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- Eckeskog, Linn, 1984-
(författare)
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Kommunikation i förskolan : förskollärares och barnskötares kommunikation med föräldrar i ett digitaliserat medielandskap
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall aim of this doctoral thesis is to study communication work among personnel in Swedish pre-schools, with a particular focus on mediated communication with parents. The purpose is also to analyse what roles are given to the professionals in this communication, to identify what subject positions are constructed and to identify how boundaries are managed within the communication practices.The primary theoretical framework of the thesis is social constructivism and symbolic interactionism. The pre-school organisation and identities are regarded as in a perpetual state of becoming and changes in the media landscape are viewed as rearranging the preconditions for communication practices. Technical innovations are regarded as social products at both ends. Results build upon observations in five pre-schools, interviews with 32 pre-school employees and multimodal analysis of communication material directed to parents. Additional interviews and document studies were conducted in the form of a case study, in order to gain knowledge of the implementation of a digital learning platform.The study shows that the communication environments differ between pre-schools, e.g. concerning how and which mediums are used. Several obstacles to communication are identified, of which many (but not all) are related to the socioeconomic status of parents. Within the mediated communication, pre-school personnel to some extent position themselves as experts concerning practical and pedagogical questions, whilst parents are positioned as actors in need of guidance. A major function of mediated communication is assigning parents’ responsibilities in relation to the pre-school, along with norms regarding what constitutes the “good” (pre-school) parent. Boundary work in relation to parents is conducted using different modalities, used for hedging but also for establishing professional positions. Digitalisation appears as a negative force when introduced top-down, without regards to the needs, previous practices and preconditions within a particular pre- school; but as a positive force when initiated by the professionals themselves and when responding to particular needs within specific pre-schools. As expectations on digitalisation in pre-schools increase, questions of preconditions and communication skills grow in prominence.Although expectations on pre-school professionals’ communication skills are high, communication with parents is not sufficiently acknowledged as part of the actual work in pre-schools. A sign of (and reasons for) the under prioritisation of communication work is the uneven and arbitrary preconditions for communicating, in the forms of relevant education, time and technical equipment. The lack of resources can be connected to three issues: A working environment issue (discrepancy between expectations and preconditions), a democratic issue (communication being random rather than planned/ considered) and a professional issue (multimodal communication not reflecting the professional identity that informants strive towards).Communication with parents (and surrounding society) needs to be acknowledged as part of the work in pre-school, and the personnel need to be given the necessary skills and conditions for communication, in order to provide equality of ac- cess to the parents, but also to give personnel the possibilities of communicating about and reflecting the pre-school organisation as they know it.
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| 2. |
- Hartung, Kerstin, 1989-
(författare)
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Paths to improving atmospheric models across scales : The importance of the unresolved scales
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Correct representation of physical processes, the parametrizations, and their interaction with the resolved circulation is crucial for the performance of numerical models. Here, focus is put on understanding model biases and developing tools to alleviate existing biases. Atmospheric blocking can divert the typical atmospheric flow for several days up to weeks and thereby impacts the mean climate of the region experiencing blocking. Models typically underestimate the frequency of atmospheric blocking. Based on results from the global climate model EC-Earth, it is found that the atmospheric model resolution is not strongly influencing the representation of atmospheric blocking once the grid reaches about 80 km grid length in the horizontal. Updating several physical parametrizations, and thereby the model version, is the largest contributor to advancements in simulating atmospheric blocking. The importance of the topography for the large-scale atmospheric flow is further investigated with the reanalysis ERA-Interim by applying a simplified theoretical analysis. It is found that the idealized topographic forcing theory can explain some part of the observed large-scale properties of the flow, though the method does mainly produce relative results. The explained part of the large-scale structure is increased during periods of northwesterly flow and when the flow impinges the mountain ridge almost orthogonally.Small-scale processes acting in air masses transported from midlatitudes to the Arctic are also discussed. Numerical models often struggle with representing the stable conditions in the Arctic and tend to underestimate the downward longwave impact during cloudy conditions. A comparison of single-column models (SCMs) indicates that most models can capture the bimodal longwave distribution which develops from alternating cloudy and clear-sky conditions. SCMs are often used for model development as they allow to decouple the parametrized physical processes from the large-scale environment and enable many parameter sensitivity tests. A new tool is presented which can be used for the development of physical parametrizations in marine and polar conditions. It combines one-dimensional models of the atmosphere and ocean, including sea-ice, into a coupled atmosphere-ocean SCM (AOSCM). The presented setup constitutes an advantage compared to SCMs of one component because the coupling is directly modelled and the interaction between the respective boundary layers does not dependent on prescribed boundary conditions.
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