and the students. This instrument was administered to 78 classes, with the participation of 1696 students and 78 teachers in Göteborg. The first objective was to compare the attitudes of students now with the DPA investigation 35 years ago using identical items. The analysis focused both on item-level data and on factor scores computed from the two-level CFA model. The results showed a general improvement in attitudes. A differentiated picture was seen on the within-class level with significant changes in peer relational factors but not in school factors. The present curriculum with its focus on interaction aspects of learning may have implemented changes in relational patterns and created a more positive student attitude. On between-class level all three factors had increased their levels of attitudes, but the variation among classes was wide. The second objective was to analyze differences between the points of view of students and their teachers, and to analyze which factors explained classroom differences in attitudes. Differences in teacher-student perspectives were seen on item level. The students’ attitudes emphasized the importance of positive interaction with both teacher and peers. Teachers noted the level of work ambitions, stress and disturbance among students. The factors of most importance for classroom differences in attitudes concerning work atmosphere and social relations were a sensible management of deviancy, and creation of a safe and orderly environment.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Langelotz, Lill
(författare)
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Vad gör en skicklig lärare? : en studie om kollegial handledning som utvecklingspraktik
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis takes its departure from the on-going debate about teachers´(collective) ‘continuing professional development’ (CPD). Teachers’ CPD through an imposed nine-step model of peer group mentoring (PGM) is focused on. The study draws on data from a two and a half yearlong interactive project that took place in a teacher team in a Swedish school. The general aim of the thesis is to study a practice of professional development in a teacher team involving peer group mentoring and to find out how and what kind of teachers’ expertise that is constructed. Furthermore, the aim is to examine how the PGM-practice was constrained and enabled and what kind of CPD was made possible. The theoretical and methodological framework is mainly based on practice theory. Practices and practitioners are seen as mutually interrelated. Practice architectures (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008) are used to uncover the relations between the PGM-practice and its historical, material-economic, social-political and cultural-discursive conditions. Furthermore, Foucault’s notion of power was adopted as an analytical tool to examine how power came into play during the mentoring sessions and how the teachers’ discursively constructed a ‘good teacher’ and teachers’ expertise. The methodological approach is action research. A main finding of the thesis is that professional and personnel development may be imposed through peer group mentoring. Furthermore, democratic processes increased during the PGMmeetings and seemed to have an impact on classroom practice and the practice of parent-teacher meetings. The results show how the PGM–practice and its outcomes are deeply interconnected to global and local historical, material-economic, social-political and cultural-discursive arrangements which constrained and enabled it. When economic cut downs (i.e. materialeconomic arrangements) began to take effect in the local school, along with a neo-liberal discourse (i.e. cultural-discursive arrangements), democratic processes were challenged and threatened. The focus in the PGM discussions shifted from the teachers’ perceived need for pedagogical knowledge development to talk about students as costs. The constrained nine-step model disciplined some individuals more than others. The teachers disciplined each other through e.g. confessions, corrections and differentiations. Inconsistent discourses about good teaching and teachers’ know-how were constructed and the teachers positioned themselves and each other as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ teachers. The interactive research approach partly enabled the PGM-practice but at the same time effected the teachers’ positioning of each other. The interactive research approach disciplined both the teachers and the researcher. Anyhow, power relations became fluent and mutual among the participants. A collegial approach and the ability to carry out reflexive cooperation were both fostered by the model and articulated in the PGM-practice as important teacher skills.
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