Potentials for meaning making when pupils experience and represent the world through photography 

How can a digital tool as the camera app be used to widen and deepen pupils’ possibilities to make meaning and develop their literacy? 

The digitization of society has made a range of different modes more accessible for meaning making and has had a major impact on how we communicate and learn (Jewitt (Ed.), 2014; Selander & Kress, 2010; Kress, & van Leeuwen, 2021). In my PhD study, I have chosen to explore one of the possibilities that the digitization has made more accessible: photography. 

In close collaboration with a group of teachers and their pupils aged 10–12 years, I explore the potentials for meaning making when pupils experience and represent the world through photography. The study has a multiliteracies perspective and is framed by social semiotic theory. The empirical data consists of field notes, video documentation and the pupils’ photographs when they visually answer questions like: What is geography?; What is a noun?; Where is your favourite place in school?; What is power?; What is faith?, and when the children create storybooks, document their work during lessons and argue visually. In my material I identify ‘visual literacy events’ when children photograph, edit and read photographs, and in the analytical process I explore the children’s meaning making with121‘strata’, ‘metafunctions’ and ‘positions’ as analytical tools (Arvedsen & Illeris, 2011; Illeris, 2012; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001, 2021).

The preliminary findings show that when pupils experience and represent the world through photography different kinds of practices are established with different potentials för meaning making. At ICOM-11 I will discuss the potentials for meaning making of these practices under the headings ‘experience’, ‘agency’, ‘perspective’ and ‘epistemological commitment’ in relation to literacy. 

Keywords: photography, meaning making, agency, visual literacy event and literacy 

References

Arvedsen, K. & Illeris, H. (2011). Visual Phenomena and Visual Events. SomeReflections around the Curriculum of Visual Culture Pedagogy. Research in Arts and Education, 2011(2), 44-63. https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.118750

Jewitt, C. (2014). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. Routledge. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: the modes and media

of contemporary communication. Arnold.Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2021). Reading images: the grammar of visual

design. Routledge.

Designing MMLA systems is a complex task requiring a wide range of considerations. In this paper, we identify key considerations that are essential for designing MMLA systems. These considerations include data management, human factors, sensors and modalities, learning scenarios, privacy and ethics, interpretation and feedback, and data collection. The implications of these considerations are twofold: 1) The need for flexibility in MMLA systems to adapt to different learning contexts and scales, and 2) The need for a researcher-centered approach to designing MMLA systems. Unfortunately, the sheer number of considerations can lead to a state of "analysis paralysis," where deciding where to begin and how to proceed becomes overwhelming. This synthesis paper asks researchers to rethink the design of MMLA systems and aims to provide guidance for developers and practitioners in the field of MMLA.

Research on students’ perceptions and understanding of technology has shown that students have a narrow view of technology: for example, technology is often manifested in students’ descriptions as artefacts or objects. This paper aims at investigating how students develop understanding of how technology is manifested during classroom activities in technology. The study was conducted at a compulsory primary school with eight-year-old students.

The data (video and audio recordings) were collected in small-group interactions and whole-class discussions. In the interactions, the students utilised self-taken photographs to visualise their understanding and perception of technology. The analysing process is grounded in Mitcham’s (1994) manifestations of technology: object, activity, volition, and knowledge.

Based on the students’ prior knowledge, they perceived technology as contemporary electrical artefacts. The findings indicate that students achieve a more nuanced perception and understanding of technology as objects during classroom activities in technology.

I denna kvalitativa studie undersöktes två lärares iscensättning av gemensamt återberättande av sagan Rödluvan och vargen som ett exempel på narrativ genre. Båda lärarna använde den grafiska modellen Berättelseansiktet i en storgruppsdiskussion i årskurs 1 i svensk grundskola. Studien sker med bakgrund i en textanalytisk studie som analyserade aktuella styrdokument, grafiska modeller samt annat läromaterial med inriktning mot narrativ text i tidiga skolår (Ridell & Walldén, 2023). Presentationen lägger särskilt fokus på respektive lärares intermodala undervisningspraktik där 1) olika uttrycksformer promptade aspekter av narrativ text och 2) förhandlade kring innehållet i sagan utifrån elevernas förslag.

Studien tillämpar ramverket design för lärande (DfL) samt ett socialsemiotiskt ramverk som innefattar genreteori och visual grammar. Med dessa utgångspunkter synliggörs både lärarnas aktiva bruk av multimodala resurser i undervisningsmomentet samt vilket kunskapsinnehåll avseende narrativa texter som främjades. För att urskilja ytterligare nyanser i lärarnas olika didaktiska iscensättning användes även Bernsteins inramning samt horisontell och vertikal diskurs.

Utifrån video- och ljuddata producerade i två klassrum studerades iscensättningen i form av olika visuella, verbala och gestikulära uttrycksformer samt lärarens sätt att utnyttja skrivtavlan och styra interaktionen med eleverna. Forskningsfrågorna lyder: Hur kan aspekter av narrativ genre bli visuellt, verbalt och gestikulärt promptat i iscensättning av textdekonstruktion och -rekonstruktion? Vilka metafunktionella dimensioner och genreteoretiska aspekter hamnar i förgrunden i förhandlingen av Rödluvan och vargen?

Tentativa resultat visar att lärarnas varierade iscensättning genom olika visuella representationer påverkade elevernas handlingsutrymme. Båda lärarna iscensatte en ideationellt orienterad dekonstruktion och rekonstruktion av sagan med fokus på karaktärer och händelseförlopp. Elevernas förslag på spänningsskapande interpersonella aspekter erkändes i huvudsak när de drev handlingen framåt.

Under de senaste decennierna har utbildningen i svenska för invandrare (sfi) blivit allt starkare kopplad till arbetsmarknaden. Samtidigt tyder tidigare forskning på att sfi-undervisningens relevans för språkligt deltagande utanför klassrummets väggar behöver stärkas (t.ex. Ahlgren & Rydell, 2020;Wedin & Shaswar, 2022). Denna presentation ger en praktiknära och kvalitativ belysning av en kommuns satsning på en sfi-kurs där klassrumsundervisningen integrerades med elevers praktik inom olika branscher. Undervisningen hade inspirerats av tidigare forskning om språkpraktik (Sandwall, 2013) som har visat behovet av atts kapa meningsfull transfer mellan praktikplats och klassrum. Eleverna fick därför språktränande uppgifter som de genomförde under veckovisa praktikdagar som de sedan redovisade inför klasskamraterna.

Presentationen utgår från följande frågeställningar: Vilka erfarenheter beskriver sfi-eleverna av att använda och utveckla målspråket (svenska) under språkpraktiken och lektionsmomenten? Vad kännetecknar klassrumsinteraktionen under ett specifikt moment som sökte skapa transfer mellan praktikplats och klassrum, nämligen elevers presentationer av en ordförrådsuppgift?

Forskningen följde en praktiknära och etnografiskt inspirerad ansats där forskaren och den deltagande läraren samarbetade. 20 sfi-elever ingick i studien som studerade kurs C och D. Undervisningen dokumenterades genom observationer, ljudinspelningar och intervjuer under två kurstillfällen som varade totalt 20 veckor. Tematiseringen av elevernas upplevelser av språkpraktiken inspirerades av situationsvariabler för språkanvändning som har utvecklas inom systemisk-funktionell lingvistik. För analys av klassrumsdiskussioner om ord eleverna hade valt ut från praktikplatserna användes semantiska begrepp från Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013; Walldén & Någord Larsson, 2021). Resultatet visar att elever som praktiserade på äldreboenden och förskolor uppgav relativt rikliga språkanvändningsmöjligheter medan det motsatta fallet gällde för elever med branschval inom lager och kök. Under klassrumssamtalen kopplade till elevernas ordförrådsuppgift skedde en rik interaktion om situationsberoende betydelser av ord och uttryck som kan kopplas till olika språkliga domäner. Momentet öppnade upp för en kunskapsbyggande interaktion där både läraren och eleverna bidrog till att kontextualisera de olika betydelserna.

Although the teaching of narrative texts in primary school is well researched, there is a lack of insight into how visual models and multimodal prompts are used by teachers to convey genre-specific knowledge. Therefore, we conducted a multimodal study of the teaching practices in two first-grade classrooms during joint re-tellings of the folktale Little Red Riding Hood and subsequent interactions around narrative genre. In both cases, the teachers used the graphical model The Story Face as well as a whiteboard canvas in their orchestrations. Data was collected in the form of audio and video recordings. Underpinned by a social semiotic framework combined with Bernstein’s concept framing, the analyses revealed that both teachers focused on story events and the story’s macrostructure while displaying different orientations in the use of verbal language and visual representations. This resulted in different emphases on either story-specific or more general features of narrative genre. Furthermore, the students showed an interest in iconic and suspense-building story dialogue, but this aspect was generally de-emphasized by the teachers’ use of verbal language and visual resources. Based on these findings, we discuss the significance of studying teachers’ differing orchestrations through overlapping modes.

Children use digital environments at an early age and should be supported from the start of school to a conscious and critical way of navigating the internet.Previous studies show that children have vague ideas about how the information has ended up on the internet, how it should be read and evaluated. In thisexploratory study, we investigated how children start an internet search, how they formulate their search query and what they pay attention to when the searchresult is obtained, as well as how they read the information from the screen. 15 eight-year-old children performed the searches in small groups, using one tabletin joint searches. The children's speech and screen activity were recorded. The data was analyzed with the help of Luke and Freebody's resource model to callin different dimensions of reading competence that are actualized when students initiate searches and navigate search results. The results show that thestudents can use speech and writing to quickly search for specific information. At the same time, they are disinclined to stop and reflect on the relevance,credibility, and sender of the search results. With interactional support, some students were able to identify the sender of the information and reason about which50type of sender might be credible. To reach a more developed thinking and awareness that digital information has a sender, teaching that promotes criticalinformation awareness and multimodal text competence is required. 

Research on students’ perceptions and understanding of technology has shown that students have a narrow view of technology: for example, technology is often manifested in students’ descriptions as artefacts or objects. This study investigates the ways in which students’ understanding of how technology is manifested expands during a series of classroom activities in technology. The study was conducted at a compulsory primary school with eight-year-old students. The data (video and audio recordings) were collected in small-group interactions and in whole-class discussions. In the interactions, the students utilised self-taken photographs to visualise their understanding and perception of technology’s manifestations: object, activity, volition, and knowledge (Mitcham in Thinking through technology. The path between engineering and philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, 1994). Based on their prior knowledge, the students perceived technology as contemporary electrical artefacts. As they engage in a technology project, they develop and expand their understanding of how technology is manifested, as well as relate different manifestations to one another. The findings indicate that students achieve a more advanced understanding of technological manifestations compared to only discussing each manifestation of technology separately. 

The purpose of the interdisciplinary project is to generate knowledge about the pedagogical potentials and limitations of multilingual practices in mathematics and science education. We specifically aim to explore and problematise how multilingual approaches and activities may promote mathematics and science teaching and learning in school years 4–9. The qualitative project is conducted by an interdisciplinary research team that integrates theories from educational research in didactics, sociology and linguistics, including translanguaging theories. The project’s four-year period comprises initial exploration of existing pedagogical practices, mainly through workshops with teachers, classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, in four culturally and linguistically diverse schools. This explorative phase is followed by a two-year period of pedagogical interventions, in which teachers and researchers together design, carry out and analyse classroom interventions. The interventions involve exploring the pedagogical potentials and limitations for promoting multilingual resources for teaching and learning. Further, students’ identities as engaged learners of mathematics and science are explored. Our ambition is for the project to contribute with new and multifaceted knowledge on the complexity of teaching and learning in multilingual mathematics and science classrooms in mainstream compulsory schools in which the students have a variety of language backgrounds.

This article explores students' experiences of intellectual, social, and emotional growth during the first year at university and the extent to which these experiences can be considered transformative (Mezirow, 1981). The study is a qualitative interpretative multiple-case study built on semi-structured interviews with students in two higher education contexts, Argentina and Sweden. The results show that most students experience similarly interrelated changes concerning self-confidence, knowledge- and language abilities, critical thinking, and values and beliefs. For some students, these changes lead to profound shifts in how they perceive themselves and their possibilities. Such transformative experiences are emancipatory and empowering, giving students more control over their lives. Other students are gradually changing, experiencing growth in knowledge, literacy, and self-confidence. However, they do not yet experience profound changes in their worldview and how they perceive themselves. Contextual factors related to family life and future profession affect the significance the students attach to experienced changes.     

A major challenge for first-year students is the demands on academic writing. The purpose of the study is to identify students' difficulties with writing at the beginning of their education to contribute to the discussion about how students' writing development can be supported. The overall theoretical perspective is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The data consists of texts from the first examination of a primary teacher program. The analysis includes partly a corpus analysis of 125 texts concerning sentence length, word length, the proportion of long words, word variation, and lexical profile, and partly a qualitative text analysis of a selection of eleven students' texts from the larger group concerning text cohesion, composition and use of references. The results indicate that the task design is of great importance for how advanced the students' texts are, based on the proportion of long words, word variation, and lexical profile. Furthermore, students struggle with paragraph division and creating clear relationships between and within paragraphs to create coherent texts. The results also show that the students need support to develop their ability to write from sources. Based on the results, the authors discuss how subject teachers in higher education can support students' writing development. 

The overall aim of the chapter is to contribute to the discussion on how teachers’ facilitation of classroom interaction can be understood in view of mono- and bi-/multilingual norms, and more specifically how teachers relate to, make use of, and strengthen children’s epistemic authority through language competences in the multilingual classroom. The analysis is primarily based on two sets of data. First, teacher interviews which answer to what problems and solutions teachers experience concerning teaching and learning in the multilingual classroom, and how they view their role as facilitator of dialogue and a promoter of agency and hybrid integration in relation to this. Secondly, video-recordings of classroom interaction in selected European localities teachers’ facilitation of dialogue were explored with regard to considering monolingual and bi-/multilingual ideologies and the promotion of hybrid integration. The analysis shows how the monolingual ideology permeates the data material. Students’ multilingual resources are not recognised and valued; consequently, multilingual students’ agency and epistemic authority is hindered. However, there are glimpses of “cracks” where spaces for alternative practices can be developed, in which students can use their full linguistic repertoire, including varying named languages to express their views or ideas beyond the language of instruction, which create potentials for strengthening students’ participation in classroom interactions. The chapter argues that children’s language competences should be integral to understandings of their epistemic authority and calls for further research into how strategies that accomplish this can be developed and transferred across classrooms and localities, with the purpose of strengthening all children’s epistemic authority in education.

Over the past three years, the Western world has seen many conflicts aroundhistory. Statues have been torn down, anniversaries have been debated, historical figureshave been re-evaluated, and many have begun to question or defend their own nationalhistorical narrative. Social media has heightened the debate, with antagonists engaging infierce and usually not very nuanced debates on Twitter and Facebook. In this text, we try tobuild a digital historical didactic framework for how teachers can work with controversialhistory in the multi-cultural classroom by using social media as a resource. Through ananalysis of second order concepts such as significance, historical perspective, and historicalempathy based on a historical cultural perspective and with the use of history in focus, wehope that teachers in the classroom will be able to contribute to increased interculturalcompetence. In a final example, we analyze how people with different backgrounds anddifferent purposes in a thread on Twitter debate the history behind the celebration ofColumbus Day in a city in the USA.

The project Spaces for multilingualism is founded by the Swedish Research Council (2022-2026). The purpose of the interdisciplinary project is to generate knowledge about the pedagogical potentials and limitations of multilingual practices in mathematics and science education. We specifically aim to explore and problematise how multilingual approaches and activities may promote mathematics and science teaching and learning in school years 4–9. The qualitative project is conducted by an interdisciplinary research team that integrates theories from educational research in didactics, sociology and linguistics, including translanguaging theories. The project’s four-year period comprises initial exploration of existing pedagogical practices, mainly through workshops with teachers, classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, in four culturally and linguistically diverse schools. This explorative phase is followed by a two-year period of pedagogical interventions, in which teachers and researchers together design, carry out and analyse classroom interventions. The interventions involve exploring the pedagogical potentials and limitations for promoting multilingual resources for teaching and learning. Further, students’ identities as engaged learners of mathematics and science are explored. Our ambition is for the project to contribute with new and multifaceted knowledge on the complexity of teaching and learning in multilingual mathematics and science classrooms in mainstream compulsory schools in which the students have a variety of language backgrounds. The presentation will focus on the explorative phase of the study and the preliminary results from interviews with students and teachers as well as workshops in which teachers and researchers collaborated. We will also present the ongoing preparations for the interventional phase of the study.

Today many classrooms in Sweden are multilingual, characterized by a diversity of linguistic, cultural and epistemological resources available for teaching and learning. Handling this diversity puts certain demands on teachers in order to provide all students equal learning opportunities in a context where the language of instruction is Swedish. As a response to this, local school development projects based on multilingualism as a resource have been initiated. This study focuses on two such projects with the aim to deepen the knowledge about how translanguaging teaching practices can be developed. To make visible what characterizes as well as enable and constrain translanguaging teaching practices under development, the theory of practice architectures is used. Three different practices are identified The Multilingual, The Ambivalent multilingual and The Monolingual teaching practice. The practices are formed by differing cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. Above all, cultural-discursive arrangements such as norms and ideas affect the differences between the three practices. Existing norms and ideas affect how material and economic resources, mostly identic in all three practices, are used. Furthermore, monolinguistic norms seem to form hierarchical relations. Thus, we argue to develop translanguaging practices multilingual norms are important to develop.

Medvetenheten om språkliga dimensioner i ämnesundervisning har ökat det senaste decenniet genom forskningsstudier, pedagogisk litteratur och kompetensutvecklingssatsningar. Fokuset har till större delen legat på läsande och skrivande i andra ämnen än svenska och svenska som andraspråk. I det här blogginlägget vill jag belysa hur lärare hanterar språkliga stötestenar i arbete med romaner och bilderböcker.

In both current debates on the perceived crisis of young people’s writing and national research on writing instruction, there is a tendency to foreground oneparticular perspective on writing. Debaters focus on technical skills, while many researchers advocate a focus on function rather than form. Also, research on writing instruction in primary years of schooling is scarce. This article responds to the need for a more nuanced understanding of writing instruction in the primary years of schooling. Its particular focus is on the oral feedback given on letters written by students in Grade 3. The research aim is to explore and highlight movements between different perspectives on writing in the interaction. The study is based on transcribed audio recordings of nine feedback talks (1h30m) between a school librarian and Grade 3 students writing letters based on a reading of a children’s book. In the analysis of the data, Roz Ivanić’s discourses of writing are operationalized and visualized in a way which enables the detailed analysis of how oral classroom interactions relate to correctness, disposition, and the communicative context. In particular, this analytical tool highlights discursive shifts, for example between disposition and communicative function. Feedback focusing on the communicative  context is understood in light of Halliday’s contextual categories of field, tenor and mode.The writing assignment given to the students consisted of answering letters from parents seeking aid with misbehaving children. In doing this, they were expected to assume the role of the book’s protagonist, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. The letters they responded to had been written by peers in a previous, related assignment. The result of the analysis shows that the librarian underscored the importance of adhering to a prescribed disposition of the letter, with reference to different aspects of the communicative context. In particular, she underlined the importance of explaining why the students’ proposed solutions to children’s misbehavior would work (field) to convince and reassure the parents (tenor). Also, she drew attention to the need for explicitness in written communication, which relates to the contextual category of mode. As such, the results show a considerable interplay between disposition and communicative goals, which can be understood as discursive shifts. The students were also given feedback on syntax, interpunctuation, and spelling. This feedback was rarely related to the construction or communicative goals of the text. However, there were some exceptions, such as when the librarian commented positively on the use of exclamation marks reflecting the “energy” of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and guided the children in using a conjunction to give an explanation.In summary, the results highlight the potential of the interplay between different discourses of writing. It is suggested that the analytical lens developed and employed in the study can be used in other activities of writing instruction, for example teacher-led deconstructions of model texts. A more nuanced view of the interplay between textual forms and functions in on-going teaching is desirable to promote students writing and counteract the one-sided perspectives which can otherwise govern discussions about writing instruction.

Research into the role of literature in the Nordic classroom has shown that literary texts are predominantly seen as a tool for the developing of literacy skills and often focus on the structural components of the text itself. This often leads to the equally important creative and playful aspects being sidelined. Addressing this imbalance, the present article argues in favour of creating opportunities for young learners to take more agency and promote creative dialogue and playful expression in classroom reading practicesthrough the framework of playworld (Swedish: lekvärlden) (Lindqvist, 1992, 1996). Specifically, this article attempts to answer the following questions: (1) how can oral and written interaction based on the reading of a children’s book be understood in terms of playworld; and (2) in what ways can the concept of playworld enrich the understanding of students’ and teachers' engagement with children’s books? The findings are based on a classroom study of a Swedish Grade 4 students, focusing on discussions and activities related to the reading aloud of Wegelius’s The Legend of Sally Jones. The results of this study have enabled us to shift from the dominant focus on individual readers and readings to the dialogic interplay in playworld between the children and the adult / teachers who creatively reworked and expanded upon the text. The concept of playworldis employed as a tool to empower both teachers’ and students’ creative engagement with literary texts in a way that builds on a collective imagination.

Literature on thesis supervision emphasises collaborative approaches with strong and supportive relationships. Despite an increasing research interest in supervisory relationships, little cross-cultural research has been conducted on supervisory roles and relationships in expandingcircle countries. This study explores how thesis supervisors negotiate different rolesand relationshipsin supervision in English as an Additional Language (EAL) contexts. A multi-case study was employed in three contexts: a Swedish university, two Indonesian private universities, and an Indonesian public university. Semi-structured interviews were conducted withfourteenthesis supervisors. Thematic analysis and systemic-functional appraisal theory were used to analyse the discourse. Our findings revealed that supervisors expressed dealing with (a)symmetrical relationships with students and colleagues, dealing with different supervision roles, and managing priorities relating to intellectual development and instrumental goals. However, these dimensions of supervision were described differently in the three contexts. The Swedish supervisors expressed concernsabouthavingweak authority; meanwhile, the Indonesian private supervisors described frustrated attempts to form a closer relationship with the students, whereas the Indonesian public supervisors reacted to students trying to become too familiar. Furthermore, supervisors in the three contexts had to take different unwanted roles in supervision. The article concludes with implications for understanding situatedaspects ofsupervision.

Research on English as an Additional Language (EAL) academic acculturation has focused on international students as newcomers in English speaking countries and has frequently used a linguistically oriented approach. This research aimed to examine EAL thesis supervision as an academic socialisation practice in non-Anglophone context. We focused on exploring supervisors’ feedback provision priorities and students’ reactions to the feedback in one Swedish and three Indonesian universities. We contribute to the Nordic educational context by shedding light on thesis supervision as part of students’ dynamic academic socialisation. The research was conducted in response to the identified need of new strategies for academic literacy development to manage multicultural assets in the EAL academic writing and publication. We employed a multi-faceted view of academic literacy development, involving both cognitive activities and socially situated practice, integrated with. Biesta’ functions of education and Habermas’s Communicative Action concepts. Semi-structured interview was conducted with thirty-nine participants (14 supervisors and 25 students). The findings indicated different supervisors’ feedback provision priorities. Swedish supervisors explained focusing on content to strive for students’ socialisation and subjectification, while Indonesian supervisors mostly prioritise giving both form and content-focused feedback to target the function of qualification. A few Indonesian supervisors described focusing on socialisation in thesis writing and peer-reviewed publication. While supervisors in both contexts expressed striving for learning orientation through supervision, most students in both contexts described focusing on instrumental goals (finishing their thesis projects and getting degrees). Also, many students explained difficulties dealing with feedback in the form of questions. They indicated resistance to the socialisation process by employing strategic action (deleting or shortening the commented part to avoid further questions and revision). Only a few students viewed question-feedback as a communicative means of learning. Students’ responses signalled a lack of disciplinary literacy through unfamiliarity with research methodologies and theoretical framework that created problems in deciphering the supervisors’ feedback. Since the findings illustrate that students and supervisors have different feedback orientations, we call for increased clarity in communicating aims for thesis supervision. Also, the task of students’ academic literacy development and socialisation cannot fall on thesis supervisors alone. Pedagogical practices through embedded-curriculum programmes are required to foster students’ belonging to academic community and identity adaptation.

Introduction: Thesis supervision is a critical part of students’ academic literacy development. Previous research has shown different dimensions of this development with limited attention to cross-cultural aspects. In particular, there has been little research on how students and supervisors negotiate supervision practices in non-anglophone contexts. This study aimed to explore students’ and supervisors’ reported priorities and experiences regarding the provision and reception of feedback in English as an Additional Language thesis supervision. 

Method: We conducted a qualitative case study to illuminate supervisor’s and students’ experiences of supervision in Sweden and Indonesia. It involved 39 participants (14 supervisors and 25 students) from one Swedish and three Indonesian universities. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed thematically using Biesta’s functions of education, Habermas’ communicative action theory, and perspectives on academic literacy. 

Findings: Firstly, we found that Swedish and Indonesian supervisors had different feedback provision priorities. Swedish supervisors described prioritizing content-focused feedback to facilitate students’ socialization into academic writing. Conversely, most Indonesian supervisors expressed balancing content- and form-focused feedback with a greater emphasis on qualifying as English teachers. Despite these differences, supervisors in both contexts tended to isolate academic language use from discipline-specific values and practices. Secondly, students in both contexts largely expressed an instrumental orientation to achieving their goals and were frustrated by supervisors phrasing feedback as questions. Many students expressed unfamiliarity with necessary methodologies and theoretical frameworks, which made supervisors’ feedback difficult to decode. 

Discussion: Since only a few of the students viewed the feedback as a support for their process of learning, this study calls for a clear communication about the academic socialization intention through supervision. However, academic socialization cannot solely be the responsibility of supervisors but must be embedded in the curriculum courses 

I detta kapitel diskuteras studenters studieframgång, avhopp och genom­strömning. Vidare är syftet att belysa studenters känsla av tillhörighet i relation till studieframgång och olika möjligheter att minska studentavhopp. Motivet är att en ökad förståelse för studenters känsla av tillhörighet i relation till studieframgång ger stöd åt utveckling av akademiska miljöer och utbildningsprogram som i sin tur stärker inkludering och breddat deltagande.

Syftet med detta kapitel är att diskutera hur förväntningar på handledning och olika handledarkompetenser kan bidra till ett mer inkluderande arbetssätt. Det innebär att vi kommer belysa betydelsen av att klargöra förväntningar på handledning samt hur handledares kunskaper om lärandeteorier, kommunikation, etik, återkoppling och bedömning kan bidra till och stärka adeptens lärande och utveckling inom sitt ämnesområde. Kapitlet bygger bland annat på vår egen forskning (Davidsson & Stigmar, 2021; Davidsson & Stigmar, inskickad) som visar att det finns ett gemensamt innehåll och likartade undervisningsformer i handledarutbildningar för olika yrkesgrupper.

This study explores how graphical models, teaching resources and language arts curricula for primary school in Sweden represent features of narrative genre. Furthermore, it provides a conceptual and methodological approach for studying the recontextualization of genre knowledge in different educational contexts. We selected two particular models (the Story Face and the Obstacle Chart) because they are promoted by the Swedish National Agency of Education. We analyzed the models, curricula, and related teaching resources through Bernstein's concept of recontextualization fields, Martin's genre theory, and Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar. The results show that both graphical models use metaphors to evoke students' everyday experience and break down a narrative text to key story elements. Aligning with Swedish language arts curricula, the models de-emphasize the need to manage tension in narra-tives. Finally, the results show that the models' different ways of representing key story elements may be difficult for teachers and students to decode.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Doctoral thesis supervision and its writing outcome in Anglophone countries has gathered a great research attention. Moreover, the collaborative supervisory relationship has been considered as an important aspect of doctoral students’ achievement and autonomy in thesis writing. Despite the similar student-supervisor model of supervision between doctoral and undergraduate students, cross-cultural research on undergraduate thesis supervision in the expanding countries seems still underrepresented. The presentation is based on a comparative study of Indonesian and Swedish supervisors’ expression about their experience in supervising undergraduate students to write a thesis in English, the students’ additional language (EAL). The research questions are:

In what ways do Swedish and Indonesian supervisors describe experiencing thesis supervision? In what ways do Swedish and Indonesian supervisors describe their relationships with students and colleagues?

Since previous research has discussed ideal practices of supervision involving students in dialogue and supporting their intellectual development, this presentation focuses on the exploration of the different challenges and considerations pertaining to this ideal as described by the supervisors in the three contexts (Swedish university, Indonesian public university, and Indonesian private university). This presentation highlights similarities and differences between supervisors in Sweden and Indonesia, and between supervisors in private and public Indonesian universities. It adds to previous research on supervision which are mainly conducted in the postgraduate or doctorate levels in the Anglophone context. Moreover, this presentation contributes knowledge of the supervisor's beliefs about their roles and relationships in three different contexts, with implications for what is seen as constituting a “good” supervision practice.

Accordingly, a qualitative case study with semi-structured interview technique was conducted with fourteen thesis supervisors (five Swedish and nine Indonesian). Thematic analysis was informed by systemic-functional linguistics from appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005). It focused on analysing the discourses expressed by thesis supervisors related to their roles, relationship with students and colleagues, and values about supervision that are scrutinised through the use of modality.

The findings show that supervisors in the three contexts describe tensions related to imbalanced relationships with students and colleagues, supervisors’ various roles, and supervisors’ priority management regarding students’ instrumental purposes and their desired intellectual journey. Different concerns expressed by supervisors related to tensions in their supervisory relationship. Swedish supervisors described experiencing low authority over their students, Indonesian private university supervisors mentioned challenges in befriending students to create more symmetrical supervisory relationships. Meanwhile, Indonesian public university supervisors emphasised their unease related to students’ attitude for being too close to the supervisors. Different undesired supervisory roles recounted by supervisors such as being students’ editors, pseudo debt-collectors, and spoon feeders were necessitated either by institutional situations or personal commitment as the students’ thesis writing gatekeepers.

In the past several years, there has been a growing research interest in students’ opportunities to engage in and develop disciplinary literacies through writing. Mirroring developments in other countries, the Swedish national curriculum has required teaching with a more disciplinary focus since 2011. This puts various demans on students'  writing, such as constructing arguments based on source material and explaining causes and consequences of historical events. The presentation will focus on test-related writing practices in history teaching in Grade 6 in a Swedish school located in a socially disadvantaged and linguistically diverse area.

The presentation is based on research aiming to contribute knowledge about how students negotiate literacy expectations when writing answers to test questions in the teaching of history. The research questions are:

Which literacy expectations are conveyed by the written questions administered to the students in a final test and in activities leading up to the test?

How can the students written answers be understood in relation to the literacy expectations in the question posed to them?

Ethnographically inspired methods were used to document teaching activities, teaching material and students' text in a content area about the early modern period in Swedish history. The study spanned three months. Previous publications from this study have focused on the classroom interaction and the text material used in the teaching (e.g., Author, 2020; Author & Colleague, 2021). This presentation instead focuses on students' written responses to test questions based on 102 collected tests. The analysis was informed by disciplinary literacy and systemic-functional genre theory. It particularly draws on the discourse semantic system of periodicity (Martin & Rose, 2007) to highlight how the students manage the information flow in their texts, for example by introducing, unpacking and re-stating abstract and subject-related concepts. Another important point of reference is the learner's pathway through the genres of history (e.g., Coffin, 1997) which charts the progression from chronological recounts to explanatory texts that rely on causality. 

The findings show that the literacy expectations increased between homework tests used to preprare the students for a final test and the final test itself. While the homework tests expected the students to reproduce information about historical events and persons in the text material they studied, the final test required them to reason about events in terms of causes and consequences. The students mostly responded to this shift by adding more information about the events in an unplanned manner. However, some students managed to adapt their writing to accommodate the scaled-up demands by using a more planned approach to the writing and adjusting the information flow to accentuate the consequences and historical significance of events. On rare occasions, students used strategies which went beyond the written language, such as incorporating relevant information coveyed orally by a teacher and using multimodal representations. However, most of the students based their writing on a text material that provided limited input for the complex writing expected of them in the final test. Implications for classroom practice include the importance of modelling successful subject-specific writing strategies as well as providing sufficiently rich disciplinary input, through various modes, that the students can use for their written output. It follows that the writing must be understood as part of a disciplinary literacy practice. 

Coffin, C. (1997). Construing and giving value to the past: an investigation into secondary school history. In F. Christie & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Genre and institutions: Social processes in the workplace and schools (pp. 196-230). Continuum.

Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2007). Working with discourse: meaning beyond the clause. Continuum.

Walldén, R. (2020). "It was that Trolle thing" Negotiating history in grade 6: A matter of teachers' text choice. Linguistics and Education, 60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2020.100884  

Walldén, R., & Nygård Larsson, P. (2021). “Can you take a wild guess?” Using images and expanding knowledge through interaction in the teaching and learning of history. Linguistics and Education, 65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2021.100960  

Denna rapport dokumenterar insikter från följeforskning inom projektet Trelleborg Yrkeskedjor på uppdrag av Arbetsmarknadsförvaltningen Trelleborg. Den belyser undervisning i svenska för invandrare som sökte koppla samman elevers branschpraktik med språkundervisning. 

In this study, we have explored the ways in which small-group work in science can contribute to strengthen multilingual students’ subject language and conceptual development when working with language-oriented classroom activities in primary classrooms. The aim is to determine whether it is possible to identify factors in interactions in small-group work that strengthen and facilitate the students’ language development. We have focused on how students orally formulate themselves when describing observations, hypotheses, and explanations of certain scientific experiments on the properties of air. An important starting point has been that students’ successive development of a subject-specific language is crucial for their conceptual development and understanding. The analyses of the dialogues have made it possible to study how individual students gradually develop their way of expressing themselves by taking over others’ expressions and word choices and making their own. The analysis also shows that these dialogical situations are crucial for all students to develop their language use in science, primarily through probing a more precise way of expressing themselves and putting their scientific ideas and thoughts into words. An important conclusion is that students should be offered opportunities and space to develop their subject language register in science and that this is important for all students, but crucial for those for whom the language of instruction is a second language

This article focuses on how Grade 6 students interactionally make meaning out of subject-related language encountered in civics textbook material by searching for synonyms and engaging in discussions. Employing ethnographically-inspired methods, data was collected through observations and audio recordings of civics teaching in two linguistically diverse classrooms in which the students were taught in the majority language, Swedish. In the article, oral classroom interaction is perceived as a crucial part of the meaning-making social practice in which students' disciplinary literacy is developed. Key analytical concepts are discursive shifts and discursive mobility - the ability to move between and within different discourses. The results show that the use of online dictionaries promoted decontextualizing processes in which the students unsuccessfully tried to negotiate multiple abstract meanings that, in many cases, were unrelated to the disciplinary content. In other exchanges, the adults gave interactional support by contextualizing the words and expressions in content-relevant ways and pointing out recognizable parts of words. In some cases, the teacher instead drew attention to words that have different meanings, which complicated the content-relevant understanding of the words. Implications for working with subject-related vocabulary in ways which support rather than hinder disciplinary understanding are discussed.

How can teachers refne their strategies for purposefully engaging students in mathematicaldiscussions when students are working in groups and the teacher enters an ongoing groupconversation? In three educational design research cycles, four teachers collaborated witha researcher for one year to analyse, design and evaluate strategies for engaging students insmall-group mathematical discussions. The idea of noticing (Mason in Researching yourown practice: the discipline of noticing, RoutledgeFalmer, London, 2002; Sherin et al. inMathematics teacher noticing: seeing through teachers’ eyes, Taylor & Francis, New York,2011) was used to organize the fndings—by paying attention to aspects in the mathematical discussions and interpreting the interactions, teachers could together refne their ownactions/responses to better support students’ work. The Inquiry Co-operation Model ofAlrø and Skovsmose (Dialogue and learning in mathematics education: intention, refection, critique, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2004) was used as a theoreticalbase for understanding qualities in mathematical discussions. Ehrenfeld and Horn’s (EducStud Math 103(7):251–272, 2020) model of initiation-entry-focus-exit and participationwas for interpreting and organizing the fndings on teachers’ actions. The results show thatteachers became more aware of the importance of explicit instructions and their own role asfacilitators of mathematical questions to students, by directing specifc mathematical questions to all students within the groups. In this article, by going back and forth between whathappened in the teachers’ professional development group and in the classrooms, it waspossible to simultaneously follow the teachers’ development processes and what changedin students’ mathematical discussions.

Given young children's frequent use of the internet and the expectations formulated in policy documents such as the Swedish national curriculum, teachers need to promote critical awareness about information found online, even in the earliest years of schooling. Responding to the need for more information about how first-graders understand the internet, we report on findings from focus group interviews concerning what students in Grade 1 think the internet is and what kind of experiences and linguistic resources they draw upon to express their understanding. Based on thematic and systemic-functional linguistic analysis, the results show that the children mostly express an understanding of the internet as something concrete, such as an app, as something encapsulated in apps or hardware and, more generally, as an enabler for the use of different apps. Students connections to using YouTube and games are prevalent, and their understanding of the internet is shaped by experiences of screen interactions when using these apps. On rare occasions, students hesitantly tried to formulate abstract perspectives concerning what the internet is or what it means. Possible directions for promoting and researching a more abstract understanding in pedagogical practice are discussed.

Kapitlet fokuserar på ämneslitteracitet och särskilt på ämnesspecifikt språk och litteracitetspraktiker i de samhällsorienterande ämnena på grundskolans högstadium. En  översikt över forskningen om ämneslitteracitet presenteras liksom ett fokus på språk och praktik i undervisningen i de olika samhällsorienterande ämnena. Tröskelbegrepp och kraftfull kunskap/powerful knowledge är begrepp som introduceras och belyses i relation till geografi, historia, religionskunskap och samhällskunskap och baseras på resultat från en pilotstudie om hur man kan arbeta med ämneslitteracitet i so-klassrum på grundskolans högstadium.

Kapitlet behandlar mayas kosmologi, religion och tidsfilosfi i ett historiskt perspektiv i Mesoamerika. Såväl förspanska hieroglyfkodexar som tidigkoloniala källor presenteras och analyseras med fokus på myter och ritualer från förspansk tid till vår samtid. Även mayas tidsfilosofi och de några av de olika kalendersystemen belyses och särskilt fokus ges mytbildningen kring världens undergång som förknippas med slutet på den långa räkningens kalendercykel år 2012.  Kapitlet avslutas med reflektioner kring kontinuitet och förändring avseende nutida andlighet på Yukatan i Mexiko med särskild betoning på eko-turism, shamanism samt healing- och wellness-ritualer.

What is power? How can liberty be portrayed? What and why would you like to change in the classroom? How does it feel to be photographed? What is going on in this photograph?

The digitization of society has made a range of different modes more accessible for meaning making and has had a major impact on how we communicate and learn (Erixon (Ed.), 2014; Jewitt (Ed.), 2016; Kress & Selander, 2017; Kress, & van Leeuwen, 2021). But while young people today gain a lot of their experiences in multimodal environments, schools provide learning environments dominated by verbal modes (Kress, 2000:159).

In Sweden, a lot of schools provide their students with computers or tablets as resources, showing the impact of digitization in society today. The technical devices are used for writing, searching information and to some extent making presentations (SOU 2014:13), but the new possibilities for using different modes as tools for meaning making are poorly explored (Erixon (Ed.), 2014). And in situations where pupils represent their understanding using other modes, for example visually or audibly in a multimodal text, teachers assess only the oral or written parts (Godhe, 2014; Åkerfeldt, 2014; Hernwall m fl 2016; Borgfelt, 2017).

With my phd project I want to contribute to a deeper understanding of how different modes can be used as tools for meaning making and learning, in order to widen the possibilities for teachers to let their pupils use multimodal experiences and computers/tablets as resources in school. The aim of the study is to explore how pupils make meaning and learn when they experience and represent the world through one of the new possibilities: photography.

As ‘the photographic mode’ has mainly been shaped outside a school context and not used as a tool for meaning making and assessment in schools, I have chosen to work closely with a group of teachers and their 10-year-old pupils in an EDR-inspired study. The study has a multimodal and social semiotic perspective. Video documentation of lessons is an important material category together with the children’s photographs.565At NERA I will use the preliminary results to describe how the pupils use different resources in their meaning making when they photograph and interact around each other’s photographs. I will also explore the potential for meaning making and learning focusing on the high degree of involvement and interaction between the children, especially when they edit their photographs.

Central references

Erixon, Per-Olof (Ed.) (2014). Skolämnen i digital förändring. En medieekologisk undersökning. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Kress, Gunther & Leeuwen, Theo van (2021). Reading images. The grammar of visual design. Third edition. London & New York: Routledge.

McKenney, Susan & Reeves, Thomas C. (2012/2018). Conducting educational design research. London: Routledge.

We interviewed groups of students in a language diverse school, where the prevailing language norm was Swedish only, to answer the question; What do students say about relocating school academic mathematics in transitions between home and school? The students mentioned relocating school academic mathematical concepts, problem solving and arithmetical methods from home to school and vice versa. The relocating work provided resources for mathematics learning and feelings of being smart and mathematically knowledgeable and the opposite. We conclude that pedagogical designs that enhance students' first languages and home cultures as resources may benefit from considering students' work with relocating school academic mathematics to enhance opportunities for mathematics learning.

Bokens kapitel utgör viktiga bidrag i en kritisk granskning av svenskmatematikutbildning utifrån sociopolitiska samhällsperspektiv. Motbakgrund av bokens olika kapitel belyser vi upplevelser och konsekvenser av att konstrueras som den andre i svensk matematikutbildning.Med hjälp av begreppet andrafiering synliggör vi författare till dettakapitel tillsammans ’dom andra’ och deras erfarenheter i relation tillmigration och matematikutbildning. Vi som författat detta kapitel, tvånyutexaminerade lärare och två forskare, har därför ingått en så kalladallians. Vårt kapitel visar hur matematikutbildning bidrar till processerav andrafiering och skapandet av den andra och hur dessa processerpåverkar flerspråkiga elevers och lärarstudenters identitetsskapandeoch därmed även deras möjligheter att lära matematik. Flerspråkighetbehöver synliggöras och normaliseras. Alla elevers och lärarstudentersspråk och kulturer måste få ta plats, inte som exotiska inslag av kulturella uttryck utan som en del av den ordinarie matematikutbildningen. 

This qualitative study focuses on Grade 6 students’ possibilities to engage in disciplinary writing practices in history teaching in a school located in a socially disadvantaged and linguistically diverse area. The aim is to contribute knowledge about how students negotiate different literacy expectations in the teaching. The researcher used ethnographic methods to follow one teacher and two groups of Grade 6 students for 12 weeks’ teaching about the Vasa era in Swedish history. The material used consists of samples of students writing, parts of the text material they studied, and written questions they answered in tests and pre-writing discussion. In the analysis, systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) and thematic content analysis were employed to develop categories of literacy expectations based on the written questions. SFL was also used to analyze samples of the students’ writing and relevant textbook material. The findings show that the expectations increased in a final test because most questions required causal reasoning. In contrast, the questions used in text discussions and homework tests conveyed a variety of literacy expectations, with an emphasis on chronological reconstructions of events. While some students adjusted their writing to causal reasoning, others relied on a reconstruct approach that adhered closely to the simple text material that was chronologically structured. Outlier examples showed students using multimodal representations, a substitute teacher’s oral elaboration on a text, and resources of learner language in their answers. Implications for teaching that support all students’ engagement in disciplinary practices of history are discussed. 

Språk, kultur och matematik är ett nationellt lärar- och forskarnätverk som bildades 2021. Här beskrivs villkoren för dagens matematikundervisning och det arbete som görs av forskare och lärare för att bättre förstå och utveckla matematikundervisningen i mångkulturella, flerspråkiga matematikklassrum. Avslutningsvis bjuds intresserade in att delta i nätverket.

Truth, Trust and Temporality: climate communication in times of emergency

Introduction

The importance of climate education is increasingly emphasized in relation to the addressed social transformation (IPCC, COP 26). There is a pronounced need for new ways to communicate climate issues and science to invite creative ways of thinking, and new stories of the future. Hence, there is a need to study how climate change takes shape in different contexts and groups, to better understand how environmental sciences are used in climate communication (Corner, et.al. 2017).  An interesting entrance to this, is how social movements of environmental activists communicate about the climate crises.  Since 2018 new social movements of activists addressing the climate and ecological crises has rapidly grown (e.g. Friday For Futures, and Extinction Rebellion “XR”). This study rests on the assumption that the different ways we live and act, also relates to what we know and how we experience the world around us. With inspiration of Barad’s (2007) Agential Realism this study explores discourses of phenomena through “agential cuts” by applying a diffractive analysis to actions of XR.

Research Questions

How may agential cuts make nourishing understanding of new ways in communication of climate and social change, from a grassroots movement as Extinction Rebellion?

o   In what way might these results inform and be relevant to formal education?

Methodology

Creating knowledge about the climate crises involves more than education of natural and social sciences. This means being attentive to the ways in which our knowledge and the material dimensions of the world around us, the social orders we live by, and the normative values we share are all intertwined (Barad, 2007). In a diffractive analysis it is the relational result that are of interest.  Accordingly, exploring agential cuts involves looking for contrasts and connections, and is not about representation or classification. Barad (2007) points out that, close attention is paid to detail in a diffractive analysis, to the intra-actions and to the possibilities for new ideas to evolve. The empirical data consists of texts, interviews, course material and field observations from XR's actions during 2021, collected with respect to the ethical principles of research.

Findings

The initial findings discuss how generative agential cuts through phenomena as; “time”, “truth” and “trust”, create assemblages of different understanding. As an example, time generate different meaning of the urgency or emergency of climate change due to temporalities of time. Anthropocene, term of office government, planetary boundaries, tipping points are some of these temporalities giving different meaning of the climate crises in relation to truth and trust.

Conclusion & Recommendation for theory and practice

How we allow ourselves to see the world in new ways can be crucial in creating opportunities to address the challenges posed by climate change. Attention of how we understand the world, may create attention of values, inspiration, and visions to create new stories for the future.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the

entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Corner, A., Shaw, C. & Clarke, J. (2017). Communicating Environmental and Sustainability Science - Challenges, opportunities, and the changing political context. A Knowledge Report for Mistra. Oxford: Climate Outreach.

Haraway, D. (2017). Staying with the trouble. Making Kin with the Chthulucene London: Duke University Press.

Allt oftare omnämns att planetens tillstånd befinner sig i en ny tidsepok; Antropocen – människans tidsålder. Förutom den geologiska lydelsen pekar tillståndet även på det paradigmskifte i tänkande mänskligheten nu befinner sig i. Vår färdväg definieras som alltmer akut ohållbar. Från ett samlat vetenskapssamhälle framförs nu nödvändigheten av att på kort tid åstadkomma omvälvande förändringar, i en omfattning vi tidigare inte skådat. I det sammanhanget lyfts också ofta utbildningens centrala roll. I den här artikeln lutar vi oss främst mot den franska filosofen Bruno Latours resonemang om de konsekvenser antropocen har för människans behov av relationsskapande och tillhörighet. Eller formulerat som en utmaning att konfronteras med i undervisningen: Hur kan undervisningen skapa relationer med ”det mer än mänskliga” där människan utgör en integrerad del i biosfärens levande och materiella processer? Med hjälp av tre konkreta exempel från två skolor och med teori och analytiskt fokus hämtat från pragmatiska perspektiv på kommunikation, utforskar vi Latours efterfrågan av ”The terrestrial”. I den argumentativa texten visar vi hur detta kan identifieras i termer av öppna naturmöten, i relationsskapande och i demokratiska processer, vilka synliggör hur vi människor är sammankopplade med biosfären. I artikeln pekar vi också på några didaktiska riktningsgivare vilka kan vara till hjälp för lärare att skapa en undervisning som möjliggör för det omedelbara naturmötet, öppnar för det relationella utrymmet och stödjer genomlevandet av demokrati som en form av liv.