Christina Olin-Scheller

Classroom vs. Extramural English: Teachers Dealing with Demotivation

The present article explores challenges facing EFL classrooms in Sweden due to new informal out-of-school language learning settings created by the current media landscape. A recent Swedish nationa ...

Experiences of Educational Content in Swedish Technical Vocational Education: Examples from the Energy and Industry Programmes

Abstract In this study, teachers and workplace supervisors in two vocational programmes at a Swedish upper secondary school were interviewed about their experiences of what is important to teach and learn during vocational education. The interviews were analysed thematically by the qualitative method analysis of narratives concerning what the informants talked about concerning the educational content. The told experiences of educational content concern five themes: basic knowledge, assessment, different educations, interest and integration of theory and practice. These themes relates to different levels of knowledge, from basic knowledge to learning to learn.

Improving Reading and Interpretation in Seventh Grade: A Comparative Study of the Effects of Two Different Models for Reading Instruction

This article investigates the potential for developing advanced reading and interpretative skills in Swedish secondary school. Over six weeks, four separate study groups in seventh grade participated in an intervention study. The purpose was to gather more knowledge about how different teaching strategies affect students’ development of advanced reading skills. Data were collected from written assignments and an experiential questionnaire. The study attempts to provide empirical corroboration of previously theoretically founded propositions. The findings indicate that the choice of teaching strategy plays a significant role in students’ learning. However, in order to make normative judgments on the advantages of one teaching model over another, further evidence is necessary. Moreover, studying the implementation and effects of instructional change is a challenging field of research which requires an array of sophisticated methods that combine qualitative and quantitative analyses.

Literary Prosumers: Young People’s Reading and Writing

The production of culture is today a matter of ‘user generated content’ and young people are vital participants as ‘prosumers’, i.e. both producers and consumers, of cultural products. Among other things, they are busy creating fan works (stories, pictures, films) based on already published material. Using the genre fan fiction as a point of departure, this article explores the drivers behind net communities organised around fan culture and argues that fan fiction sites can in many aspects be regarded as informal learning settings. By turning to the rhetoric principle of imitatio, the article shows how in the collective interactive processes between readers and writers such fans develop literacies and construct gendered identities.Keywords: fan fiction, informal learning settings, literacy, prosumer, rhetoric principle of imitatio, literatureThe production of culture is today a matter of ‘user generated content’ and young people are vital participants as ‘prosumers’, i.e. both producers and consumers, of cultural products. Among other things, they are busy creating fan works (stories, pictures, films) based on already published material. Using the genre fan fiction as a point of departure, this article explores the drivers behind net communities organised around fan culture and argues that fan fiction sites can in many aspects be regarded as informal learning settings. By turning to the rhetoric principle of imitatio, the article shows how in the collective interactive processes between readers and writers such fans develop literacies and construct gendered identities.

Playing fiction : The use of semiotic resources in role play

By taking two different kinds of role playing as examples, this article explores how semiotic resources are utilised within a certain context. Regarding these role-playing activities as examples of participative narratives, we discuss how the playing and fiction interaction works as semiotic remediation practices for teenagers and young adults. While actively becoming part of the story and ‘making’ themselves in interaction with fiction, they use semiotic resources not usually included in literacy competencies such as the body and various artifacts. This kind of participation in narrative indicates that we have a need for play not only as a first step in our socialisation to become a reader, but also as a tool for reading development throughout life.

Digital Participation Among Children in Rural Areas

This chapter problematizes the experience of digital participation and growing up in rural areas. The chapter modifies the relatively uniform picture of children as digital natives. It describes how children in different ways use, and refrain from using, digital tools and how these practices relate to inclusion and exclusion in peer relations. The study takes an ethnographic approach by employing observations, interviews and visual methods. Data collection was carried out over 2 years in a school (preschool to grade 6) in a rural area in Sweden. The participants were qualified educators other staff, and their students aged 1–12 and parents. In this chapter we use a sub-corpus of data consisting of 31 interviews with children (aged 7–12) and 2 with parents. The study shows that few of the children can be described as digital natives, while the majority relegated digital tools and the Internet to the periphery across settings. There were important differences between children with high and low social activity. Children with low social activity and few friends outside the family seldom used digital tools or rarely used them for interaction, although they developed alternative means of communication. This finding suggests implications for these children’s chances to develop digital inclusion, learning opportunities and – by extension – their opportunities to be involved in community development. The rural community in which they lived can be described as a subculture in which children can feel safe and be protected from, as the adults expressed it, the digitalized, unsafe world.

Wolf cries: on power, emotions and critical literacy in first-language teaching in Sweden

ABSTRACT Adopting a critical literacy perspective in teaching is about how experiences, social contexts, languages, learning and power relations interact in language development. In this article, we explore how students’ critical literacies are enhanced and hindered by emotional power relations in the classroom. We investigate what happens when emotionally charged texts – here texts about wolves in Sweden – are used in lower secondary schools. Drawing on two examples we illustrate different ways of enhancing students’ critical approach to the argumentative text type. The article highlights the affective aspects of teaching, and thus the unforeseeable aspects of classroom interaction. Emotionally, the wolf issue became very different objects for the persons occupying the classrooms. It invoked, e.g. homosocial relations, racist accounts and nationalistic outbursts. The article stresses the significance of teacher intervention but argues that to facilitate critical literacy in emotionally charged classrooms, the circulation of emotions, including teachers’ emotions must be brought to light.

Professional Learning Communities in a Web 2.0 World: Rethinking the Conditions for Professional Development

The new technologies, in particular social media in Web 2.0, enable rapid change in people’s behaviour, which needs to be considered in research on teacher empowerment and teacher professional deve ...

Teaching and learning critical literacy at secondary school : The Importance of Metacognition

ABSTRACT Taking Swedish secondary school students as a point of departure, this article focuses on aspects of teaching and learning critical literacy and specifically on what students identify as argumentative text structure. Challenges connected to teaching critical literacies can be considered quite big, since studies show that students have difficulties in identifying argumentative text structure and that teachers feel insecure about what kind of knowledge is required as well as how to organize teaching of critical literacies. By using Bernsteins notions of horizontal and vertical discourses as well as Gees notions of primary and secondary Discourses, we describe the interaction between personal, informal discourses and the more formal, academic discourses in the teaching and learning of critical literacies. The empirical material contains observations in two secondary school classrooms as well as written student material from a study focusing reading of argumentative texts. Our result shows that metacognition is a key component of reading instruction that supports the development of secondary Discourse and vertical discourse. Metacognition also facilitates a critical approach to different texts, and is an important aspect of critical literacies perspectives.