Newly qualified teachers' learning related to their use of information and communication technology: a Swedish perspective

This qualitative study focuses on newly qualified teachers’ use of information and communication technology (ICT) as a tool for meeting the challenges of their everyday work. The overarching aim is to investigate whether they can contribute to new knowledge about learning in ICT contexts. Theoretical points of departure concern the changeable nature of learning in situations where ways of communicating knowledge and skills are changed. The study draws upon interviews and observations. The findings show intersections picturing the new technique as partly changing the circumstances for teaching, learning and collaboration between colleagues. The new teachers’ utterances show that ICT utilisation is extensive and exhibits great variation both among female and among male participants. Boundary‐crossing changes become visible in the collaboration between more experienced teachers and those who are newly qualified, especially when they work on a common development project. However, there are relatively few teachers who bring up active ICT use in connection with pupils’ learning. Changed roles because of ICT competence raise questions about the importance of systematic ICT features within teacher education. Many of the newly qualified teachers wish they had more knowledge about ICT and related techniques. Another question is whether newly qualified teachers who show interest in using the technique can take on the role as agents of change in their active and creative use of ICT.     

Abschied vom Irgendwie

Reflection on the politics of sport is a scientific area of development. Everybody knows that sport has to do with politics in some way, but nobody seems to be interested to know how this relationship is precisely conditioned and it is left in that“somehow”. But whoever wants to bring politics responsibly into sport has to understand which special object is to be dealt with: which options of political acting approve of this pattern of sense and which exclude it? A well-founded understanding of sport politics extracts its aims from the particular sense of sport acting, its means out of the particular sense of political acting. So the term is reserved for a kind of political acting which gives power to the cultural sport idea for self-confidence, self-unfolding and self-maintaining in the societal space. It becomes a standard for the critical examination of legitimacy or illegitimacy of political acting in the field of sport. Details of this fundamental understanding specified in eight theses present a building block for the draft of a general theory und history of sports politics.     

The inflammatory response to a wheelchair half-marathon in people with a spinal cord injury - the role of autonomic function

This study investigates the relationship between autonomic function and the inflammatory response to a wheelchair half-marathon in people with a spinal cord injury (SCI). Seventeen wheelchair athletes with a cervical SCI (CSCI, N = 7) and without CSCI (NON-CSCI, N = 10) participated in a wheelchair half-marathon. Blood was taken prior, post and 1 h post-race to determine the concentrations of adrenaline, noradrenaline, extracellular heat shock protein 72 (eHsp72) and interleukin-6 (IL-6). A sit-up tilt test was performed to assess autonomic function at rest. CSCI showed a lower supine ratio of the low and high frequency power of the variability in RR intervals (LF/HF RRI, p = 0.038), total and low frequency power of the systolic blood pressure variability (TP SBP, p < 0.001; LF SBP, p = 0.005) compared to NON-CSCI. Following the race, catecholamine concentrations increased only in NON-CSCI (p < 0.036). The increase in IL-6 post-race was larger in NON-CSCI (p = 0.040). Post-race catecholamine levels explained 60% of the variance in the IL-6 response (r = 0.77, p = 0.040), which was further increased when the resting autonomic function indices were added to the regression model (R² > 81%, p < 0.012). In summary, the dampened acute inflammatory response to a wheelchair half-marathon in CSCI was strongly associated with the autonomic dysfunction present in this group.     

Testing the Consensus Model: relationships among physics teachers’ professional knowledge,interconnectedness of content structure and student achievement

ABSTRACT

The structure and definition of professional knowledge is a continuing focus of science education research. In 2012, a pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) summit was held and it suggested a model of professional knowledge and skill including PCK, which was later often called the Consensus Model (Gess-Newsome, 2015. A model of teacher professional knowledge and skill including PCK: Results of the thinking from the PCK summit. In A. Berry, P. J. Friedrichsen, & J. Loughran (Eds.), Teaching and learning in science series. Re-examining pedagogical content knowledge in science education (1st ed., pp. 28–42). New York, NY: Routledge). The Consensus Model proposes a potential powerful framework for the relations among teachers’ different professional knowledge bases, but to date it has neither been investigated empirically nor systematically. In this study, we investigated the relationships suggested by the Consensus Model among different aspects of teachers’ knowledge and skill. A sample of 35 physics teachers and their classes participated in the investigation; both teachers and their students in these classes took paper-and-pencil tests. Furthermore, a lesson taught by each of the teachers was videotaped and analysed. The video analysis focused on the interconnectedness of the content structure of the lesson as representation of the in-class actions of the teachers. The interconnectedness is understood as a direct result of the application of professional knowledge of the teachers to their teaching. The teachers’ knowledge showed no significant influence on the interconnectedness of the lesson content structure. However, the results confirmed the influence of interconnectedness and certain aspects of professional knowledge on students’ outcomes. Therefore, interconnectedness of content structure could be verified as one indicator of teachers’ instructional quality.     

Conditions for Boundary Crossing: Social Practices of Newly Qualified Swedish Teachers

The purpose of this study is to gain knowledge about conditions for boundary crossing between academic and vocational practices and to identify dimensions of social practice within workplaces. The data consist of 28 questionnaires and 14 in‐depth interviews with newly qualified secondary school teachers in their first year of teaching. We use the lens of sociocultural theory to analyse qualitatively what we can learn from newcomers' talk about their experiences and whether theories provided during their teacher education helped them to meet challenges in their new workplaces. Theoretically, notions of participation in social practices in terms of social space are in focus. In the findings, such space is identified as social adjustment, social distance, social inclusion and social expansion. Drawing on these concepts, we suggest that professional development depends strongly on the way new teachers' boundary crossing is supported by collaboration and to what extent they belong to professional dialogues in settings with inclusive and expansive relationships.