| 41. |
- Bergviken Rensfeldt, Annika, 1969
(författare)
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Opening Higher Education: Discursive transformations of distance and higher education government
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis takes as its starting point the 1990s and early 2000s political arguments for a more open and flexible Swedish higher education system. At this time, the issues of accessibility and participation were also brought into the debate by revitalized ideals of distance education. In this study, the aim has been to denaturalize and render discursive shifts visible by examining the assumptions and reasonings of “opening higher education.” The empirical material is Swedish distance and higher education policies; Government bills, Government official reports, and replies from universities and university colleges, from 1992 to 2005. The thesis draws on a Foucauldian, post-structural understanding and approach of governmentality, focusing on how discourses take part in a governing that constitutes certain problems, solutions, and rationalities, made visible in policy. The overall purpose has been to analyze how discourses suggesting widened, flexible, and democratic participation involve regulations and orderings of students, institutions, and higher education systems. The thesis includes four studies that demonstrate how discourses of openness become parts of governing distance and higher education; how rationalities of expansion and flexibility are aligned to securing higher education systems and populations, and how institutions and individuals should adjust to flexible and personalized higher education. The first study examines how a post-war, nation-based higher education expansion is re-configured in scale, into regional, IT-based, European and global spatialities. The second study examines flexible distance education in terms of gendered spatial orderings, problematically intended for female populations. The third study explores how a certain ideal subjectivity and self-technology of personalization is embedded in the notions of IT-based Learning management systems. The last study examines the discursive shift from distance education to flexible learning and how a spatial politics and polarizations of study modes (distance/flexible), university localizations (distance/campus), and ideals of distance education (distance/closeness) are produced. The analyses reveal how liberal rationalities and self-organization of individuals, populations and spatialities take part of the governing and how orderings; differentiation of systems and exclusion of populations through spatial affiliation, gender, distance and IT study modes, market and performance logics, are produced.
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| 42. |
- Bigsten, Airi, 1957
(författare)
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Fostran i förskolan
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of the current study is to generate knowledge about the preschool teacher’s incitements to action in the work they conduct around the upbringing of children, as well as how preschool teachers experience their own actions in interactions with children. The current study adopts a phenomenological lifeworld approach (Merleau- Ponty, 1962/2006; Schütz, 1966). This approach has been chosen in order to be able to understand the phenomenon of upbringing from the preschool teacher’s perspective. The study has been carried out in four different sections at four different preschools. Interaction between nine preschool teachers and 64 children (3-5 years old) at the four different sections was video-recorded. The data was comprised of video observations and interviews using the method of stimulated recall (Calderhead, 1981). In the analyses conducted three themes emerged. The first theme that emerged is The preschool teachers wish to respect each child’s uniqueness. In this theme the ways in which the unique child is met both by the preschool teachers and other children is described. The second theme is The preschool teachers want to achieve order. In this theme the ways in which upbringing finds expression through order are revealed. The third theme Existence: the preschool teachers want to lay the foundations for life in the future, shows how – both in the here-and-now, but also from a future-oriented perspective – upbringing finds forms of expression in preschool. The preschool teachers’ incitements to action indicate a striving to respect children’s rights to being unique individuals, the right to order and predictability, and the right to have hope, both in the hereand- now and in the future. These rights are relational and interrelated with one another. For the preschool teachers these rights are of importance, both from the child’s perspective, but also in relation to others. On occasions the adults can abstain from certain rights, if this is regarded as relevant in the particular situation. Rights also involve a degree of responsibility. Using these concepts, dimensions of upbringing can be identified and analysed, both in research as well as in pedagogical practice. In this way the study can contribute to creating a more in-depth understanding of upbringing and its nature, and can challenge teachers to develop their own practice and thus contribute in the ongoing development of the profession.
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| 43. |
- Bjervås, Lise-Lotte, 1960
(författare)
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Samtal om barn och pedagogisk dokumentation som bedömningspraktik i förskolan - En diskursanalys
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The preschool, nowadays an intergral part of the educational system, is to be found within a welfare state and a knowledge economy, within a society characterized by the idea of lifelong learning. As a conse-quence of this, the preschool is also a part of a strong culture of assessment and measurement of children’s development and learning, and for this purpose there are different tools which may be used by teachers. In Swedish preschools, it is common that teachers carry out pedagogical documentations where they try to capture what is happening in pedagogical practice by video recording, taking photos and writing down what children express during selected moments. The overall aim of this study is to investigate how teachers talk about children during their planning meetings when they are trying to understand together the children in relation to the documentation they have made. Two different teams of teachers in preschool, in total ten teachers, have been followed during planning meetings, each team in the course of about half a year. Data has been constructed through taperecording when the teachers were talking about the children during these planning meetings. The teachers’ utterances have been interpreted in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of communication, including his thoughts about the dialogical voice, and with analytical tools derived from Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. The results of the thesis show that the teachers’ conversations about the preschool children are multifaceted. Discourses coexist in the utterances. Sometimes discourses are involved in hegemonic struggles, and sometimes they work together. The teachers talk about preschool children both as children with an essential identity and as children who take the subject positions which the context offers. When the teachers talk about the children they go back and forth between these images of children’s identity but in spite of this, above all the teachers talk about the preschool children in a manner which describes the children as children with a lot of competence. In the utterances the teachers primarily are discussing the competencies of the children. The teachers look upon the pedagogical documentation as a tool which supports the children’s possibilities to show themselves as competent children, a tool which may help the children to use compe-tencies they already have but also to cross boundaries and become even more competent. In the utterances the teachers also agree with each other about the idea that preschool children may be limited by their age. The teachers seem to talk about the preschool children in a manner that show that they are searching for the point where the children’s capacities reach their limit, and there is nothing in the context that may help the children to cross this border. The teachers also emphasize the responsibility they have to create favourable conditions for the children’s development and learning. The children are assessed by the teachers in relation to the preschool program they take part of. The moment when the teachers document the children’s activities stands out as a critical moment when the teachers may disturb the children in their processes. In the teachers’ utterances they express that the use of pedagogical documentation in preschool offers many advantages for the preschool children and these advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
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| 44. |
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| 45. |
- Borgfeldt, Eva, 1961
(författare)
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”Det kan vara svårt att förklara på rader”. Perspektiv på analys och bedömning av multimodal textproduktion i årskurs 3.
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Drawing and coloring have been part of young students text making as long as the writing system has been used, but with the increased use of digital tools and an enlarged focus on accountability of today there is a reinforced educational interest to understand what constitutes multimodal student texts in the context of classroom practice. This thesis project overall aim is to highlight and discuss the opportunities and difficulties in the assessment of language and knowledge-developing multimodal text work in a multilingual educational context. Conceptually the study is grounded in sociocultural theories, in sociosemiotic theory and in multiliteracies research. The methods used consist of qualitative multimodal text analysis and semi-structured interviews with students and their teacher. The three empirical studies were carried out, each having a different perspective. The first study looks at the text production of students in an integrated work of drawing, coloring and writing. The second study focuses how students reason when they choose to draw, write or both draw and write when they report to their teacher what they have learned. The third study discusses what the teacher highlights when assessing her students’ multimodal text productions. Overall, the results show that the semiotic resources, images and color, dominate students’ text productions and that the teacher attaches great importance to the illustrations, but that she, despite the best intentions, has trouble using multimodal criteria when assessing the students’ different ways of expressions and semiotic resources into a whole. It seems to be problematic for the teacher to allow students to freely interpret and independently design the task while she at the same time intends to make an overall assessment of how the content is presented. The results also indicate that it is difficult for the students to verbalize their thoughts on the assessment and in practice; the teacher more often is focused on assessing abilities relating to how thoroughly the students carry out the process of documenting rather than encouraging the students to develop and express their knowledge. Finally, the thesis concludes with discussing the content of an ongoing need for research, especially regarding the consequences it may have for younger students, whatever language background they have.
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| 46. |
- Bradley, Linda, 1961
(författare)
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Language learning and technology. Student activities in web-based environments
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The impact of the web as a communicative arena, based on the use of social software, has changed conditions for communication on all levels of society; privately, at work and in education. This has opened up for multicultural communication, frequently with English as the lingua franca. Exploring how the web and web-based technologies afford learning activities is something that is related to practical and theoretical interests in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). These interests are also the foundation for this thesis. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of how web-based environments can change the conditions for language learning. Within a socio-cultural framework, the thesis explores activities and student interaction in web-based learning environments in language learning for engineering students in higher education in Sweden. The main research question is how web-based language learning activities contribute to the development of language competences. There are four more specific questions: How are web-based technologies situated in language learning environments? What forms of activities and student interaction evolve? How can web-based peer reviewing contribute to language learning? How can intercultural exchanges contribute to language learning? The empirical foundation of the thesis comprises four case studies of educational designs including student activities in blogs and wikis. Data consists of logs of student driven web-based activities and interviews. The first study investigates how students use a wiki as their joint workspace. The results show that the students either use the web page or the discussion forum on the wiki, entailing both a form-based and a content-based focus. Three types of activity patterns emerge: contributing and writing together; evaluating and peer reviewing; and arguing and discussing. The second study explores rationalities of student co-production of texts on a wiki. The patterns of interaction in groups can be characterized either as co-operation or collaboration. The results show that the collaborating groups are more frequent in giving peer response. When writing together,collaboration with contributions from diverse perspectives changes the dynamics not only of text production but the text in itself. This has potential for language learning since the students become involved in many levels of text production, from very detailed linguistic aspects to discursive and semantic aspects. The third study investigates student interaction in a poetry blog exchange with native-English speaking students from the US. In the blogging activity, the students share their interpretation of poems by a Swedish poet. The analysis of the blog postings uncovers four themes of student interaction: blogging in an educational environment; displaying cultural belonging; forming threads that thematize content and meaning of poems; and discussions of language and translation issues in an intercultural environment. Study four investigates an intercultural exchange, targeting student peer-reviewing in a wiki. The procedure of giving comments to and receiving comments from peer students from another culture offers diversity to text revision processes. Being engaged in an intercultural peer review exchange offers opportunities in getting an insight into different ways of expression, conditions of giving and receiving feedback, cultural differences when meeting someone from outside of one’s own disciplinary field and from another country and with another language background. This is in line with core issues of intercultural exchanges that concern mastering expressions of other cultures than one’s own. The four studies contribute to the understanding of how web-based environments can be used in language learning. They display a range of productive student interaction such as discussing, collaborating, and responding through text. In conclusion, they demonstrate that educational designs utilizing web-based writing technologies offer a space to develop discursive, linguistic and cultural competences.
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| 47. |
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| 48. |
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| 49. |
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| 50. |
- 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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