| 1. |
- Almén, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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Access to and accounts of using digital tools in Swedish secondary grades : An exploratory study
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Information Technology Education: Research. - : Informing Science Institute. - 1547-9714 .- 1539-3585. ; 19, s. 287-314
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Aim/PurposeThe aim of the study is to explore students’ encounters with digital tools and how they account for their experiences of using digital tools within formal education.BackgroundWhile computers have a long history in educational settings, research indicates that digital tools function both as affordances and constraints, and that the role of digital tools in schools continues to be debated. Taking into consideration student perspectives can broaden the understanding of knowledge formation practices.MethodologyThe study is part of a larger ethnographic project, focusing on agency at all levels with respect to digitalization in schools. The present exploratory study is built primarily on interviews with 31 secondary school students at five different schools (15 girls and 16 boys). The analytical framework was a Nexus Analysis, focusing on discourses in place.ContributionThe paper shows how digital tools are conceptualized as being formed by and fitted into the traditions and habits of the institution, rather than acting as a transformative force to change knowledge formation practices in schools.FindingsFrom the students’ narrative accounts, the following key themes emerge: (1) Action in contexts, (2) Agency in contexts, and (3) Equality in contexts. The first deals with the use of digital tools in school and the interaction order as it is accounted for in the use of digital tools in schools. The second frames human agency with regards to usage of digital tools and how agency fluctuates in interaction. The third deals with the compensating role digital tools are supposed to play for students who are identified with special needs and for students with divergent backgrounds, especially socioeconomic standards.Recommendations for PractitionersFor teachers, the recommendation is to engage in dialogue with the stu-dents on how and when to use digital tools and the affordances and con-straints involved from a student’s point of view.For school leaders, the recommendation is to review how organizational structures, culture, and processes hinder or support the development of new practices in digitalization processes.Recommendation for ResearchersThe three key themes that emerged in this study emphasize the need to reflect upon how a panopticon view of contemporary classrooms can be challenged. Involving students in this work is recommended as a means to anchor ideas and results.Impact on SocietyThis study is part of a larger project at Jönköping University, focusing on agency at all levels with respect to digitalization in schools. The overall goal is to increase our understanding of how to improve digitalization and implementation processes in schools.Future ResearchFuture studies that address digital technologies in schools need to pay special attention to the interaction between students, teachers, and various kinds of tools to map the nature of the education process, with the aim of challenging the panopticon view of the classroom. Future studies need to focus upon processes themselves, rather than accounts of processes.
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| 2. |
- Almén, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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Digital tools and social-ecological sustainability : Going beyond mainstream ways of understanding the roles of tools in contemporary eduscapes
- 2023
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Education. - : Frontiers Media S.A.. - 2504-284X. ; 8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- All education in Sweden, or the Swedish eduscape, is permeated by discourses of compensation and inclusion, conceptualized in this study as a one-school-for-all ethos or perspective. This ethos contributes to a social-ecological framing, wherein the intentions are a society where everyone can participate as active members. This study scrutinizes the governmental strategy of 2017 to digitalize the Swedish educational system based on a one-school-for-all perspective. The study is framed by SWaSP (Second Wave of Southern Perspective) theoretical ideas, with a special focus on positionings, languaging, timespaces, and epistemological-methodological dimensions, including ethics based on the entangled tenets of sociocultural, integrationist, and southern perspectives. Furthermore, this study is anchored in three research projects and one societal developmental project. Materials - e.g., video recordings, audio recordings, photos, artifacts, fieldnotes – from these projects have been generated through (n)ethnographic methods from different institutions in the Swedish educational landscape i.e., eduscape. These span across compulsory schools to Swedish for Immigrants (SFI), within Municipal Adult Education. Three themes have emerged in the multi-scalar data analysis from across settings: (i) intended inclusion, (ii) unintended exclusion, and (iii) intended exclusion. The first theme highlights how digital tools (DTs) create inclusion for students with special needs, or those who are new to the named-language Swedish, in the classroom community, thus contributing to social-ecological sustainability. The second theme illustrates how DTs intended for inclusion in classroom practices morph into tools of exclusion for individuals in mainstream classrooms. The third theme highlights how students in the Swedish eduscape are intentionally excluded from mainstream classrooms. We argue that a social-ecological sustainable stance troubles the division of eduscapes into “mainstream” and “other” settings in contemporary societies, calling for the inclusion of all students irrespective of their positionalities. Our findings highlight that multimodal use of DTs potentially can facilitate inclusion, by providing tools where individual students can participate in and contribute to teaching and learning—what we frame as a third position of classroom organization.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Almén, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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Discourses and practices regarding digital tools. Unintended tools for exclusion in educational contexts?
- 2021
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study builds on a multi-scale ethnography of policies and mundane lives of lower secondary students and teachers with a specific emphasis on recent digitalization initiatives in Swedish schools. The study aims to illuminate the discourses and processes of inclusion and exclusion within contemporary educational digitalization initiatives whose intentions relate to a one-school-for-all agenda. Sociocultural perspectives have been a key point of departure and the discourse analytical framework of Nexus Analysis has been used as a guiding analytical lens. Participant’s deployment of digital tools in educational settings have been scrutinized through interviews, classroom audio and video recordings, and other ethnographic data. In addition, the study draws on analysis of national and school policies related to digitalization initiatives and Sweden’s one-school-for-all ethos. These data come from the research project Digitalization Initiatives, and Practices (DIP, www.ju.se/ccd/dip) where a key focus is the digitalization of the Swedish school system from a perspective of inclusion and exclusion.With a point of departure in the one-school-for-all discourse, the Swedish school system rests on values like inclusion and compensation – inclusion for all students, irrespective of background, disabilities etc., and compensation of various types of functional disabilities. Framed by the one-school-for-all discourse, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is considered both a tool for inclusion and a compensatory tool in the Swedish school. Therefore, students (and teachers) with documented special needs have had access to digital tools like laptop computers or iPads for quite some time. However, due to the high degree of independence that individual schools and teachers enjoy, access to and usage of digital tools among students without documented special needs is reported to differ considerably, sometimes within the same school. Such previous findings across previous studies led the Government of Sweden to initiate a strategy to digitalize the entire Swedish school system in 2017. This strategy has had three key focus areas:Digital competence for all in the school system.Equal access and usage.Research and follow-up about the possibilities of digitalization.The first two focus areas highlight the inclusive ambitions of the one-school-for-all discourse. Many secondary schools have started teaching computer knowledge, and the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) has included affordances and constraints of the digitalization of society in the curricula of different subjects, in particular in the curriculum of mathematics where programming became an integrated part, as a means to fulfill the first focus area of the strategy. A majority of Swedish secondary schools today provide students with digital tools, with the result that the one computer per student ratio has increased dramatically, as a response to the second focus area. However, for students who are diagnosed with a functional disability, an initiative to digitalize the entire student population in a school, creates a paradoxical scenario of exclusion. Thus, as the following examples from our analysis suggest, digital tools for inclusion appear to have turned into tools for exclusion in Swedish lower secondary schools.Before the digitalization initiative, students with special needs were often the only students in the classroom with their own digital tools. This marked them as students with special needs, even thoughthe digital tools provided features which made it possible for them to study at the same pace as their non-marked peers. When all students received digital tools within the framing of the digitalization strategy, the effect was that the compensatory advantage for the students with special needs decreased and they started experiencing a lagging behind effect in educational settings.An outcome of the digitalization strategy was that many schools stopped buying paper editions of textbooks in order to be able to reserve resources for the procurement of digital tools and other digital resources. Therefore, students are currently required to use digitalized textbooks. This offers the possibility to use digital features like text-to-speech, i.e. the written text is synthetically read aloud. Wearing headphones, the students listen to the texts simultaneously while they may read it on their individual screens, something that is easier for students with diagnoses like dyslexia, or those who are new to the named language Swedish. However, the combination of digital tools and headphones tempts students to engage with non-school tasks (like scrolling Spotify playlists or watching YouTube videos) instead of reading an assigned text. This results in students who best need time to study lagging behind in school tasks.Discourses of compensation and inclusion circulate in the Swedish school system. However, for students with special needs these discourses can imply a further exclusion if this means a compensation and inclusion for mainstream students. After the digitalization strategy was implemented, digital tools have become an integrated part of the Swedish lower secondary classrooms. For students with special needs, digital tools can function as compensatory measures and facilitate learning. However, this study suggests that digital tools for everyone can become counter-productive for students who are marginalized to begin with.Our analysis highlights and troubles the binary dichotomies of being abled and disabled, or what being a student with special needs implies as compared to those who do not have any diagnoses or special needs. When functionally disabled students or students with special needs are seen as “problems” who can be “fixed” with digital tools, the tools themselves risk becoming hindrances for the students’ educational development. To come to terms with this, students, regardless of prerequisites, need to be understood as individuals with individual needs, and whose needs call for individual solutions that are part of solutions for all students. This study also highlights how a discourse analytical framework of Nexus Analysis can be used to shed light on complex social relationships across different types of data.
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| 5. |
- Almén, Lars, et al.
(författare)
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Inscriptions and digitalization initiatives across time in the nation-state of Sweden : The relevance of shifts and continuities in policy accounts for teachers’ work
- 2019
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Ingår i: Virtual sites as learning spaces. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783030269289 - 9783030269296 ; , s. 27-62
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study illuminates the political, ideological, moral and ethical driving forces behind the Swedish governmental initiative to digitalize the educational system—the Swedish Digitalization Initiative (SDI). Taking a sociocultural point of departure, policy documents are considered mediational means and have agency. Nexus analysis is the analytical lens that is deployed. Policies are analyzed according to the public consultative discourse analysis scheme. Three main findings are reported in this study:The policy documents are chained, that is, one document is linked to one or more others.There are three important discourses that circulate in the policy documents: digital competence, programming and an economical discourse.Different policy documents have different strengths of agency, expressed rhetorically in terms of both languaging and layout.The driving forces of SDI are politically and ideologically economical liberalism. Moral and ethical driving forces can be seen in terms of equality between women and men.
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| 6. |
- Almén, Lars
(författare)
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One-school-for-all As Practice – A Nexus Analysis of Everyday Digitalization Practices
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Government of Sweden formulated a strategy in 2017 to digitalize the entire Swedish educational system. The government summarizes this strategy through three focus areas: (i) all parts of the school system shall have equitable digital competence, (ii) all parts of the school system shall have equal access to and usage of digital tools, and (iii) research and follow-up of the possibilities of digitalization shall be conducted. The impetus for the digitalization strategy was that despite the long history of the Swedish school system’s digitalization, there existed major differences in access to digital tools between different schools and individual students. Further, differences existed in digital competence between different actors in the school system.The point of departure in this compilation thesis is the 2017 governmental digitalization strategy, with a special focus on discourses of digital tools as compensatory tools and tools for inclusion. The compensatory and inclusive perspectives are conceptualized as the one-school-for-all discourse. Three research questions guide the thesis. These cover discourses at macro (policy), and micro (classroom) levels, and temporal spaces before the enactment and in the implementation processes of the digitalization strategy.Nexus analysis is used as an analytical framework. This draws on a sociocultural perspective and an ethnographically inspired framework. The ethnographic data material that this thesis builds upon comprises of audio and video recordings, fieldnotes, policy documents, student work sheets, and timetables. The classroom data (recordings, fieldnotes, etc.) are from grades 7 and 8 in five secondary schools in one small and one medium-sized municipality in southern Sweden. Here students are 13 and 14 years old.This thesis consists of four studies. The first study contributes with analysis of macro level policy discourses before the enactment of the digitalization strategy. The second study contributes with classroom discourses on digitalization from student interview accounts of the everyday use of digital tools in secondary schools before the enactment of the digitalization strategy. Based on fieldwork data from a secondary school, the third and fourth studies highlight classroom inclusion and marginalization processes. They contribute with classroom discourses in the implementation processes of the digitalization strategy.The discourses highlighted in the thesis relate to the computer room, programming, compensatory tools, hardware that is focused, identity, entertainment, and agency redistribution. The digitalization strategy is temporally demarcated in terms of a before and after of the implementation phase of the digitalization strategy. Students had ubiquitous access to digital tools after the enactment. The thesis highlights that this has both including and excluding consequences.The analysis, in particular of the fieldwork observations, indicates that the ubiquitously present digital tools are used as tools to facilitate learning only to a minor extent. Schools purchase digital tools without always considering how to use them pedagogically. Furthermore, the studies indicate the importance of teachers’ continuing education for their mastery of the pedagogical usage of digital tools. The thesis does not support the technology deterministic belief that digital tools per se facilitate learning. Instead, it highlights that pedagogical affordance can be enhanced by introducing digital tools; for instance, teachers and student’s digital competence increases when digital tools are used in creative ways, functioning as mediating tools for learning. Thus, the pedagogical value of digital tools needs to be considered before they are incorporated into schools. The thesis also argues for a more comprehensive societal perspective on digitalization.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Arnér, Elisabeth, 1941-
(författare)
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Barns inflytande i förskolan : problem eller möjlighet för de vuxna?
- 2006
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this study is to investigate and describe how, through development work in the form of an in-service training programme, preschool teachers were able to change their approach to initiatives and active participation on the part of the children, with the emphasis on a change from a negative to an affirmative approach. The study also seeks to highlight the consequences of the described change for the active participation of the children. The focus is on what this change means, how it happens, and what the basic conditions for it are. Ultimately, the thesis is concerned with how children can be empowered to become active participants in their own everyday preschool situation.To achieve these aims, I have analysed the development work undertaken, the purpose of which was to encourage teachers to develop their responses towards children’s initiatives and towards their active participation in preschool activities. In the light of the preschool curriculum’s emphasis on the role of preschools in democratic education, I have also sought to analyse how the initiatives which children took to become active participants were made visible and described by the teachers themselves. On this basis I have attempted to interpret what a “relational” and a “punctual” approach to children can entail.The theoretical perspectives of the study are founded on von Wright`s (2000) reconstruction of Mead’s theory and her relational perspective and intersubjective turn.The concept of active participation is linked to democracy and to the opportunities for children to tangibly influence their everyday lives at preschool. The concept is thus also concerned with children’s rights and the role which teachers have of creating conditions to achieve those rights.The thesis examines the concept of a child’s perspective and focuses on children’s own perspectives as a basis for teachers’ efforts to promote their active participation.The results of the study are based on narratives created within the framework of the development project mentioned. These narratives show that, when teachers’ attention was drawn to habitual approaches which they had earlier taken for granted, those approaches could be changed in ways which they considered favourable both for their own working situation and for the children’s opportunities to actively participate. The process of change described by the teachers reflects a transition from a punctual to a relational response to the children. This process is described as an intersubjective turn.An approach on the part of teachers which affirms children’s initiatives, and thus promotes their active participation, calls for continuous reflection, development of knowledge and an ongoing discussion of educational issues. An affirmative response to children and a way of working with them that is based on knowledge and reflection creates possibilities, while a controlling and restrained response prevents the children from becoming active participants and assuming responsibility.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Bagga-Gupta, Sangeeta, 1962-
(författare)
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A common education-for-all and life-long learning? : Reflections on inclusion, equity and integration
- 2014
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Ingår i: Theory and methodology in international comparative classroom studies. - Kristiansand : Cappelen Damm Høyskoleforlaget. - 9788202470616 ; , s. 225-243
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Two important reasons are often presented to account for the significant organizational shift at the compulsory educational level and for ways in which continuing education is conceptualized in many parts of the world in the post-World War II period. These two encompass ideologies related to a “common education-for-all” and a “life-long learning” perspective. They have had far reaching consequences for both individuals and collectives. Even though access to schooling and learning opportunities over the life-span are unevenly distributed across the globe, a major transition has occurred during the last five-six decades: doors to formal education have become a feasibility (if not a reality) for all members of society. Formal education became a possibility for groups that were previously marginalized; for instance, girls, functionally disabled, economically disadvantaged, individuals in rural areas, immigrants, etc., and for the post-school and college going sections of the population.A common education-for-all young people including the life-long learning movement are, in different ways, understood as constituting fundamental principles that many democracies currently uphold. These conceptual traditions, based upon the notions of equity and human rights, have specific implications regarding (i) what is understood as legitimate in the conceptualization of human diversity and (ii) concomitantly how teaching and learning are organized for groups that previously stood outside the educational system/s. In other words, how human difference is conceptualized has a bearing upon how communities have historically organized education and/or provision for “different” groups. In addition and more significantly, as will be argued, what is meant by learning plays an important role in how education gets organized for some groups within the framework of a “common education-for-all”.This chapter takes the discourse of equity and rights as a point of departure in order to discuss how education for different groups of young people and adults in the post-World War II period has been organized, particularly in the contexts of the global North. Issues related to human difference, the meanings subscribed to different identity categories or constructs (for instance, immigrants, functional disability and gender) and the ways in which learning for different groups gets framed is of focal interest here. My aim here (and in current academic work) is to theorize what can be termed the “didactics of inclusion-equity-integration”. Thus for instance, an interest is to understand the basis on which education for different groups has been argued for and organized. Given that learning and instruction was organized differently for different groups in the pre-World War II era, an interest here is to try and tweeze out the ways in which exclusion and segregation currently get played out, particularly in the contexts of the global North. What kinds of knowledge about human diversity are seen as important, are privileged and are made relevant in educational contexts? What understandings of learning and instruction guide the organization of education and everyday practices in educational contexts? In other words, what are the didactics of inclusion, integration and equity? These constitute some of the issues that are explored here.Reflections on the themes attended to here arise from my previous and ongoing studies across different projects. The cumulative empirical work that the present chapter draws upon can be understood in terms of different long term ethnographically oriented projects that are framed within sociocultural and postcolonial perspectives and that furthermore invite intersectional analysis. In addition to these empirically driven research projects, the issues I raise here draw upon experiences from both large scale school developmental projects and national level work for Governmental and policy organisations since the mid-1990s.
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