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- Christensson, Johan, 1984-
(författare)
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Teacher Identity as Discourse : A Case Study of Students in Swedish Teacher Education
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis comprises three separate studies that together explore how Swedish student teachers construct or produce professional identity in interaction while navigating different institutional and professional instances of teacher education. As a discourse analytical contribution to research on teacher identity, the main theoretical framework is mediated discourse theory (e.g. Scollon 2001a). For data construction and analysis in the studies, different parts of the two related methodologies of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris 2011) are employed. Constructed through an ethnographic approach, the interactional data consist of audio and video recordings of interaction in instances from three different components of a Swedish teacher education program: a rhetoric course, a bachelor thesis course in history and teaching placement. Furthermore, the data include observational field notes and interviews, as well as resources used by the participants, primarily written texts. Taking place early on in teacher education, Study I focuses on student teachers performing oral presentations under the fictitious presumption that they are speaking as teachers. Employing the notion of communicative project (Linell 1998), the empirical aim of the study is to shed light on how student teachers manage institutional affordances and constraints affecting interactional role shifts from student teacher to teacher. In Study II, three student teachers are writing their bachelor theses in the subject of history, and the study focuses on the interactional production of teacher identity of one of the students during seminars. While partly being a methodological study, Study II empirically explores how student teachers interactionally relate to their future profession in an academic disciplinary setting, highlighting which actors and institutions are involved in the production of professional identity. Finally, Study III concentrates on a student teacher during his final teaching placement. Focusing on previous experiences resemiotized as stories, Study III highlights how discourse re-emerging from the historical body (Nishida 1958) can be used in interaction in producing identity. The results suggest that the production of teacher identity by the student teachers is a co-operative and communicative task, where previous experiences as well as an anticipatory perspective on the teaching profession are important features. The three studies identify different resources that can be used and adapted by students to suit different purposes in professional identity production, described as textual resources, embodied resources, and narrative resources. In turn, the different uses of such resources motivate the need for studying identity in interaction with an approach where ethnographic and sociocultural knowledge is part of the analysis. The creative use of resources in identity production highlights that students use knowledge and experience linked to academic and professional as well as everyday discourse in producing professional identity. Presuming an interest in opportunities for student teachers to develop professional identity during their education, it appears fruitful to reflect upon how potential resources are designed and implemented in teacher education, and how institutional affordances and constraints affect the possibilities of using them.
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| 2. |
- Hanell, Linnea, 1986-
(författare)
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The Knowledgeable Parent : Ideologies of Communication in Swedish Health Discourse
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores the communication of health knowledge among new parents in Sweden. Based on three separate studies, the thesis employs a selection of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches, mainly originating from mediated discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Study 1 takes a broad view on the object and asks how knowledge circulates and emerges in a particular arena for parental knowledge. Drawing on nine months of online fieldwork on a discussion forum thread for expectant parents, the study shows that communication of knowledge is engendered by entextualizations and recenterings of previous experiences, including encounters with discourse. This fact challenges categorical conceptions that construct some sources of health knowledge as trustworthy and others as unreliable, and thus, potentially harmful. Study 2 narrows the focus to professionals typically perceived as producers of parental health knowledge, namely, midwives who give prenatal education classes. Drawing on a dataset comprising observations of classes as well as interviews with midwives, the study throws analytical light on anticipatory discourse, that is, discourse designed to dictate and influence the future, and elucidates some of the ways in which midwives prepare the participants for their upcoming delivery by discursively constructing links to these future events. Study 3, finally, takes the perspective of a single individual in whose life several forms of communicated parental knowledge converge as she becomes a mother. The study focuses on a period during which this individual struggles with breastfeeding problems. A combination of the notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body is here employed to grasp this experience as shaped in relation to discourse regarding child care and health. Looking at narrative data through this lens, the study shows how this individual connects failure to follow official breastfeeding recommendations to failure to perform child care in an appropriate way. At heart, the study makes a case for the moral loading of health knowledge and cautions against the assumption that authoritative medical knowledge is the only means for taking action that a new mother might need. In conclusion, the present thesis utilizes a combination of theoretical and methodological tools from MDA and linguistic anthropology to enable a discourse analysis of health communication that privileges a view of language in use as accumulating vis-à-vis engendering meaning over time and in relation to social action. Invoking the notion of ideologies of communication, it demonstrates that parents’ knowledge about their children’s health is a non-neutral issue, and that instrumental aspects of parental health knowledge can never be isolated from moral ideas regarding how particular parenting practices are to be carried out. At the same time, the thesis points out that while representatives of institutions of the welfare state may produce messages to communicate health knowledge, the knowledge obtained by individuals is the product of myriad discursive encounters and other experiences, of which the discourse produced by representatives of state institutions constitutes only one share.
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