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- Augustsson, Dennis
(författare)
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Expansive design for teachers : An activity theoretical approach to design and work integrated learning
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores how Participatory Design (PD) and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) can be combined and used as a theoretical framework and methodology in a professional development activity for teachers. A shift in the way we view teachers, from implementors to designers who actively construct, invent, and develop the practice of schooling also calls for changes in teacher education and professional development activities. The study presented here explores teachers' work and learning during a professional development activity conducted as a participatory design project between two K-12 schools in Sweden and the USA, using media production to create an international collaboration on Ocean Literacy. The work draws on central notions and practices based on the Scandinavian School of Participatory Design and the Change Laboratory methodology (CL) based on the theoretical framework of expansive learning. The thesis is comprised of three articles answering research questions about what challenges and strategies develop in a design process as a situated professional development approach and how we can understand learning as part of and expanding beyond a design process using activity theoretical tools.The first article presents a description of challenges and strategies developed by teachers in the first iteration of the design process and the results of using an activity theoretical model for collaborative analysis of the process. The second article analyses a CL intervention in the second iteration of the design process, adopted after the results of the first iteration. The analytical focus here was placed on empirical manifestations of the epistemological principles of the theoretical framework of expansive learning. The third article explores the occurrences and cyclicity of the learning actions postulated by the theoretical framework in the same intervention through a detailed analysis of the participants' discourse in the process. The thesis comes to a conclusion with a tentative formulation of design principles based on findings from the studies.The results point to how innovative educational design can have consequences for teachers' work with conflicting needs, tensions, and contradictions at the systemic level of the activity. PD processes in educational settings require toolsand concepts to capture this complexity and create sustainable solutions. In this study, activity theoretical models served as a collaborative tool for teachers to analyse and change their practice and to describe and explain work integrated learning in the design process. The work highlighted the need for teachers' expertise in design as well as the important role of media literacy in the use of new technology. Their active and practical engagement in the materials, basedupon the tradition of PD, must be understood as an important part of the development of agency and volition, and findings suggest that the combination of PD and CL methodologies can serve as a vehicle for expansive learning and new innovative learning designs in educational settings. This approach was conceptualized as expansive design.
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| 3. |
- Einarsson, Anneli
(författare)
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Drama as an Ecotone in the Ecosystem of Primary Education
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates the tensions that emerge as drama is implemented in the teaching at a primary school. The thesis analyses drama practice in relation to a rationalistic and a holistic theoretical framework, and employs the epistemological view that subjectification and socialization are as important as the qualification dimension in education. A metaphorical model was developed, Schooling–Ecotone–Art, in order to deepen the understanding of drama as a subject in relation to the educational discourse. The ecotone, a notion deriving from ecology, symbolizes drama and serve as a tool to explore the tensions created at the borders of the adjacent habitats. The study describes the developing diversity within the drama practice in relation to the staff’s teaching and the pupils’ learning and meaning making. The empirical data are gathered by field studies at a primary school in Sweden, during one year. A project was made possible by a grant from the local municipality, through which the school was able to engage in a collaborative project with a local culture centre in which teachers and drama pedagogues worked together on a weekly basis. The doctoral study was initiated by an invitation from the school and the culture centre. Anchored in critical ethnography, the data include observations, interviews with staff and pupils, video recordings, questionnaires and email correspondence. The findings reveal different levels of tensions as drama is implemented in the teaching, which reflects the materiality of the discursive order and institutional power in education. Further, the study demonstrates the levels of progression as drama is practiced regularly, in which carnival play was a factor in the initial turbulent phase, and thus a major challenge for the staff. The study suggests that the phases in the progress demonstrate that drama comprises a unique and subject-specific content, which is needed in a holistic epistemology in primary education. Additionally, the progress describes how diversity emerges in the staff’s teaching as well as in the pupils’ creative work and that questions of interculturality are illuminated. The study concludes that there is a need to deconstruct a rationalistic epistemology, and develop a holistic epistemology, in order to achieve a sustainable education. The thesis contributes with deepened knowledge of drama as a unique habitat, and the possibilities for diversity as the tensions created in relation to adjacent habitats, schooling and art, are viewed as possibilities rather than obstacles to avoid.
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| 4. |
- Jarhall, Jessica
(författare)
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Historia från kursplan till klassrum : perspektiv på lärares historieundervisning från Lpo 94 till Lgr 11
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis examines how history teachers perceive history teaching in Swedish lower secondary schools during a time-period when two different curricula were in use: Lpo 94 and Lgr 11. The overall aim is to investigate how history can be expressed through teachers' transformation of the subject, from syllabus to classroom. The study focuses mainly on the perceived and the operational curricula, according to Goodlad et als curriculum theory. Transformation and transformation factors, i.e. factors that influence teachers' transformation, are central concepts of the thesis. Those are based on Shulman's theory of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and teachers' knowledge base. The term transformation is used in a wide sense, including the process of planning, teaching, and evaluation. Theories from both German and Anglo-american history didactics are used to create an analytical model, including three dimensions of historical knowledge and three sets of historical concepts. The model is used to analyze the respondents' stories as content knowledge, disciplinary knowledge and functional knowledge.The empirical material was collected from qualitative interviews with twenty-one history teachers at six different lower secondary schools. In addition to the interviews, teaching material in the form of teacher planning, examinations and other documents were collected. These documents were used to support, or question, the findings in the interviews.The results show that teachers transformed the history subject in several different ways, using the syllabus as starting point. The main factors influencing the teachers' choice of goals, content and methods in their history teaching were the students, the text books and their knowledge base. For the teachers in the second sub-study, the new national test had a profound impact on the choices teachers made. The three dimensions of knowledge, dealing with content (substantive knowledge), metahistorical concepts and skills (procedural knowledge), and value related issues (meaning) in history proved to be important in history teaching, both before and after Lgr 11. Although the main emphasis on knowledge as content was a continuity, the disciplinary aspects have gained importance during the period. All teachers also took the dimension of meaning into their teaching. A specific result shows that teachers who taught in multi-cultural classrooms especially saw identity and democratic citizenship as important aspects of their teaching. Another important result is that the national tests had a great impact on teachers after Lgr 11. The study also showed that history teachers were affected by the educational context, i.e. accountability, a strong emphasis on the quality of education and increased control.
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| 5. |
- Lind, Jacob
(författare)
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The politics of undocumented migrant childhoods : Agency, rights, vulnerability
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis, I investigate the paradoxical characteristics of political struggles that take place in relation to undocumented migrant childhoods. Drawing on ethnographic research in Birmingham, UK and Malmö, Sweden between 2014 and 2017, I take as my starting point the everyday life experiences of children and families who have experienced living under an immanent risk of deportation. Through a critical engagement with issues of agency, rights and vulnerability, I contrast the experiences of the children and their families with the development of policies and political debates in both countries. By analysing the contexts of Birmingham, UK and Malmö, Sweden in parallel as sites of irregular migration, I contribute with a clearer understanding of the specific characteristics of how each context constructs and governs irregular migration and how this is experienced by migrants themselves.In this thesis, I argue that a discussion about the political agency of children positioned as undocumented migrants is crucial for an informed and contextualised understanding of the political conflicts that characterise the issue of undocumented migrant childhoods. Through an analysis of the children and families’ everyday struggles, I highlight the role played by children’s rights as being perhaps the most important resource for enabling limited forms of support for these families from the host societies. However, I also show how the arguments and practices surrounding rights can be mobilised for migration control. In this sense,rights are “dangerous”.I suggest that if the intergenerational context of undocumented children’s rights is neglected, there is a risk that the human rights of children as well as adults will be marginalised. State actors arguing for the rights of undocumented migrant children often attempt to strengthen children’s deservingness by portraying their parents as “bad parents”who put their children at risk of increased vulnerability. While the state views the parents as putting their children at risk by “hiding” them, the parents view the state as putting their children at risk by trying to deport them. Parents are then forced to act as “humanitarian agents” responsible for caring for the children when state support to the rights-bearing migrant child is limited by the notion of the migrant child at risk of deportation.This “child migrant paradox” is an overall entrance point from which many of the political issues discussed in the thesis can be traced. The politics of rights in the context of undocumented migration is closely related to processes of vulnerability. Rights are mostly perceived as a matter of implementation while vulnerabilities, which rights are supposed to ameliorate, are mainly understood as descriptively self-evident. In this thesis, I problematise such commonplace understandings of rights and vulnerabilities and theorises them as fundamentally political concepts that need to be understood as enacted and reproduced through different political processes at different scales.I introduce the concept of “vulnerabilisation” to capture how states first create vulnerability through hostile policies towards undocumented migrants, then label the targeted groups as vulnerable and finally utilise this vulnerability to rationalise the governing of undocumented migrant children and families’ mobility and territorial presence. To enable children’s rights to be a productive tool for challenging the repressive governing of migrant families and children, I argue in this thesis that both the children’s rights paradigm and the vulnerabilisation of migrant childhoods need to be problematised and contextualised. Rights struggles by and on behalf of undocumented migrant children and families thus need to be aware of the fundamentally political character of rights and vulnerability.
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| 7. |
- Lundberg, Janna, Doctor of Philosophy, 1980-
(författare)
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Samhällskunskap för alienerad elit : Observationsstudie av särskilda läroverket
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is built around an observational study of a class at an elite school. The study follows the class through their upper secondary school education (ages 16-19), focusing on social science lessons. I have used ethnographic methodology to describe and problematize how social science and value-based ambitions of equality conflict with the student role of superiority cultivated at this school. This study of an elite uses a fly-on-the-wall distanced position of an included stranger. In the perspective of research on elite schools, the school is characterized as performing in the shadow of a more classic elite school tradition. The more traditional national boarding and cathedral schools use characterizations of age and tradition to legitimize their elite status. This is a characterization that the studied free school (approx. charter school) is trying to mimic despite its recent establishment.A concept of alienation including superiority frames the performed excellence noted during the observations. A concept of alienation without powerlessness is developed theoretically in this dissertation and used to analyse the material from the observations. A contemporary kind of stoicism is investigated within the concept of alienation. Stoicism within alienation describes the students’ ways of distancing themselves from what they learn, not giving any expression of whether what they learn influences what choices they make as they shape their lives and values. The social science subject at the elite school is characterized by a “dialectical didactics of turning away”, or of abandonment.In several ways the dissertation relates to power: a social hierarchy where supremacy and subordination becomes less black and white. The dissertation concludes by discussing the limited freedom of students who must negotiate egalitarian contra elite values in their social sciences education. In understanding egalitarian values in the perspective of power, Simone de Beauvoir’s (2018 [1947]) concept of freedom is useful: one’s own freedom is not freedom when others are unfree.Research on the democracy-promoting mission of the social science education subject, as well as the recommendations and directions of the school authorities, argues for a pluralistic classroom where different views and experiences meet. A deliberative democracy is also promoted. At the Distinct Grammar School, observations have been made of a classroom without pluralism and without deliberation. This has consequences for the teaching of social science in the school: the social science teacher’s authoritarian leadership style is motivated, in a contradictory way, with ambitions of promoting democracy and a democratic distribution of power. A complex dynamic of power between the teacher and the students plays out during the observations. The ethnography in the intersection of elite school research and social science didactic research has exposed a didactical dialectics of the exile, or exclusion. The turning away is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s (1998 [1958], 2006 [1961]) concept of World Alienation, a concept elaborated for understanding loss of love for the world as a threat to the promise of the political. This is framed as a social science didactics for alienated elite.
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| 8. |
- Nilsson Sjöberg, Mattias
(författare)
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Relationär pedagogik - för ett sannare liv : En essäistisk sammanläggning om dys/funktionell uppfostran: exemplet ADHD
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Föreliggande doktorsavhandling utgör en pedagogisk-filosofisk studie av diagnosen ADHD som uppfostran. Avhandlingen består av fyra internationellt publicerade artiklar samt en substantiell kappa. Det övergripande syftet är att lägga fram ett pedagogiskt argument för varför en förändring kan förefalla nödvändig om målet är att leva ett mer sant liv. Metoden använd utgörs av en triadisk modell som innefattar den grävande mullvaden, den filosofiska ugglan och den pedagogiska örnen. Det pedagogiska exempel som används i studien är den så kallat neuropsykiatriska diagnosen ADHD.Baserat på en kritisk undersökning av diagnosen ADHD påvisas att denna diagnos inte är vad den sägs vara, utan även någonting annat. Diagnosen ADHD förefaller vara ett symptom på en pedagogisk irrationalitet som hos den enskilde individen re/producerar ”brister” och ”avvikelser” vilket öppnar upp för olika former av mer eller mindre behavioristisk uppfostran. I kappan argumenteras för att diagnosen ADHD bygger på en modern form av sofism, vilken utgör en negativ identitetslogik och en biopedagogik som konstituerar dysfunktionell Andrahet.Vidare visar analysen att diagnosen ADHD inte enbart är irrationell, utan även orättvis, oren, ond och våldsam. Detta resultat bygger på en teoretisk dialog med tänkare som Michel Foucault, Karen Barad, Michel Serres, Baruch Spinoza, och inte minst Alain Badiou. Utifrån Badiou argumenteras för att diagnosen ADHD bygger på ett ändligt pedagogiskt tänkande, framför oändligt många andra sätt att bli till på tillsammans. Platsen för denna pedagogiska möjlighet uppgår i det unika mötet. I detta unika pedagogiska möte öppnas upp för ett gemensamt kreativt utforskande av världen och därmed möjligheten för de olika parterna att leva ett mer sant liv.Avhandlingen avslutas med den retoriska frågan om huruvida pedagogen trofast ska hålla fast vid idén om den universella möjligheten att verka för ett mer sant liv, alternativt genom fortsatt bruk av kvasi-diagnostik – diagnosen ADHD – re/producera en irrationell, orättvis, oren, ond och våldsam uppfostran.
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| 10. |
- Rosengren, Mathilda
(författare)
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Wastelands of difference? Urban nature and more-than-human difference in Berlin and Gothenburg
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores more-than-human entanglements of contemporary urban environments in order to develop a rearticulation of urban landscapes as spaces decidedly beyond the exclusively human. Taking its cue from the question “How do we live with urban difference today?,” such spaces, the thesis argues, emerge through, as well as change with, a variety of socio-ecological entwinements. It proposes that alternative ways of living in urban landscapes may be detected, as well as potentially fostered, if we turn our attention to other-than-human being, becoming, and belonging in the city. Subsequently, it investigates how this, in practice as well as in theory, changes the ways in which human city dwellers consider other-than-human urban expressions. Based on twelve months fieldwork in Berlin, Germany, and Gothenburg, Sweden – following a mixed methods approach of participant observation and in-depth interviews with urban planners, park managers, local activists, and decision-makers, complemented by a visual anthropological practice – the thesis examines several urban green spaces (recreational areas, ecologically protected nature-parks, industrial wastelands and old cemeteries) where other-than- human bodies have been given space and time to develop without direct or invasive human interference. These spaces, the thesis shows, have also become sites of potential contestation and change, challenging who and what belong in the urban milieu. On the one hand, the cities currently face increased influxes of human residents as well as acute housing shortages, with calls for intensified densifications and developments of interstitial urban land growing ever louder. At the same time, with the monocultural shaping of the rural areas outside the cities, spontaneous urban green spaces are being touted by local experts as increasingly important sites of biodiversity. Interlacing these empirical examples with a series of theoretical approaches on how to conceive of the urban, diversity, matter, and vitality – ranging from the scientific (urban ecology and biology) and empirically-grounded, social scientific (urban political ecology, more-than-human ethnographies, human-plant and -animal studies and so forth), to the philosophical (such as posthumanist and neo-vitalist concepts) – the thesis discerns some disparities in this research canon: One concerns the separation of theoretical reasoning and empirical study, where, as Donna Haraway notes, the “mud” of the world of actual multispecies living never truly seems to reach, nor to be included in, the “sublime” of philosophical thought. Another one is the lack of overarching empirical accounts tracing the implications of recognising everyday urbanities as contingent, yet multifarious, wholes of more-than-human socialities, as defined by anthropologist Anna Tsing. The thesis shows that through the formulation of an expanded notion of more-than- human urban difference, and an intimate ethnographic engagement with the urban other-than- human, these disparities may be addressed. Thus, in bringing intricate parts of more-than-human urbanities to light, the thesis provides not only a thick description of the everyday politics of urban nature planning and conservation of two Northern European cities, but in particular works toward developing perspectives, beyond the singularly human, of what being a contemporary urban dweller (human or otherwise) in actuality entails.
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| 11. |
- Stenström, Anders, 1981-
(författare)
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The Plural Policing of Fraud : Power and the investigation of insurance and welfare fraud in Sweden
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There is a vast literature on plural policing and the ways in which non-governmental actors now have and are assuming more responsibility for crime control. This literature argues that the connection between policing and the state is being eroded, questioned and sometimes abandoned in favour of networks in which the state acts as one actor among many others. This thesis examines the Swedish policing of insurance and welfare fraud via an analysis of the ways in which power is organized and articulated by actors in the private insurance industry, and at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency and police authority.The three articles included in the thesis contribute to a field that has received comparatively little attention, particularly in Sweden but also internationally. The existing literature has primarily been interested in the control of street-level criminality and the operations of uniformed security actors. Investigation practices in general and the plural policing of white-collar crime in particular have received far less attention. In Sweden, studies of policing are primarily state-centred, and the interactions between the police and other policing actors require further consideration. When examining insurance fraud, scholars have not considered the ways in which the insurance institution controls fraud; instead, this literature focuses on the characteristics of fraudsters. Thus the current thesis furthers our knowledge of a field of policing about which we currently know relatively little.The thesis takes as its general assumption the view that this form of policing is marked by a basic ambiguity between on the one hand being responsibilized and assuming responsibility for crime control, and on the other being responsible for other goals, such as promoting trust in, and the legitimacy and survival of the insurance institution. Existing research suggests that this ambiguity is resolved by simply denying compensation, adjusting premium levels, and cancelling policies or social benefits. My research shows that there is no Swedish exceptionalism in this sense.Based on a Foucauldian understanding of power, the thesis furthers our understanding of how the insurance institution is organized to tolerate fraud. The uncertainty between crime control and additional organizational goals is embedded in attempts to police the policing actors themselves, which is reflected in forces that make the policing of fraud a professional risk for the policing actors. The thesis argues that power relations provide opportunities to ensure that organizational goals are not endangered, while at the same time maintaining the public image that crime is being controlled. In contrast with existing research, the thesis shows that the law and the state – analytical categories that existing research, and particularly post-Foucauldian approaches, tend to reject or avoid – are critical to the plural policing of fraud. It is further suggested that scholars need to pay more attention to the way different technologies of power shape relationships between the actors involved in plural policing and their definitions of their own roles. In particular, scholars need to consider the role of the state and the legal framework in such arrangements.
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