| 1. |
- Holmqvist, Diana, 1984-
(författare)
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Adult Education at Auction : On Tendering-Based Procurement and Valuation in Swedish Municipal Adult Education
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Our understanding of adult education’s purpose and value is linked to how we think ‘good’ education should be organised and provided. This thesis explores the interplay between organisation and values by looking at how conceptualisations and valuations of adult education are affected when private providers become involved in public education.For this purpose, the study draws on the example of Swedish municipal adult education (MAE). On the one hand, Swedish adult education is organised to compensate for structural inequalities and mitigate barriers to participation in education for citizens. On the other hand, private providers are allowed to make profits from their involvement in public education. Sweden’s combined commitment to universal welfare and the market make this a particularly interesting case to examine. Mainly contracted through tendering-based procurement, for-profit companies (and to a lesser extent non-public organisations) now service almost half of all MAE course participants. The thesis explores how municipalities construct the value and purpose of MAE when placing orders with private providers, and how teachers working in MAE reflect upon the purpose and value of MAE.Drawing on empirical data from both procurements and interviews, the study shows that municipalities use tendering-based procurement to shape the public-private partnership and promote different values. On a national level, this creates a heterogenous landscape of adult education provision and valuations. Furthermore, the study shows that there are tensions between MAE teachers’ professional self-conceptualisations and the realities put forth by policy or constructed in the procurement process. Analysing how teachers navigate these tensions, the study shows that teachers work to resist reformation, while they also become complicit in enforcing values promoted through policy and procurement.
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| 2. |
- Mufic, Johanna, 1991-
(författare)
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“Quality Problems” in Swedish Municipal Adult Education : The Micropolitics of Quality Construed in the Audit Society
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis was to analyze and critically scrutinize how quality is construed in an audit process in Swedish Municipal Adult Education (MAE) and the discursive effects. Drawing on adult education policy documents and observations of a quality audit process, as well as the Swedish Schools Inspectorate’s (SSI) Day, this study also contributes to the uncharted field of how the micropolitics of “quality” is being produced in the Audit society within adult education. By applying Carol Bacchi’s post-structural, Foucault-influenced ‘What’s the “problem” represented to be?’ approach, it became possible to analyze the politics of “quality” on a micro level. The results indicate that quality seems to be construed as a ‘lack’ or a ‘problem’ in Swedish MAE policy and during the quality audit that SSI carried out in MAE. Moreover, principals, teachers and heads of education seem to be held responsible for this lack as the increased need for flexibility and individualization is stressed as a solution to the ‘quality problem’. There also seems to be an ambiguity of how quality should be addressed, defined, audited, and produced in MAE, as the SSI seem to struggle with making quality measurable for it to be auditable. The analysis shed light on two different logics that underpin the way that quality is construed; on the one hand, it is construed as something elusive that can be used to pinpoint quality in teaching and schools. And on the other hand, it is construed as something quantitative and limiting that has effects on what can be said and done in MAE. There also seems to be a hierarchy between different ‘problems’ during the SSI’s audit of MAE which also have consequences for what can be said and done about quality in this context.
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| 3. |
- Aman, Robert, 1982-
(författare)
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Impossible Interculturality? : Education and the Colonial Difference in a Multicultural World
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An increasing number of educational policies, academic studies, and university courses today propagate ‘interculturality’ as a method for approaching ‘the Other’ and reconciling universal values and cultural specificities. Based on a thorough discussion of Europe’s colonial past and the hierarchies of knowledge that colonialism established, this dissertation interrogates the definitions of intercultural knowledge put forth by EU policy discourse, academic textbooks on interculturality, and students who have completed a university course on the subject. Taking a decolonial approach that makes its central concern the ways in which differences are formed and sustained through references to cultural identities, this study shows that interculturality, as defined in these texts, runs the risk of affirming a singular European outlook on the world, and of elevating this outlook into a universal law. Contrary to its selfproclaimed goal of learning from the Other, interculturality may in fact contribute to the repression of the Other by silencing those who are already muted. The dissertation suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, which is not framed in terms of cultural differences but in terms of colonial difference. This argument is substantiated by an analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad, which derives from the struggles for public and political recognition among indigenous social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. By bringing interculturalidad into the picture, with its roots in the particular and with strong reverberations of the historical experience of colonialism, this study explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook. In this way, the dissertation argues that an emancipation from colonial legacies requires that we start seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.
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| 4. |
- Bredlöv, Eleonor, 1982-
(författare)
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Shaped for beauty : Vocational and gendered subjectivities in private education for the beauty industry
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis was to answer the question: How are vocational, gendered subjectivities produced in vocational education for the beauty industry? Drawing on Foucault and poststructural feminist theory, this question is answered in four papers, in which the material consists of beauty-school recruitment and marketing material, interviews with skin and spa therapy students and observations of practical skin and spa therapy training. These are educational arrangements that are closely bound to the economic sector of the beauty industry, and they have remained remarkably unexplored. Various aspects of subjectivity production are explored throughout these papers: Paper I shows how the potential beauty student is shaped through processes of responsibilising and individualising in recruitment; Paper II shows how a scientific and caring professional emerges; Paper III shows how students learn to adopt a critical gaze towards bodies; and Paper IV shows how students are produced as emotional workers and learners, taking Hochschild’s term “emotional labour” as a point of departure. The results show how (medical) scientific knowledge becomes a resource in the production of the skin and spa therapy professional, mobilising gender relations of power, and neglecting other types of skills and knowledge. However, relational and caring aspects of work and learning emerge in the study through the way in which wider discourses of femininity inform the ways in which students are produced as professionals.
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| 5. |
- Mbabazi, Penelope B.
(författare)
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Quality in Learning in Rwandan Higher Education : Different stakeholders’ perceptions of students’ learning and employability
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of the thesis is to investigate quality in learning in higher education in Rwanda by focusing on students’ learning and their employability. This focus allows for an understanding of key challenges for Rwandan higher education to emerge, at a time when more and more students are enrolling. Higher education is being rebuilt after the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda and the focus on quality in learning and preparing students for work life is thus timely and important. The empirical material comprises interviews with students, teachers and employers. Interpretation of this material is guided by perspectives on quality in learning: students’ approaches to learning, learning as transformation and employability. A meta-ethnographic analysis of the four articles on which the thesis is based generated five themes as central quality aspects of learning that could enhance the employability of graduates: becoming professional, skillful practices, becoming a learner, becoming responsible and international experience. The results illustrate that students have to some extent different views from employers and teachers regarding questions about quality in learning. Thus, it could be of value for policy makers and teachers to listen to what the students have to say when designing policy and curriculum in higher education in Rwanda.
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| 6. |
- Rahm, Lina, 1973-
(författare)
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Educational imaginaries : a genealogy of the digital citizen
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis makes use of a genealogical approach to map out and explainhow and why computers and citizenship have become so closely connected.It examines the historical continuities and disruptions, and the role thatpopular education has played in this interrelation. Drawing on previousresearch in the overlap between Swedish popular education history andhistorical computer politics, this thesis adds knowledge about howimaginaries of popular education, operating as silver bullet solutions toproblems with computerization, have had important functions as governingtools for at least 70 years. That is, Swedish popular education has since the1950s been imagined as a central solution to problems with computerization,but also to realize the societal potentials associated with computers.Specifically, this thesis makes two contributions: 1) Empirically, the thesisunearths archived, and in many ways forgotten, discourses around thehistorical enactment of the digital citizen, and the role of popular education,questioning assumptions that are taken for granted in current times; 2)Theoretically, the thesis proposes a conceptual model of educationalimaginaries, and specifically introduces the notion (and method) of‘problematizations’ into these imaginaries.
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| 7. |
- Sandberg, Fredrik
(författare)
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Recognition of Prior Learning in Health Care : From a Caring Ideology and Power, to Communicative Action and Recognition
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the last decades Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) has become a more frequently used method to recognise adult’s prior learning. This thesis analyses a process of RPL in health care, where health care assistants are assessed against subjects in the upper-secondary health care program. Prior research on RPL is to a high degree non-theoretical and focus is primarily on policy level research. This thesis adds to the field by progressing a critical social theory perspective on RPL. In the thesis the RPL process is analysed through Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Axel Honneth’s Recognition theory. General questions posed are: What are the power issues in the RPL process? What implications does the tension between the lifeworld of work and the system of education have? What consequences does mutual understanding and communication have for the outcome of the RPL process? What part does recognition play for the participants? The results disclose the power relations that emerge in the relationship between participants and teachers. A caring ideology is developed and problematized. Further, the importance of mutual understanding between participant and teachers in the assessment of prior learning is discussed focusing on the consequences a lack of mutual understanding could have for the outcome in such assessments. On a macro level the analysis demonstrates the tension between the participants prior learning and the educational systems demand for formalising prior learning. In addition, analyses of a more developmental character that intends to show the potential for critical learning, change and recognition are progressed.The results suggest that communicative action can be used to develop RPL into processes focusing on critical learning and change. Recognition of traits and abilities could also enhance individual’s positive relations with the self. Such recognition could develop self-confidence and thus RPL could encourage learning and cultivate continuing self-realisation through work.
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| 8. |
- Andersson, Per, Professor, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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Kunskapers värde : Validering i teori och praktik
- 2023. - 3
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Denna bok ger en introduktion till validering av kunskap och kompetens, närmare bestämt den ambition som finns i vårt samhälle att värdera och ge erkännande åt vad människor lärt sig oavsett var, när och hur detta skett.Validering sätts i relation till hur vuxnas lärande organiseras och till de skilda sätt på vilka valideringstanken gestaltat sig. Vidare visas hur validering förhåller sig till olika teorier om kunskap och lärande samt till den i sammanhanget så viktiga kunskapsbedömningen. I boken presenteras några modeller för hur validering kan organiseras och genomföras i praktiken, liksom de roller som olika aktörer har i en valideringsprocess. I denna nya upplaga har innehållet reviderats och uppdaterats, bland annat har ett kapitel om kvalitet i validering lagts till. Boken riktar sig främst till blivande och yrkesverksamma personalvetare, yrkes- och studievägledare samt lärare, men även till andra som berörs av frågor kring värdering av kunskap och kompetens.
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| 9. |
- Andersson, Per, Professor, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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Lärares tolkning och tillämpning av styrdokument i kommunal vuxenutbildning
- 2023
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I denna forskningsrapport presenteras en omfattande studie av hur lärare verksamma inom komvux olika skolformsdelar tolkar och tillämpar de läroplansanknutna styrdokumenten i sin undervisning. Med hjälp av läroplansteoretiska begrepp diskuteras resultat från en enkät som har besvarats av 1321 lärare och intervjuer som har genomförts med 63 lärare. Studien visar att de läroplansanknutna styrdokumenten utgör en ram som tolkas och tillämpas av lärare i relation till en rad andra ramar som exempelvis tid, elevsammansättning, läromedel, marknadsorganisering och fragmentisering. Sammantaget pekar resultaten på ett behov av en översyn av komvux styrdokument likväl som villkoren för lärarnas undervisning med syfte att få dem mer samstämmiga.
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| 10. |
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