| 1. |
- Karlsson, Rauni
(author)
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Demokratiska värden i förskolebarns vardag
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 2. |
- Hjalmarsson, Marie, 1961-
(author)
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Lojalitet och motstånd : anställdas agerande i ett föränderligt hemtjänstarbete
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis aims to shed light on the dynamics and the complexity in the relationship between power and resistance in labour, from an employee-perspective. This is done by describing and analyzing how a group of employees in municipal home help services interpret and make use of their possibilities to act in relation to a process of change, initiated by the management, involving new technology. Hand-held computers were implemented by the management and the home helps were supposed to use them to register their daily work performance. A theoretical framework based on power and resistance in accordance with Michel Foucault and Jon McKenzie, together with Ackroyd & Thompson’s concept of self-organization, is used. The study has an ethnographic approach. The empirical material is based on a combination of participant observation, interviews and document analysis. Two major periods of observations were conducted. The first period focused on understanding the work performance and its routines. During the second period, the use of (or rather attempts to use) the hand-held computers was in focus. The interviews with 11 home helps focused on the meaning and content of their work with regards to work performance, skills and knowledge, possibilities and limitations and their opinions of the ICT project. Five management representatives, a local councillor, a software consultant and a union representative were also interviewed in order to grasp a management perspective. The results show a pattern in the actions of the home helps. It is a rational way of acting where adaptability, responsibility and reliability permeate thoughts and actions. It functions as a premise for how the home helps interpret their possibilities to act at work. They address their loyalty in several directions: to the care recipients, but also to their colleagues, to the management and to the organization as such. This rationality of loyalty is reproduced by the home helps but also by the management. The home helps are to a certain extent aware of the loyalties in their actions and every so often they use them in a conscious way. They reflect on how strong the loyalty should be and towards whom or what it should be directed. The actions of the home helps at work in general and in relation to the ICT project in particular is characterised by loyalty and consent rather than by formal resistance. The home helps don’t show any formal resistance but they do self-organization. They strive towards a relative autonomy and to maintain their dignity. This way of acting is however related to the rationality of loyalty that has a regulating influence on their informal resistance. Despite the limited and informal character of the self-organization of the home helps, it can be considered subversive. It has a possibility of undermining the exercise of power and it creates an alternative professional identity to the one offered by the management
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| 3. |
- Hjalmarsson, Maria
(author)
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Lärarprofessionens genusordning : En studie av lärares uppfattningar om arbetsuppgifter, kompetens och förväntningar
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis presents a study of the gender order of the teaching profession. It focuses on how teachers perceive meanings of the gender order in their work. It also focuses how the gender order is expressed in the interviewees’ understandings and interpretations of their assignment and work.The theoretical concept gender contract (Hirdmans, 1988, 2007) is used to interpret and analyse how teachers apprehend their work tasks and how these are carried out. Lindgrens (1985, 1999) studies of majority- and minority positions at a work place are relevant as that the amount of women and men in schools’ lower grades differ. The theoretical concept gender regime (Connell, 1996) is used to study how the overall gender order is expressed in different schools. Connell (1999) describe a hierarchy of masculinities which is used as a tool to understand how the male teachers reason about expectations from others.The thesis is primarily based on an interview study among fourteen teachers in grade three to five in an urban municipality. Some data from a questionnaire, answered by approximately 600 teachers who work with children 10-12 years old, are also included.Results show that social dimensions are intervened with pedagogic-didactic aspects, but at the same time talked about as disturbing teachers’ main assignment. Social dimensions are described as taking a lot of teachers’ time and energy, but also as “that all round”. Especially the male teachers discuss aspects as caring and relationships to pupils and describe these aspects as a source to challenge in work. From a gender perspective, it is interesting to note that it is mostly female coded aspects, i.e. relationships that are described as “that all around”. Contact with parents is highly emphasized and influenced by aspects of ethnicity. Several teachers state that norms in the pupils’ home environment and norms in school differ. Because of this, contact with parents includes dilemmas.Partly because of that, it can be hard to delimit the teacher role from the private role.Even if tasks related to social dimensions in work are described as “that all around”, the importance of the teachers’ social competence is emphasized. The teachers maintain that competence in work does not have anything to do with the gender of the teacher. Especially younger teachers tend to emphasize abilities and competences of the individual. At the same time, it seems that women and men partly handle different kinds of tasks and that certain tasks get gender coded, which corresponds to the regulations of the gender contract through which the gender order is established.Several male teachers state that they have worked as teachers for smaller groups of pupils with special needs, without having the relevant educational background. These men also told that they were recruited to handle instable groups of pupils. Thereby, they are expected to behave like “real men”, i.e. perform a hegemonic masculinity, and if they don’t they run a risk to be seen as unmanly. Feelings of shame are discussed only by male teachers. This shows that not only women but also men “suffer” of the gender order.The male teachers dwell upon strong expectations from parents to “uphold peace and quiet” in a way that female teachers don’t. However, when focusing the corresponding theme in the questionnaire, the picture changes. 91% (n=366) of the female teachers and 86% (n=235) of the male teachers feel to a high degree expectations from parents to “uphold peace and quiet”.
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| 4. |
- Johansson, Monica
(author)
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Anpassning och motstånd : En etnografisk studie av gymnasieelevers institutionella identitetsskapande
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Nearly all pupils in Sweden continue their studies at upper secondary school. A central point of departure in this thesis is therefore to examine how the upper secondary school deals with its now both complex and difficult to interpret task of ”one school for all” and to describe and analyse the creation of identity for pupils within this institution. How the creation of identity occurs in different programmes during the pupils’ period of education is specifically studied with a theoretical starting point in Anthony Gidden’s structuration theory complemented with theories that concern pupil adaption and resistance. The study was conducted at a municipal upper secondary school and used critical ethnographic research and document analysis. The programmes that were included in the study are the individual programme, the health care programme and the technical programme. Five pupil groups were followed for three school years. The results show that the differentiation of pupils within the education system is strengthened in the everyday activities of the upper secondary school. At a general school level, an explicit pupil identity is sought after, but in the different programmes different possibilities for the pupils to achieve this are discerned. The pupils are faced with different demands and expectations depending on which upper secondary school programme they are studying at. This applies to both their performances and the social relations of the positioning processes involved in being a pupil. The creation of pupils' identities is formed and developed in different ways and can also be related to the prevalence of special support, as well as to gender, social background and ethnicity. During their education most pupils strive towards adapting to the pupil identity that the school, at a general level, seeks. But they do so with varying degrees of resistance. In the thesis, the results are discussed in relation to the increased marketisation of the education system where individual performance, control and the evaluation of pupils are becoming more and more central. There is a need to critically examine these questions since they have such significant consequences for the future of young people.
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| 5. |
- Mattsson, Anita
(author)
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Flexibel utbildning i praktiken : En fallstudie av pedagogiska processer i en distansutbildning med en öppen design för samarbetslärande
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The aim of this study is to examine the pedagogical processes that evolve in an "open" design for online learning realized in relation to a specific setting. The study describes and analyzes pedagogical activities in a distance education course in higher education that uses an asynchronous conference system for communication and interaction. The study's theoretical framework is based on the CSCL field, and a socio-cultural perspective, where the aim of the research is to create artefacts and environments that support meaning making in practice. The study was conducted in an authentic environment and can be described as an ethnographic exploratory case study. The analysis focuses on how the practice is established and constituted over time. The unit of analysis is ongoing interaction between nine groups of students and their teacher. Some overall patterns has been analysed and three models of division of labour emerged in the study. The produced assignments mirror the negotiations the groups’ members have in understanding how and when they will be working with the assignments. The course had a weak educational framing and the participants were responsible for their own learning. The teacher's instructions were intentionally broad and vague, an open design, which allowed the students to use their creativity in the work. Even if the teacher was responsible for monitoring the students' discussions, she did not participate because she thought it was too difficult to understand when her active participation supported the students and when it did not. The relations between and within the structuring resources were used in learning communities and the students acted in relation to them. To understand how to divide and allocate tasks, and how to solve problems, is not only done in relationships and people's thinking, but also implicit in learning communities. This means that teachers have to design courses in new ways. The requirements for participation, interaction, and communication, must be determined. The way in which an assignment is formulated structured the students' way to solve the assignments.
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| 6. |
- Dragemark Oscarson, Anne, 1953
(author)
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Self-Assessment of Writing in Learning English as a Foreign Language. A Study at the Upper Secondary School Level
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The main aim of this study is to explore the role of self-assessment in EFL learning in developing lifelong language learning skills and in furthering the development of more comprehensive and thereby fairer assessment practices. The study explores how upper secondary school students perceived their own general and specific writing abilities in relation to syllabus goals and whether these perceptions are affected by self-assessment practices. It also explores students’ and teachers’ experiences of integrating self-assessment into everyday classroom practice. The study is based on the theory that metacognitive skills such as self-regulation and self-monitoring are important for the development of autonomous learning skills. Two teachers and four groups of Swedish upper secondary students participated in the study during one school year. Using grades, students self-assessed the results of two written assignments, namely a classroom writing assignment and a written test task. The classroom writing assignment was also analyzed linguistically by the researcher. The two teachers and eight student focus groups were interviewed about their experiences at the end of the study. The results of the study showed that at the group level students were well able to assess their general writing results in relation to the criterion (the teachers’ grades). At the individual level the results were more variable, partly depending on the type of writing activity assessed and on the amount of practice students had had of self-assessment. Students’ assessments of their writing ability in general showed a stronger relationship with teachers’ grades than did students’ assessments of their results in a particular classroom writing assignment. Students’ assessments tended to become more realistic with practice. The results also showed that the specific writing skills that students at upper secondary school focused on in their writing are spelling and grammar, rather than other skills such as sentence structure, vocabulary, paragraphing and punctuation skills. Students were self-critical with regard to these skills and tended to underestimate their performance in relation to the researchers’ assessment of the same. Students and teachers were positive to the incorporation of self-assessment activities in the EFL writing classroom and saw it as a transferable skill that underpins lifelong learning in other subject areas. The method used in a classroom assignment, where the writing process approach was coupled to self-assessment questions and non-corrective feedback from the teacher, was found to be a practical way of helping students become more aware of their language skills and language levels. Both teachers and students considered student self-assessments as contributing valuable additional information to ordinary tutoring and testing. The implications for EFL writing are that syllabus goals that encourage student responsibility and autonomy are viable and realistic, but students need to practice self-assessment, preferably from an early age, to become adept at employing the approach effectively on a regular basis.
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| 7. |
- Eriksson, Anita
(author)
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Om teori och praktik i lärarutbildning. En etnografisk och diskursanalytisk studie.
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 8. |
- Frank, Elisabeth
(author)
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Läsförmågan bland 9-10-åringar. Betydelsen av skolklimat, hem- och skolsamverkan, lärarkompetens och elevers hembakgrund
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Title: Reading skills among 9-10 year olds. The importance of school climate, collaboration between school and home, teacher competence and pupils’ home background Language: Swedish, with summary in English Keywords: PIRLS; reading achievement; school climate; safety; parental participation; collaboration; home and school partnership; teacher competence; two-level structural equation modeling ISBN: 978-91-7346-655-4 The main aim of the thesis is to acquire knowledge about conditions in the school and classroom context that are relevant to students’ reading skills. In focus are school and classroom climate and the collaboration between home and school. Also taken into account are the effects of students' home background and teacher competence. The data consists of the grade 3 sample from the Swedish participation in the PIRLS (Progress in Reading Literacy Study) study in 2001 conducted by IEA. The statistical method principally used was structural equation modeling (SEM) where theoretically grounded latent variable models were fitted to the data. The manifest variables used as indicators were selected from the teachers’, the schools’, students’ and the parents’ questionnaires. A standardized reading achievement score was used as an outcome variable. The study includes three broad steps. Based on a comparison of low and high performing classes, it identifies in the first step areas that seems to be important for achievement. In this step, a number of survey questions are also identified, which serve as indicators of the concepts identified in the next step. The second step consists of a literature review in which previous research and theory in selected problem areas are studied. Through theories and/or previous research, a number of concepts are identified whose relationship to reading achievement is examined in the next step. In the third and final step, a series of theoretically based structural equation models are fitted to the data. In the first stage, measurement models of broad constructs such as “parental participation” and ”safe climate” are identified and later included in a two-level structural model. These latent variables are related to achievement both at the individual and at the class level. The results indicate that safety as well as the collaboration between school and home play an important role in explaining differences in reading achievement between classes. Between students in classes safety also seems to be important for explaining reading skills, whilst the effect of parental participation at the individual level seems to be almost negligible. In the final analysis, the relationships between each construct and reading achievement were investigated in separate models where both teacher competence and student home background was included. It is shown that the positive effect that safety as well as parental participation had on achievement was dependent on student home background and teacher competence at the class level, but also to some extent at the individual level. The results also showed that teacher competence and student home background do not seem to be systematically related to each other. To summarise, it can be noted that there are differences between classes not only with respect to pupils’ home background and reading achievement. There are also differences in the form of climates that vary in safety but also in the extent to which the parents participate in schoolwork. It was clear that there were also differences as regards the teaching teacher’s competence. There are many indications that this competence includes not only promoting good reading skills but also creating a safe climate and positive collaboration between school and home.
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| 9. |
- Nilsen, Mona, 1976
(author)
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Food for Thought. Communication and the transformation of work experience in web-based in-service training
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The background of the present study is an interest in the use of digital technologies for in-service training activities in industry. Globalization, international competition and transnational production are elements that currently transform work practices and work organizations. In the food industry, which is the empirical context of this study, globalization has resulted in a number of changes including new forms of production, new international regulations and an increase in quality control of food and food production. These food quality initiatives and the new regulations, in turn, have resulted in a need for in-service training of staff. By analyzing how people actually engage in and use web-based environments as part of in-service training efforts, the overall aim of the research is to contribute to our understanding of the kind of communication and agency that emerges in web-based environments, and how such environments constitute contexts for communicative socialisation and learning for people employed in industry. The focus of the present study is on the nature of activities that unfolds when using digital media and learning resources in such settings. Analytically, such a focus is pursued employing a sociocultural perspective on communication and learning. Empirical material has been collected from archived chat log files from web-based in-service training courses. The results from this study, as outlined and discussed in four empirical articles, show that the participants accommodated rather smoothly to the affordances of the technology. They also managed to increase their skills and exert agency when engaging in communicative activities mediated by chat technology. Through chat interaction with other participants and experts, the course participants gradually appropriated some of the analytical tools and practices of quality assurance. Put differently, they literally wrote themselves into a different understanding of their current work practices. One of the productive features in these training activities is that they constituted hybrid contexts for learning. For instance, they are hybrid in the sense that practices of instruction, on the one hand, and practices of production work on the other, were salient resources for participation. From a pragmatic point of view, this study indicates that these activities supported by web-based technologies seem to offer feasible models for organizing distance learning in both further and in-service training
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| 10. |
- Norlund, Anita
(author)
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Kritisk sakprosaläsning i gymnasieskolan. Didaktiska perspektiv på läroböcker, lärare och nationella prov
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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