Per-Olof Erixon

School Subject Paradigms and Teaching Practice in the Screen Culture: Art, Music and the Mother Tongue (Swedish) under Pressure

There are great expectations that new digital technology will become a powerful tool for developing education activities. Like many countries in Europe and worldwide, Sweden has invested a large amount of resources in new technology and new media (hereafter called digital media), and they have become a natural and important part of school teaching. The developed use of digital media is assumed to lead to educational change and, hence, better teaching. That such expectations have not been fulfilled, however, is shown in a number of Swedish, European and international studies. One explanation of this situation may be that the incorporation of digital media differs between different school subjects. School subjects have their characteristic structures, which are of great importance for how digital media can be integrated. Digital media influence the way in which school subjects can be described from a knowledge theory perspective — i.e. what constitutes the subjects paradigm and its teaching practice. The point of departure of this article is the school subjects of art, music and the mother tongue (Swedish), which, like other school subjects, are feeling the pressure of a digital media and screen culture to an ever increasing degree, and it queries whether and how teachers and pupils in these three school subjects conceive of and relate to the shifts that take place in the subjects when digital media are being increasingly integrated into the teaching. The study is based on interviews with pupils and teachers in the three school subjects, and the results are presented in terms of four themes that appear in the investigation — namely: (1) educational environments; (2) what teachers and pupils regard as the sacred and the profane; (3) motives for using digital media in teaching; and (4) whether and how working methods are changing with digital technology, i.e. questions concerning collective and individual aspects. In all three subjects, there are clear indications that digital media have already started to influence both the subject content and the working methods, while, at the same time, the proportion of digital media is limited and the impact is weak.

The Teaching of Writing in the Upper Secondary School in the Age of the Internet and Mass Media Culture

The Teaching of Writing in the Upper Secondary School in the Age of the Internet and Mass Media Culture

Editorial—Educational sciences and a media ecology perspective

Theories in educational sciences pay little or no attention to the fact that technologies hold deep and crucial implications for what Bernstein (1996) calls “content” and “framing” in an educational discourse. This also applies to Bernstein. It is easy to ignore the fact that tools are always involved in teaching and learning and that today’s teaching is mainly based on old technologies like paper, books and pens. The radical technological shift we are experiencing highlights the major role technology really plays in both what we teach and learn and how we organise it. This must be taken into consideration when developing theories within educational sciences, i.e. a media ecological perspective must be developed.

On the remediation, relativisation and reflexivity of mother tongue education

In this article, education is regarded as a medium (Salomon, 2000). i.e. a channel for the transmission of knowledge with its specifically and historically defined form and content. From a media ecology perspective, media are not neutral, transparent or value-free channels for transporting information. Instead, the inherent physical structures and symbolic form of media play a decisive role in the design of what and how information is coded and transferred and hence also how it is decoded. It is the structure of the medium that determines the content and nature of the information. In our digital era this medium, i.e. education, is now being remediated (Bolter & Grusin, 2002). With this point of departure, in this article traditional education is placed on a par with a coherent text in the form of an essay. This implies that what typifies an essay in a transferred sense is characteristic of traditional education based on paper, pencil and book technologies. In a new media ecology context, what is polyvocal, interactive and transient is also becoming characteristic of education in its capacity as a medium. Like all remediation this also offers a promise of reforms and changes in the sense of remoulding, which partly corresponds to all the expectations placed on new media as regards the possibilities to develop education, for teaching and for pupils’ learning. This article aims to indicate and discuss what is identified as a relativisation that appears when schools and teaching are remediated and which manifests itself on three different levels in schools, i.e. regarding: (1) the content of the teaching; (2) the forms of teaching; and (3) the relations in the classroom. The examples are taken from teaching of the school subject Swedish (mother tongue).

Academic Literacies; Discourse and Epistemology in a Swedish University

This article explores the perceptions of active senior researchers from different scientific and scholarly areas about scientific and scholarly writing, specifically that associated with research. The study comprises interviews with 12 researchers in four different faculties at a Swedish university: Arts, Social Sciences, Science and Technology, and Medicine. The article draws on Biglan’s (1973) and Becher’s (1994) four intellectual clusters, i.e. (1) hard pure (natural) science; (2) soft pure (arts and social) sciences; (3) hard applied (engineering) sciences; and (4) soft applied (education) sciences and connects them with Graue’s (2006) four identified writing traditions in academia, of: reporting, interpreting, constituting and praxis. The findings suggest that researchers in the applied sciences see writing as having a mediating and creative function for research while, for pure scientists, writing is based on epistemology that does not attribute a mediating function to language (Wertsch, 1998). The study also indicates that researchers who are active in applied science, e.g. professional education of various kinds, are positioned at the interface between the discipline and individuals as social beings, and that they operate as epistemological boundary crossers for the faculties.

The Garden of Thought : about writing poems in upper secondary school

This chapter takes as its starting point a 10-year-project in the upper secondary school in the north of Sweden, called “The Garden Of Thought”, which involved students in creative writing such as poetry, as part of the ordinary school curriculum. One of the main questions was whether the students accept creative work of this kind as part of their schoolwork, since a poem can be highly personal, involving love and the deepest feelings.

Understanding the Educational Landscape through the School Novel

Swedish literature includes many novelsabout school experiences. These novels help usunderstand how teachers experienced changes inthe Swedish school system during the previouscentury. The most interesting novels are thosewritten by professional teachers. In thatrespect it is possible to connect this work tolife history research, an established field ineducational research for examining how privateindividuals perceived and related to events inhistory. This article I based on a researchproject entitled: “Educational work in theprism of the novel”.

The struggle for the text : – on teacher students’ meetings and negotiations with different academic writing traditions on their way towards a passed paper

The struggle for the text : – on teacher students’ meetings and negotiations with different academic writing traditions on their way towards a passed paper

Extended Writing Demands – A Tool for ‘Academic Drift’ and the Professionalisation of Early Childhood Profession?

ABSTRACT This study explores the extended demands for writing in the Swedish public service sector of early childhood and how academic writing in the higher education programmes aimed at professional work in that sector is perceived to be of value for early childhood practice among practitioners. Empirical data was collected in individual interviews and focus groups among 65 early childhood staff in two different communities. The study points to an overall focus on assessments and evaluation in professional writing which tends to challenge everyday communication, i.e. everyday discourse for an internal audience (staff, parents and children). The study further indicates that professional writing holds implications for social relations and contributes to strengthened hierarchies among early childhood staff; younger generations more trained in academic writing tend to be ‘ranked’ higher than staff more experienced in practice. Whether the twin demands for ‘professional’ and ‘academic’ writing will contribute to a ‘professional’ early childhood staff community, as suggested in policy and teacher union rhetoric, remains an open question.

Punctuated Equilibrium--Digital Technology in Schools' Teaching of the Mother Tongue (Swedish).

ABSTRACT This article deals with how teachers and pupils in seventh to ninth grade in Sweden look upon and relate to the incorporation of new digital technology in mother tongue education (Swedish). The result shows that both the classification and framing of the subject is being challenged by new technology, but that the awareness of the impact seems to be limited. It is suggested that the development might now be approaching a stage where the gradual change, “evolution”, that has taken place through all the invasive “forms of media” that have been added to the teaching environment, will now contribute to a punctuated equilibrium, which will hopefully lead to a new inner stability or homeostasis, in other words a paradigm shift. This, however, requires teachers to appropriate new technology as well as an awareness of its influence on the pedagogical discourse.