Catarina Player-Koro

Factors Influencing Teachers’ Use of ICT in Education

This study investigates teachers’ attitudes to and beliefs about using ICT in education and proposes a model of how different variables are related to teachers’ use of ICT in classrooms. The model suggests that positive attitudes related specifically to ICT as a useful tool for teaching and learning and a strong sense of self-efficacy in using computers in education seem to influence the use of ICT the most. It is also suggested that positive attitudes to ICT generally do not seem to contribute very much to teachers’ use of ICT in classrooms. This is a surprising finding. The distinction between the importance of specific and general attitudes to ICT use and the emphasis on self-efficacy contributes to contemporary research. Self-efficacy and attitudes are suggested to be mutually related to ICT use.

Hype, hope and ICT in teacher education: a Bernsteinian perspective

This article draws from ethnographic data produced inside mathematics teacher education in Sweden. It explores and makes visible the ongoing process of education during workshops in information and communication technology (ICT) laboratory contexts in which student teachers were working with spreadsheet applications on the computer. The main finding is that, contrary to the intentions to renew and revitalise education, ICT in use seemed to operate as a relay in the reproduction of traditional ways of teaching and learning. However, the investigation is not one of the failures of education to make use of ICT but one that tries to distance itself from the traditional enthusiastic rhetoric, with the ambition to contribute to a more realistic discussion. Bernsteins concept of pedagogical discourse has been used. One education setting has been studied in detail.

Marginalising students' understanding of mathematics through performative priorities: a Bernsteinian perspective

This article draws from data produced during subject theory lectures and in conversional interviews with students from an ongoing ethnographic study of mathematics teacher education at a Swedish University. Using Bernsteins’ language of description of the pedagogic device the article describes how the aims of teacher education to re-contextualise mathematical education towards greater student subject knowledge is thwarted by a strongly classified and framed practice that obstructs student teachers from developing a vertical knowledge structure in mathematics due to performative priorities. The mathematical knowledge to which students are subjected takes more the form of a horizontal discourse and this is problematic for their knowledge development. A horizontal discourse reduces student access to important forms of knowledge by which they can challenge tradition and consciously change their practice.

Authoritative Knowledge in Initial Teacher Education: Studying the Role of Subject Textbooks through Two Ethnographic Studies of Mathematics Teacher Education.

Two related ethnographic research projects on mathematics teacher education in Sweden are presented in this paper. They represent a response to recent policy developments that reaffirm the value of authoritative subject studies content as the central and most important component in the professional knowledge base of would-be teachers and concomitant increases in the amount of subject studies in teacher education. These policy changes, in Sweden at least, lack scientific research support and the article argues that these policies need to be seriously rethought, as the increased emphasis on subject content may undermine the development of key professional skills.

Academic domains as political battlegrounds : a global enquiry by 99 academics in the fields of education and technology

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses as a case study the academic domain of education and technology to examine this question. Its authorship approach is innovative, with a worldwide collection of academics (99 authors) collaborating to address the proposed question based on their reflections on daily social and academic practices. This collaboration followed a three-round process of contributions via email. Analysis of these scholars’ reflective accounts was carried out, and a theoretical proposition was established from this analysis. The proposition is of a mutual (yet not necessarily balanced) power (and therefore political) relationship between the human and non-human constituents of an academic realm, with the two shaping one another. One implication of this proposition is that these non-human elements exist as political ‘actors’, just like their human counterparts, having ‘agency’ – which they exercise over humans. This turns academic domains into political (functional or dysfunctional) ‘battlefields’ wherein both humans and non-humans engage in political activities and actions that form the identity of the academic domain.

Privačių veikėjų poveikis mokytojams rengti Švedijoje. Švietimo politikos mobilumo tinklo etnografijos tyrimas

Policy networks constitute a new form of education governance through a mix of jodint working arrangements involving both public and private sector actors. This article explores the work of a specific actor in a Swedish educational policy network, active in the digitalization of schools. We examine how this actor fits within global policy networks and activities that are adding to and profiting from problems of the educational sector and not providing solutions for these difficulties by exploiting the existing mediatized problems in order to motivate the reduced expenditure on state-owned public services and to develop a conceptual foundation for launching private alternatives.

4.7 Changing Teacher Education in Sweden? A Meta-ethnographic Analysis Based on Three Long-Term Policy Ethnographic Investigations

This chapter has been developed from a meta-ethnographic analysis of national and international ethnographic research in teacher education. The interpretation of the results from three policy ethnographic studies of teacher education, related to three recent rounds of teacher education reform in Sweden, is however the main focal point. These investigations cover a 30 year reform period from the mid-1980s to the present day. Together they have allowed us to critically reinterpret the most recent round of reform and the recent teacher education policies of the right wing alliance government. The political decisions of this government in teacher education have turned policy development there away from professional unification and the development of a common scientific (cognitive) base of professionalism, toward a horizontal and fragmented cognitive base within a dualistic teacher education structure. This policy turn has previously been termed as a re-traditionalisation turn in teacher education policy making. It has been made on purely ideological foundations and runs against all available scientific evidence concerning teacher education and the professional knowledge needs of teachers.