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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren

The Didactic Challenge of New Literacies in School and Teacher Education

Tildelt: kr 6,1 mill.

The project is multidisciplinary, focusing on the subjects Norwegian, Mathematics and RLE. The research has also included analysis of curricula, textbooks and official documents in school and teacher education. Literacy has been a key concept. What is learned has to be mediated by cultural and linguistic signs or different forms of semiotics. It is therefore necessary to explore and clarify what specific challenges these mediating processes may have for teaching and learning in specific subjects.In sev eral studies we have explored the meaning of literacy as interpreted in textbooks and curricula and how it is understood and played out in everyday practices in lower and upper secondary school. In our research we see patterns explaining why so many stude nts fail within the school system. Our findings opens up for new didactic discussions. Sigmund Ongstad: This study focuses on how language and school subjects/curricula are integrated. The role of semiotics in didactics and literacies is problematized. We study perceptions of language and communication in Norwegian curricula for school subjects in primary school and teacher education. A main focus is the reform (LK 06), in which three basic communicational skills, reading, writing and orality, are made obligatory in all school subjects. A key question is: How do language and disciplines relate, theoretically and in school subjects in this new curricular context? The study problematizes the role of language, communication and semiotics in developing lite racy competencies across school subjects. Hans Jørgen Braathe: This study is based on data from teachers in mathematics, and on a socio-political reading of educational official documents in Nordic contexts. The discourses of equity and quality in educa tion have permeated the international debates on education whether they occur in the context of research, policy, curriculum or teaching and learning. Rather than being directly articulated, they often remain implicit and assumed. Education in Norway is s trongly influenced by these discourses.The study is invoking the socio-political turn within mathematics education research which signals the shift in theoretical perspectives that sees knowledge, power, and identity as interwoven and arising from (and co nstituted within) social discourses. Adopting such a stance means uncovering the taken-for-granted rules and ways of operating that privilege some individuals and exclude others. Bodil Kleve Through interviews of pupils in school,Kleve points out the r elation between social background and mathematical success in school. Through analysis of interviews Kleve investigates how being a pupil in mathematics means constructing identity through participating in mathematical activities. Throughout the whole project period, Bodil Kleve has had collaboration with Cambridge University in developing a coding manual for the Knowledge Quartet (a theoretical framework). Also researchers from other countries (the US, Turkey, Greece) and researchers from other Univer sities in the UK are linked to this work. Halldis Breidlid Through interviews with pupils and observations of RLE lessons Breidlid has found a coherence between socio-cultural background and the pupils understanding of the RLE subject. In her study the pupils meta-consciousness in RLE strongly corresponded to the level of literacy and the academic and religious-cultural discourses at home. On the other hand, she also found that the literacy challenges of pupils unfamiliar with the discourses in school were not always given appropriate attention. Further investigation is needed to fully answer the question of how the teaching in RLE may utilize the potential of students lacking experience of the school discourses. Sylvi Penne:A goal has been to explor e language and other symbolic representations as mediational means for learning - not as a neutral factor, but as mediums loaded with cultural values that have become part of the pupils´ identities and actions. The study was based on interviews with pupil s from one lower and two higher secondary schools as well as observations of lessons, textbooks and students´ written texts. The research interviews focus on the students´ attitudes to learning. The results show that students with a literacy competence e asily accept their role as "pupils". They "play the school game". This position stimulates their meta-awareness in the learning contexts (and good results) while students who react more emotionally, focusing on affinities and individual taste,in the same contexts get lower grades. The Scandinavian tradition with strong focus on the individual learner may then be part of the problem. Håvard Skaar: Internet based plagiarism among Norwegian upper secondary students is focused.The frequency and extent of pla giarism in the studentessays is measured and related to individual differences between the students.

The starting point is sociological studies showing how traditional democratic ideals are threatened in the Norwegian educational system (Nordli Hansen 1999, Bakken 2004). With their background from primary school and lower secondary school an increasing n umber of students do not complete upper secondary school. International research relate such tendencies to a new focus on language - a natural consequence of the age of information. The concept literacy conveys that learning is a language act - what is le arned has to be mediated by cultural and linguistic signs, and that language and metalanguage as mediational means is decisive for who will learn what in the classroom (Wertsch 1998, Gee 2003). The project studies the role of language/communication at dif ferent levels in the education system and investigates how three different subjects are taught in different classrooms. Two of the subjects, RLE and Norwegian, are traditionally based on a syntagmatic mode of thought, while the third is based on a paradig matic mode. The dialectics between both modes is from a didactical point of view an essential part of a literacy-competence. The five researchers focus literacy on different levels of education from different perspectives: Ongstad: Discursivity and Disciplinarity: Literacies and/as semiotics across curricula. Braathe:Teacher Education and the Construction of a Math Teacher. Students' communicative positionings in mathematical literacies. Penne:Learning and Learning how to learn in grade 10 Soci ocultural differences displayed through language in a multimodal world. Breidlid:The Potential of RLE in promoting Cultural Literacy in the Multicultural Classroom. Kleve:Mathematical knowledge for teaching - mathematical literacy in school.

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