| 1. |
- Pedersen, Helena, 1968-
(författare)
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The School and the Animal Other : An Ethnography of Human-Animal Relations in Education
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How human-animal relations are expressed and negotiated has significance for the situation of animals in society and offers insights that contribute to our understanding of how we organize relations between humans as well. This critical ethnographic investigation is positioned at the intersection of education research and the interdisciplinary area of human-animal studies. It uses participant observation, interviews with students and teachers and critical discourse analyses of texts and other artefacts used in the schools investigated to contribute cross-curricular perspectives on how human-animal relations are configured in the daily activities of both vocational (animal caretaker) and university preparatory programs. Building on central ideas from the Frankfurt School, the study proposes a platform for a critical theory of human-animal relations in formal education that embraces species-inclusive versions of critical pedagogy as well as gender and postcolonial analyses. In this vein, the study explores how social processes and practices in and outside the classroom enable certain human as well as animal subject positions while disabling others. A primary question is how a species-discourse intersects with categories formed around conceptions of gender, race/ethnicity, and class. A variety of ascribed animal representations and positions embedded in these processes are identified.The study argues that human-animal relations are characterized by indeterminacy and contradiction. While the school may educate to achieve improved conditions for animals inhuman society, it is at the same time involved in a process of social and cultural reproduction that normalizes the accessibility of animal bodies for human purposes. At the heart of this reproduction process lies boundary work around the animal as “other”. Such conceptualizations at times conflict with the views of animals that students bring with them to school and they therefore receive guidance about the “appropriate” position of animals in society; guidance that at the same time allows students to keep intact a sense of self as caring and moral actors toward animals. The school has a repertoire of concrete strategies for achieving this, and the effects of these strategies are identified as key components in a hidden curriculum of human-animal relations. The analyses show that these effects constitute a shared frame of reference of commonsense knowledge about animals in which contradictions embedded in human-animal relations can be comfortably accommodated. In addition, analytical tools borrowed from postcolonial theory are proposed that contribute to understanding the operations of hegemonic discourses of human-animal relations in the classroom as well as the effects generated by resistance to these discourses.
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| 2. |
- 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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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Cederqvist, Anne-Marie, 1970-
(författare)
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Seeing the parts, understanding the whole : A technology education perspective on teaching and learning in processes of analysing and designing programmed technological solutions
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Analysing and designing Programmed Technological Solutions (PTS) has been introduced as a part of technology education in an effort to bring elements of programming into the curriculum for compulsory school, in order to develop pupils’ understanding of how PTS work and are controlled by programming. However, what an appropriate understanding entails at this level remains to be articulated, particularly how this understanding looks from a pupil’s perspective. Such descriptions are paramount for allowing teachers to make pedagogical decisions on what specifically is to be addressed in the classroom. The challenges are increased by a dependency on programming materials, which give a structure to teaching and learning that is not necessarily in line with pedagogical needs. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to identify key elements that are important to address in teaching and learning technology in the processes of analysing and designing PTS. The knowledge domain of PTS, in relation to technological literacy, frames the results from three phenomenographic studies that investigate the ways pupils (aged 10-14) experience PTS when analysing and designing PTS in the contexts of the BBC micro:bit material and PTS from everyday life. The results show that understanding programming concepts and how to produce code are key elements, and most importantly, that there are other key elements embedded in the processes that it is necessary to direct attention to. These are: knowledge related to the dual nature of PTS; knowledge related to the programming material used in the processes; the relevance structures provided by the contexts in terms of experienced partwhole structure of PTS; and the use of systems thinking to discern the partwhole structure of PTS. Together these direct attention to the structural and functional nature of PTS, which must be understood in order to understand how PTS can be controlled by programming. Thus, these key elements are important to consider in pedagogical practice in order to promote learning with regard to PTS
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| 5. |
- Eklöf, Anders, 1956-
(författare)
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Project work, independence and critical thinking
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies how students do projects in a Swedish upper secondaryschool. The students have to produce products and at the same time provethem self as independent in relation to the teachers, and negotiate therequirements of the project setting and the written instructions within thegroup. The study focuses on what comes out as problematic for the students,how they solve these dilemma situations and what resources are used in orderto do so.A choice was made only to analyse student group interaction in parts ofthe project process where the teachers were not physically present thus fillinga research gap.The empirical material was collected during three years in sex secondaryschool classes through filmed sessions of groups or pairs working with theirproject.Each of the four articles primarily focuses a special dilemma; structure,independence, instructions and critical thinking. By combining Goffman’sframe analysis with the concepts of risk and uncertainty from a Risk – societyperspective, issues related to what it means to do project work asindependent, critical 21st-century learner are illustrated and discussed.The choice to look only at situations in which students have to managewithout the aid of a physically present teacher illuminates several practicalconsequences like an unwillingness to go to the teacher and ask questions andan increased concentration on and interpretation of the written instructions. Adevelopment of Miller and Parlett’s (1974) discussion of student approach tocues are suggested. The concept of the cue choosing student are constructedin order to better respond to demands from an individualised interactionsociety. The study also emphasises how the students have to balance differentframeworks in order to be both authors and assessed students. Byimplementing a risk society perspective new ways of analysing andunderstanding independence and classroom interaction is suggested and arecontextualization of critical thinking proposed.
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| 6. |
- Göthberg, Martin, PhD, 1959-
(författare)
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Interacting : Coordinating text understanding in a student theatre production
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present dissertation explores student actors’ and their teachers’ coordination of text understanding in a theatre production – a two-semester process from page to stage in an upper secondary school in Sweden. With an interest in the collaborative work achieved in and through theatre education the research is realized against a background of the role of arts education and reading of literary texts in the neoliberal educational landscape that favors measurable effects of individual achievements. The overarching aim is to explore how text understanding evolves collaboratively as the participants transform drama text into stage text. This aim is pursued by investigating moment-to-moment contingency of unfolding social interaction in theatre activities grounded in a particular drama text. Analytically, such a focus is pursued by employing sociocultural and dialogical approaches to meaning making, creativity and learning. Data has been generated from ethnographic observation and video- and audio recordings of the participants’ staging of Molière’s The Affected Ladies, including the process from the first reading to the last performance. The unit of analysis applied to the data is tool-mediated activities, encompassing the participants, their interactions and the tools used. Three studies are reported through two articles and a licentiate thesis. The studies complement each other as the analytical work moved from ethnographic orientation into finer-grained scrutiny of talk- and action-in-interaction. The research design allows investigation of the micro-genesis of specific text understanding in relation to the overall transformation of a literary text into stage text, in which complexity of text understanding in artistic practice can be demonstrated. The results illustrate the situated, interactional ways in which the participants progressed from a position as newcomers to the drama text into a position of mastering the stage text. The findings show that anchoring text understanding in experiences in the material world developed the student’s perspectives on the text and expanded their action possibilities. They also show that students’ informal and playful role-playing provided the spaces necessary for appropriation of cultural and social interactional means that the students later re-used in rehearsal of scripted dialogue and in the stage text. One of the productive features was the dynamic, laminated interaction, including hybrid role-taking, in which substantial student agency surfaced. Such interaction supported collaborative realizations of meaning potentials in the situated habituation of characters’ manners. Stretched-out over the production period, the micro transitions of text understanding formed salient examples of emergent learning across formal and informal situations. There seems to be good arguments for doing more things with literary texts than ‘just’ reading them, in order to explore their inherent dynamics as layers of cultural meaning. To reduce learning arrangements to what seems efficient to reach measurable goals for the individual appears ill-judged considering the educational potentials of collaborative, creative, explorative and transgressive forms of learning illustrated in the present research.
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| 7. |
- Jonasson, Kalle, 1976-
(författare)
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Sport Has Never Been Modern
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sport has often been understood as a set of formalised physical contests, and moreover as something inherently modern. New conceptions of the term implicates that sport ought to comprise all physical activity. However, the studies and approaches that describe the range and tension between those positions are lacking. The thesis addresses this lacuna and suggests that the aforementioned conceptions could be inquired as the narrow (physical contest) and the broad (physical activity) understanding of sport. The work presented in this thesis sets out to outline a theoretical and methodological framework that could comprise the different conceptions of sport. This framework is laid out with inspiration from Bruno Latour’s symmetrical anthropology. The empirical material was collected from an array of sources with a broad range of ethnographical methods. Four sporting practices (break time football, parkour, eSport, and company table tennis) that embody the tension between the broad and the narrow are inquired into in the articles. The comprehensive framework that the thesis seeks to outline takes form in shape of the different concepts (“dromography,” “minor sport,” and “the art of tracing”) constructed within the articles. It is concluded that the broad understanding of sport threatens to hollow the term. However, the narrow understanding of sport tends to downplay the material dimension of modernity. It is argued that the connection between the material and the social dimension of sport, with regards to categories such as age and gender, mustn’t be neglected in the study of sport. Furthermore, it is argued that the competitive element of modern sport is related to modern science in an unexpected way that adds new understanding to the ontology of modernity in general.
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| 8. |
- Henry, Alastair, 1963-
(författare)
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L3 Motivation
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this thesis was to study secondary school students' motivation to learn a second foreign language in addition to English. In addition to the empirical investigation of L3 motivation over a program of study and the testing of the widely-held assumption that L2 English impacts negatively on L3 motivation, the aim was also to contribute to the conceptual development of self-based motivation theory by examining the evolution and development of language-speaking/using selves, and by addressing the issue of interference between different self-guides. In Studies I and II the L3 motivational trajectories of two samples of secondary school students (n=532, n=169) were mapped across grades 4 – 6 (Study I) and grades 6 – 9 (Study II), with a particular focus on differences in the trajectories of girls' and boys' ideal language-speaking/using selves. The results of Studies I and II revealed a pattern where initial gender differences, although remaining stable after a year of learning, thereafter follow different developmental paths. While boys' ideal L3 selves declined by the end of grade 9, girls' ideal L3 selves became stronger. Although a similar pattern was found for L2 English selves, the gender gap here was not as marked. In Study III the hypothesis that, as a result of negative cross-referencing between ideal L2 and ideal L3 selves, L2 English would have a negative effect on L3 motivation was tested in a sample of 9th grade students (n= 101). Analysis of the data indicates that students are aware of the ideal L2 English self in L3 learning situations and support was found for the hypothesised negative effect on L3 motivation, with the impact being stronger among boys. In Study IV the hypothesised processes of negative cross-referencing were examined in a series of in-depth interviews with four participants selected using a maximum variation sampling strategy. Analysis of the data revealed that when cross-referencing takes place, some students seem to invoke counteracting resources. In the discussion of the findings it is suggested that, rather than interference, competition may provide a conceptually more coherent descriptor of the processes of cognition that take place in the working self-concept when more than one possible language self is active. The implications of the findings for theoretical development are discussed in relation to both qualitative applications of the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, 2005), and the proposed ID component in the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (Herdina & Jessner, 2002). Finally, the educational implications of the findings are discussed and a series of proposals for classroom interventions are put forward
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| 9. |
- 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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| 10. |
- Bivall, Ann-Charlotte, 1977-
(författare)
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Helpdesking : Knowing and learning in IT support practices
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The background of this doctoral thesis is an interest in work achievement over extended time periods in specialized and technology-infused workplaces. Globalization, digitalization and increased focus on customer services are constituent aspects that have been claimed responsible for the current changes in the way work practices and teamwork are organized. In IT helpdesk work, which is the object of study in this thesis, challenges including dissemination of information, keeping up-to-date with technological changes and coordi- nation of people and tasks have been identified as critical. The aim of this thesis is to illuminate how knowing and competence are maintained and shared as participants engage in backstage activities in helpdesk work. The focus is on the nature of the activities that unfolds when employees engage in activities that include interaction as well as artefacts. The empirical material comprises video- and audio-recorded activities of a second-level helpdesk in a large multinational IT provider. Targeted ‘hot spot’ activities are shift changes, quality discussions and introductions of newcomers. Based on a sociocultural perspective, the (re)production of professional practices is understood as continuous negotiations between participants and tools within a situated framework. Methodologically, this implies detailed investigations of authentic activities where interactions and tool use are analysed from the participant’s perspective. Three studies are included in the thesis, each of them provide insights into the organizing of shared knowing and competence. Study One focuses on how tasks and information are communicated between shifts and transformed into workable units and knowledge. Study Two addresses the role of activities specifically arranged for learning and separated from other work tasks. In Study Three, the focus is on introductions of newcomers and what can be learned from interactions with experienced participants and technological tools. The analyses show that knowledge work is a continuous and communicatively-based undertaking. Continuity across shifts relies on several documenting routines and procedures, but shift change meetings provide opportunities for interpretation and negotiation of information as well as coordination of tasks. Talking about work provides a space for reflection and reformulation of team-related quality norms and values as shared foundations for work. Furthermore, inducting newcomers to the specialized and situated practice brings about the very detailed procedures involved in managing everyday work and technological tools. By describing the reasoning and knowing displayed by helpdesk employees, the thesis contributes to discussions about knowledge work and sharing in organizational settings, teamwork, system design and lifelong learning. To conclude, it is suggested that sharing and reproduction of knowing in practice is a collective effort that entails creative involvement by members of the practice.
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