Sigrun Gudmundsdottir

The Teller, the Tale, and the One Being Told: The Narrative Nature of the Research Interview

ABSTRACTNarrative structures are readily available in our culture and people automatically draw on them in most meaning-making activities. The research interview is one of many such activities. Narrative structures influence how informants remember their experience and subsequently tell researchers about it in an interview. Researchers also draw upon narrative structures because they hear and understand in narratives. Informal or implicit interpretation as opposed to explicit interpretation are discussed. The “iceberg” metaphor is used to describe the two kinds of interpretation. The tip of the iceberg is explicit interpretation, which is what researchers write in their research reports. The biggest part, however, is informal interpretation. It is out of sight and usually unexamined because it is built into the strategies researchers employ to make sense of data.

Story‐maker, story‐teller: narrative structures in curriculum

This chapter explains pedagogical content knowledge as a narrative way of knowing. It describes how narratives serve as a means of explaining that understanding to others. It discusses two San Francisco (California) high school teachers’ use of narrative in teaching. It concludes that, because teaching is like writing a story, understanding teaching is like interpreting a story.

Towards inclusive schools: a study of inclusive education in practice

The purpose of this study was to examine how one teacher manages to include students with special needs in an ordinary classroom. We describe how she attempted to achieve positive academic and social outcomes for students in the classroom, and especially how she handled a boy with impulsive and uncontrolled behaviour. Data collection was carried out by means of observations, video recordings and interviews. The theoretical framework was based upon sociocultural theory; and the main themes were cognitive learning processes, social learning processes and collaboration processes. Important concepts in this connection are caring, dialogue, scaffolding, other-regulation and self-regulation.

Inclusive Practice: A Biographical Approach.

Abstract For the past decades, inclusive educational practice has developed to be a guiding political vision in Norway as in several other Western countries. In this article, we are concerned with how the ideal of inclusive practice is realized in one particular classroom. Ann is the homeroom teacher for a third-grade class and in her class she has two boys with severe behavioural problems. These boys are included in the ordinary classroom activities together with their teacher and classmates. The study focuses on one aspect of her inclusive educational practice as well as on how this has developed over time.

The REFLECT project in Norway: interactive pedagogy using email

Abstract Given the constraints in teacher education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, (NTNU), one-to-one interaction via email between the student teacher out on teaching practice and a professor or a university supervisor is a favoured approach. The case studies from NTNU describe how student teachers learn to reflect over episodes from the classroom in a structured interaction with their supervisors. The cases formed part of the European REFLECT project. The article also discusses the processes of reflection and preparation to use free writing over email as a way of opening up resources. We have connected all these analyses, interpretations and the more overarching ideas to build on an interactional principle (Hoel, 1995, p. 13). In this project, the email messages had a double function. First, the writing in itself was intended as a tool for the student teachers own thinking. Secondly, email is intended to enable communication between the student teacher and their tutors. On the b...

The Accidental Learner: Experiences from Participation in Classroom Research.

This paper brings into focus what can happen when a person is both a researcher and a teacher in two different classrooms almost at the same time. In the two classrooms project work is the subject of inquiry and the working method used. The aim of the research was to figure out how group work and collaborative processes function during project work, and to compose and present a kind of ‘thinking tool’ for other teachers to use when reflecting over their own teaching. Both the researcher and the informant maintain that they influenced each other. The paper also shows that the teacher/informant interactions in addition mediate the researcher’s work as a teacher.