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- 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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| 3. |
- Eriksson, Anita
(författare)
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Om teori och praktik i lärarutbildning. En etnografisk och diskursanalytisk studie.
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis takes its point of departure in the discussion about theory and practice relationships in the 2001 Teacher Education Reform Act. In this reform a clear point is made concerning the connections between teacher education to research on the one hand and the teaching profession on the other, through an emphasised relationship between theoretical knowledge and practical experience. The main aim of the thesis is therefore to investigate how the theory and practice relationship appears within teacher education in educational conversations between students and between students and teacher educators. The intention is to record and analyse the content of these conversations in relation to formal policy texts and the content and organisation of the education as a whole and to try to understand more about how students in pre-service teacher education construct knowledge about their coming profession and what role conversations of the kinds focussed play in this process. The questions raised in the research are related to how theory and practice can be brought into a closer and more productive relationship, which is a key aim of teacher education since 2001 according to formal policy texts. The research has used a combination of ethnography and critical discourse analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework. Data production has been founded upon participant observation, interviews, field interviews and an analysis of policy and other texts about higher education in general and teacher education in particular. The field research has been conducted in a teacher education programme for the Swedish pre-school and early school years at one particular Swedish university. In the analysis of written policy the concepts of scientific foundations, proven experience, theory and practice were given particular attention and it was seen that these concepts are used and situated dualistically. Proven experience is the concept that seems to be most problematic of the four in so much that it is not defined in the policy documents and in texts about higher education there are several different definitions. Teacher educators predominantly use two teaching strategies to generate possibilities for students to couple theory and practice and construct professional knowledge. However, some differences were noted in the aims with conversations expressed by school/pre-school and university based teacher educators respectively. These differences created some difficulties for student teachers in constructing their professional knowledge. In their conversations students look for, compare, share, professionally relate, professionally ground, theoretically relate and theoretically ground and analyse content. Practical experience has been pointed out as important for connecting theory and practice and seems to be a precondition for students when they try to professionally ground literature and lecture content. The absence of such experiences made these activities more problematic. A performativity demand in relation to formal examination requirements tended to eclipse discussions about professional knowledge and to a certain extent this obstructed the realisations of the aims teacher educators have had.
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- Karlsson, Rauni
(författare)
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Demokratiska värden i förskolebarns vardag
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The theme of this thesis is democratic values in pre-school and how these are revealed in the children’s relations in that setting. It describes what the children take responsibility for and how they do it; how they demonstrate care in the sense of consideration, and what they show respect for and how they show it. The study was carried out within the framework of the state pre-school as portrayed in two pre-school departments in a municipality in western Sweden. The daily activity was followed in two pre-school groups comprising children aged 3-6 years, among which field studies were carried out over a total of 36 weeks. Observations focusing on the children’s behaviour and their communication both with each other and the teachers, made with the help of an open research protocol, audio-recordings and diary notes, resulted in descriptive field records, which were analysed in four stages. The understanding of domain theory was used as a conceptual tool for comprehending and explaining how values, value judgement and consensus may be distinguished and sorted. The analytical procedure has been influenced both by a perspective of positioning and power relations and interpretation based on value theory. The analysis has resulted in three thematic values, among which Responsibility is shown in the way the children behave in words and actions, meaning that the children do not speak about taking responsibility but, a fact that is central to this study, initiate responsibility. They show in different ways that they take responsibility for everyday matters both on their own behalf and on behalf of others. Care refers to the perception of others’ needs in an empathic way, and that the children demonstrate by their actions an empathic understanding of someone else. This means that care is a value that the children use in order to support each other within their cultural community as separate from adults’ perspective. In this way, their caring acts sometimes appear to be in opposition to the perspective that the teachers’ positions express. Respect is shown to be a value that means that the children, when encountering another, abstain from what they are doing or change their current position for that other person’s benefit. In certain situations, the children abstain from their self-chosen position in favour of a social convention or an opinion that is asserted, which means that respect is embedded in a complex way. Gender differences have been identified as an all-pervading theme in the empirical material. An important part of the children’s experiences takes place in the group divisions between girls and boys, which is why these affect the affinity that they develop. In the everyday structure, girls and boys participate as social actors with expectations and norms formed with the support of the gender differences that are made. Both girls and boys stress the importance of their fellowship, while at the same time a pattern can be discerned that ascribes girls and boys different degrees of agency.
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- Norlund, Anita, 1960
(författare)
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Kritisk sakprosaläsning i gymnasieskolan. Didaktiska perspektiv på läroböcker, lärare och nationella prov
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Critical reading of non-fiction is an essential activity in a range of contexts. Such activities were accentuated in the curricular reform of 1994. At that time, upper secondary education in Sweden was reorganized in order to prepare pupils in both academically and vocationally oriented education for further studies. For this reason, all pupils take the same core subject courses with the same curricular targets. Various aspects of critical reading appear in research and in the syllabus. Consequently, four aspects of critical reading run through the thesis: critical-analytical, critical-evaluative, critical-integrative and critical-ideological. The aim of this thesis is to study a recontextualising process where critical reading is relocated from academia to the upper secondary classroom. Additionally, a central aim is to study the creation of this process for students at two types of upper secondary programmes, i.e. academic or vocational programmes, which attract young people from different socio-economic backgrounds. The thesis has its theoretical base in Bernstein’s theory of pedagogy. According to this theory, the recontextualisation process involves various fields such as the official recontextualising field, the pedagogic recontextualizing field, the local recontextualizing field and the specialized field of research. Another field is added, ‘discursive changes’, where theoretical aspects from Fairclough are used. Each field contributes to the process with resources and undertakes to introduce students from the horizontal discourse (everyday and informal) into the vertical discourse (specialized and formal). The empirical material gathered for this thesis can be grouped in three parts, each representing a recontextualising field and a separate study. The first study consists of a contrasting analysis, mainly of four textbooks. The textbooks were studied using Halliday’s analytical tools. In the second study, 21 teachers were interviewed about their choices in the classroom in order to enhance critical reading of non-fiction. The teachers were selected from five upper secondary schools in three municipalities. The third study scrutinizes a national test and how it defines and evaluates reading activities. The results show that neither critical reading nor non-fiction has a dominating position in the subject of Swedish. The national test offers several factual texts in its text collection but as a result of the test process it is likely that some of the pupils pass the test without using any non-fiction text. The trends that have appeared in each study are integrated in a separate chapter that takes a closer look at the inter-relations between the actors. The actors interact and counteract. As a result of this, certain aspects of critical-reading seem to be disfavoured, i.e. critical-analytical, critical-integrative and critical-ideological aspects. In contrast to this, critical-evaluative activities receive more attention. Both textbooks and teachers equip the pupils with tools for evaluating sources. Above all, the critical-evaluative activities are favoured by other actors who emphasize the importance of ICT. Consequently, there is greater focus on truth vs. falsehood, putting critical activities at risk of becoming superficial. The striving for parity, which was accentuated by the reform in 1994, in some respects seems to have been taken seriously. In other respects, however, the results show that pupils in academically and vocationally oriented programmes encounter different teaching forms, which prevent vocational pupils’ induction into the vertical discourse. One such example is the fact that textbooks address their readers in different ways, assuming that the vocational pupils need more entertainment, warnings about the Internet and an intimate relation with the book, while the academic pupils are met by tasks, tools and instructions that support their induction into the vertical discourse, and their chances of being illegible for higher studies. The teachers interviewed both challenge and adapt to the reactions from their pupilss which appear to be both enabling and hindering induction. Moreover, they both challenge and adapt to discursive changes. The recontextualising process is nourished by discursive changes such as sensationalizing, dramatizing of risks, narcissism and conversationalization. It is important to discuss the consequences of the intricate web that makes up this process.
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