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- Augustsson, Dennis
(author)
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Expansive design for teachers : An activity theoretical approach to design and work integrated learning
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 2. |
- Jarhall, Jessica
(author)
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Historia från kursplan till klassrum : perspektiv på lärares historieundervisning från Lpo 94 till Lgr 11
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 3. |
- Reddy, Anuradha
(author)
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Researching IoT through Design : An Inquiry into Being-At-Home
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Researching IoT through Design is a proposal for reworking how one might approach ubiquitous networked objects, or IoT, that no longer have stable and predictable uses – and to be-at-home with them in everyday life. This inquiry into being-at-home entails a shift from the idea of the home as a fixed, four-walled space for everyday routine separate from the outside world. It is instead replaced by a notion of the home as needing to be constantly re-sensitised to the wider world in which it is embedded. I argue the importance of securing a space for sensitisation, which forms the grounding of this study’s focus on participation, and the importance of referring to such spaces as ‘design’. Further, I show how delving into diverse participatory approaches in IoT can serve to make clear the conditions under which being-at-home can be explored. Derived from the practice of Research through Design, the notion of being-at-home is examined through critically-oriented design experimentation. It includes theoretical and methodological trajectories for ‘doing’ design, building on design anthropology, feminist technoscience, and posthuman discourses. The design experiments are conducted in three distinct design contexts, where each context gravitates towards one or more participatory approaches in IoT. Together, these experiments call into consideration the need for re-familiarising things as a way to reclaim the design space that has been lost to IoT’s optimising logics and values.
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| 4. |
- Westerlaken, Michelle, 1989-
(author)
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Imagining Multispecies Worlds
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- It can be considered the most systemic, deadly, and all-encompassing form of institutional violence that currently exists: speciesism, the oppression and exploitation of other animals. For most people on our planet, speciesism is something completely normalized, justified, and encouraged through many facets of dominant cultures. The field of critical/political animal studies, and other fields that challenge anthropocentrism, have already thoroughly problematized, questioned, and analyzed speciesist practices, but one topic receives little academic attention: what can a counter-concept to speciesism contain, without saying what it is not?This thesis is concerned with imagining ‘multispecies worldings’, with the goal to construct positive rather than negative aspects of a counter-concept to speciesism. Instead of offering a single answer, this work illustrates how additive knowledges regarding the possible meanings of ‘multispecies worlding’ make worlds richer. These knowledges emerge through a repertoire of world-making practices with other animals in which we recognize and engage with the ability to respond to each other.Thereby, this thesis answers to – and builds on – various scholarly and activist discourses, including posthumanism, welfarism, animal liberationism, and is theoretically grounded in feminist epistemologies. With a focus on negotiating possibilities, this dissertation is also a work of interaction design. The design practice involves tracing and negotiating multispecies responses with other animals and expressing those narratives as a design research program. These responses are presented as a Multispecies Bestiary, in which ten protagonist animals guide the reader through a collection of big-enough multispecies stories. The thesis thereby illustrates how humans can – together with other animals – find possible meanings of ‘multispecies worlding’ not as a single (broken) solution, but as ever-expanding directions that can permanently unsettle and unmake the established speciesist order.
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