| 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. |
- 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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| 3. |
- Samuelsson, Katarina, 1972
(författare)
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Teachers' work in times of restructuring: On contextual influences for collegiality and professionality.
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The research in this thesis is situated in the intersection of teachers’ work and contexts of education. It departs from an interest in contextual influences on teachers’ work and professionality under restructuring. It is to be understood as a criticism of a widespread focus, sometimes met in research and in policy, on teachers as individuals and a simplification of teachers’ work. It also departs from a questioning of representations: who has the right to problematize teachers’ work and on what basis? I explore how teachers deal as agents with changes in governance in an era of educational restructuring in order to gain knowledge about influences on teachers’ work and professionality. More specifically, the analyses show how teachers’ work is enabled or constrained by external models of governance. The thesis consists of three sub-studies, involving responses to governance, in terms of organizational structures and expectations in different contexts of education. Theory of institutional logics provides me with a contextually sensitive profession theory that deals with influences on governing work. The intention is that by studying teacher responses to educational governance in different contexts of education through theories of institutional logics the emergent characteristics of teachers’ work and professionality under restructuring can be identified and commented on. I align with research on contemporary education policy and the teaching profession and explore influences on teachers’ work under restructuring with contradictory professional expectations. Thus, in the three articles, the focus is not on the governing or educational system as such but on contextual influences on responses to organizational structures and expectations. There is rather a broad conceptual framing of governing in regard to educational restructuring in terms of marketization, privatization, governing by results and new public management.
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| 4. |
- Meyer-Beining, Janna
(författare)
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Assessing writers, assessing writing : A dialogical study of grade delivery in Swedish higher education
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Assessment feedback has been discussed as an important resource for providing students with a sense of their current performance relative to institutional expectations and with the information needed to close apparent gaps. Pointing out that this involves complex sense-making processes, recent research has stressed the need to change the nature of assessment feedback from teacher telling to student/teacher/peer dialogues. However, there is still very little empirical research that has explored the sense-making processes that become evident in such feedback dialogues in situ. This dissertation approaches assessment feedback as a unique type of communication and illuminates the issues that become relevant as participants make sense of an assignment and its institutional assessment in the context of face-to-face grade delivery in Swedish higher education. The empirical focus is on the grade conference, a specific type of assessment activity that here involved a student and his or her former supervisor. The analytical work of this dissertation is based on a corpus of ten video- and audio-recorded grade conferences from a graduate module on environmental sustainability assessment where grade delivery was connected to a student-written scientific report. In three separate studies, these recordings were approached from sociocultural and dialogical perspectives, with a particular focus on the ways in which feedback communication was situated in different streams of sociocultural activity and achieved in instances of coordinated communicative action. The findings suggest that assessment feedback, as a type of communication, involves complex forms of sense-making on two interconnected planes: in the first place, participants in the ten grade conferences made sense of their communicative roles and responsibilities in the current feedback activity. Here, teachers were found to take on a particularly pivotal role, providing guidance for student participation in each meeting. Secondly, participants also made sense of the situated meaning of the performance grade that was being delivered and on the written report on which it was based. This involved intricate negotiations of accountabilities – as student, author, assessor and supervisor – that suggest that this type of assessment feedback provides room for broader, disciplinary, discussions of what it means to be a writer, a student and a supervisor in (Swedish) higher education. These findings give support to recent calls in the literature for more dialogue in feedback, but also suggest that such dialogical feedback activities need to be designed in a way that permits disagreement and questioning of institutional reasoning, as it needs these instances of uncertainty for participants to lay open and make sense of the many assumptions that underpin the assessment of student writing – as knowledge production and knowledge display – in higher education.
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| 5. |
- Wicke, Kurt
(författare)
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Läroböcker, demokrati och medborgarskap. Konstruktioner i läroböcker i samhällskunskap för gymnasiet
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Swedish citizenship education is charged with a double mission: socialization and education of democratic citizens. This means that textbooks exist in a field of tension between conveying content as true knowledge and offering it as a perspective amongst others. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed in order to analyse how textbooks navigate between these poles. Thus, the thesis explores how ten textbooks in social science in upper secondary school construct citizenship and democracy as systems of knowledge and beliefs, relationships and subject positions, with special attention given to the question of how they regulate pupils’ civic activities. The analysis of ten textbooks showed that democracy is constructed as liberal, representative government, and that textbooks describe contemporary Swedish government as a truly democratic, rational and effective form of government. Consequentially, citizens are predominantly described as voters, as opposed to politicians. The relationship between voters and politicians was constructed as a relation of trust and a trade-off where voters exchange votes for political decisions in their favor. The relationship between text and readers is partially characterized by subordination, and partially by persuasion. The common denominator is the necessity to reproduce contemporary political structures by means of practicing citizenship - that is, voting – and by identification with existing formal political structures as democratic and superior. Thus, the overall conclusion is that textbooks enact a certain conflict between means and ends. While the end is the reproduction of liberal democracy and liberal, individual citizenship, pupils are requested to transform themselves into supporters of contemporary Swedish democracy, positioning them as not-yet-citizens and not-yet political subjects
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| 6. |
- 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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| 7. |
- Cerna, Katerina, 1986
(författare)
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Designing for learning and knowing: Nurses in chronic care and patients' self-monitoring data
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis focuses on nurses’ work practice in chronic care and their learning and knowing in relation to their patients’ self-monitoring data. It is anticipated that self-monitoring data used as a support for healthcare professionals’ work will help to overcome the current challenges the healthcare system is facing. Because of the way nurses’ work builds on learning and knowing in relation to data produced by patients, they will be expected to be able to use this kind of data when delivering care to the patients. However, we need to learn about what happens when a self-monitoring tool is developed and implemented in chronic care nurses’ work practice. The aim of this thesis was, therefore, to specifically investigate the nurses’ learning and knowing when they have access to the patients’ self-monitoring data. These issues were explored using a design ethnographic approach in a pelvic cancer rehabilitation clinic. Study I found that the nurses in chronic care intertwine the patients’ lived experience with the nurses’ medical knowledge and clinical experience to support the patients’ learning about their disease. Study II found that nurses manage the complexity of qualitative phenomena and mobile application features as a way to participate in a design process of a self-monitoring tool. Study III revealed the changes that occur in nurses’ work practice when they gain access to their patients’ self-monitoring data. Finally, the following themes across these studies were identified. First, mutual learning points to the different levels of learning that the nurses need to cope with. Second, the translation work of nurses builds on creating connections among the patients’ lived experiences, what the nurses are able to do, and the self-monitoring tools.
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| 8. |
- Nordenström, Elin, 1978
(författare)
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Feedback and instructional guidance in healthcare simulation debriefings
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall interest of the thesis concerns how students reflect upon and provide feedback on their own performance under the guidance of teachers. This interest is explored in the context of debriefing conversations that followed on simulation-based team training scenarios for healthcare students. The thesis is informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, two closely intertwined perspectives with roots in sociology. The empirical material consists of video recordings of simulation-based training conducted at two Swedish universities. In addition, video data of feedback conversations for students at a Norwegian upper secondary school is used as a basis for investigation and comparison in one of the empirical studies. The thesis addresses questions related to how the teachers, referred to as facilitators in the setting under study, work to elicit and guide student reflection and feedback, how the students approach and accomplish such tasks, and how conceptual models and principles of “good practice” feature in the activities. These questions are scrutinised in three empirical studies. Study 1 shows how video in combination with instructional questions by the facilitators is central to how the students perceive and talk about their own simulation performance. Study 2 demonstrates the characteristics and differences between student and facilitator feedback, and what instructional functions the facilitators’ feedback contributions fulfil in relation to those of the students. Study 3 examines and compares sequences in which students in two different settings assess their own performance in response to teacher questions with the aim to demonstrate the divergence between the real- time organisation of these activities and the models and principles advocated in the pedagogical literature. Overall, the results show that self- and peer feedback are complex activities that present students with difficulties of both interactional and subject-matter character. Teachers therefore have a central role in initiating and setting the agenda for the feedback discussions, keeping them active and on track, directing the students’ attention towards relevant aspects of their own performance, and demonstrating how these aspects are related to principles, standards and discourses of the students’ future professional practice.
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| 9. |
- Ohlin, Maria, 1987
(författare)
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How to Make Bicycling Safer - Identification and Prevention of Serious Injuries among Bicyclists
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall aim of this thesis was to guide current and future safety improvements that address serious injuries among bicyclists. The thesis is compiled by four studies, of which the first two aimed to identify injuries leading to loss of health from a biopsychosocial perspective, and the two following studies aimed to understand how these injuries occur and how they can be prevented. Study I investigated health-related quality of life (HRQoL), based on the EQ-5D questionnaire, while Study II investigated sickness absence (SA), following a bicycle crash. On a general level, the injuries associated with problems in HRQoL and long-term SA included mainly fractures of the hip and upper leg, fractures of the lower leg and ankle, fractures of the upper arm, fractures and sprains of the shoulder, traumatic brain injuries, and fractures and strains to the spine. Study III found that the majority (68%) of such injuries occurred in single bicycle crashes, and further 17% in collisions with motor vehicles. In Study IV it was shown that the current Swedish safety performance indicators related to cycling could address up to 22% of crashes involving injuries associated with problems in HRQoL and long term SA. In addition to the current safety performance indicators, the following five actions should be the focus of more rapid implementation: autonomous emergency braking with cyclist detection on passenger cars, extended maintenance to include all urban roads used for cycling, improved design of curbstones, and to separate cyclists from both motor vehicles and pedestrians. Overall, this thesis highlights that additional interventions targeting single bicycle crashes need to be prioritised by road authorities in order to prevent health loss among bicyclists.
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