Glimpses of dialogue: transitional practices in digitalised classrooms

This socio-culturally informed qualitative study examines digitalised classrooms in Norwegian secondary schools, with a focus on the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and dialogic aspects of literacy practices. In the article, we foreground two cases: one on the use of digital mind maps and one on a writing process with online response. These cases display productive results of the tensions between old practices and new technology in that they open up spaces for dialogic interaction. This experience calls for a deeper historical contextualisation, and in the article we refer to different time scales: First, the restricted time scale of practices observed in the local school contexts over an academic year; second, the somewhat wider perspective of 20–30 years of educational research addressing technological innovation; and third, the extensive time scale of cultural history, with an analogy to the slow move from orality to literacy in ancient Greece. On this basis we suggest the term ‘transitional practices’ as an appropriate reference to all of these three time scales. Against this background, the glimpses of dialogue observed are seen as promising precursors of future development, but also as vulnerable plant shoots that may very well shrivel and die if they are not supported.     

Still motivated? The motivation for teaching during the second year in the profession

This article presents the results from the third study in a longitudinal research project examining newly qualified teachers’ (NQTs) motivation for teaching and how they retrospectively value their teacher education. The findings indicate that teachers enjoy the profession one-and-a-half years after graduation. They are motivated both by working with their subject matter and by teaching. Retrospectively, NQTs criticize parts of the post-graduate certificate in education (PGCE) course. Although the teachers seem content in their profession, this study reveals a high rate of attrition, with 40 percent having left the profession, and a prevalent ambivalence about their professional future.     

Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) and student motivation

This article analyses the results from a study conducted among the total population of full‐time Postgraduate Certificate in Education course (PGCE) students in Norwegian universities (N = 283) in the autumn of 2006. The students responded to a questionnaire examining their motivation to take the PGCE course and their motivation to become teachers. The findings show a relatively high motivation among the students, but they also reveal much uncertainty about their future job as teachers. Twenty‐five percent of the students do not know if they are going to enter the teaching profession. They take a PGCE course primarily because they want more options in the job market. The general view among the students is that they need the PGCE course to be confident in the teaching role and they think it will be a demanding course. The main motivation to become teachers is that the students want to continue working with their academic subject, which they in turn want to teach to others.     

Integrating Constrained Experiments in Long-Term Human–Robot Interaction Using Task- and Scenario-Based Prototyping

In order to investigate how the use of robots may impact everyday tasks, twelve participants in our study interacted with a University of Hertfordshire Sunflower robot over a period of 8 weeks in the university's Robot House. Participants performed two constrained tasks, one physical and one cognitive, four times over this period. Participant responses were recorded using a variety of measures including the System Usability Scale and the NASA Task Load Index. The use of the robot had an impact on the experienced workload of the participants di?erently for the two tasks, and this e?ect changed over time. In the physical task, there was evidence of adaptation to the robot's behavior. For the cognitive task, the use of the robot was experienced as more frustrating in the later weeks.     

Ranking national research systems by citation indicators. A comparative analysis using whole and fractionalised counting methods

This paper presents an empirical analysis of two different methodologies for calculating national citation indicators: whole counts and fractionalised counts. The aim of our study is to investigate the effect on relative citation indicators when citations to documents are fractionalised among the authoring countries. We have performed two analyses: a time series analysis of one country and a cross-sectional analysis of 23 countries. The results show that all countries’ relative citation indicators are lower when fractionalised counting is used. Further, the difference between whole and fractionalised counts is generally greatest for the countries with the highest proportion of internationally co-authored articles. In our view there are strong arguments in favour of using fractionalised counts to calculate relative citation indexes at the national level, rather than using whole counts, which is the most common practice today.     

Bridging theory and practice in Norwegian teacher education through action research

Handling the relationship between theory and practice is seemingly an endless challenge in Norwegian teacher education, and bridging theory and practice is highlighted whenever discussions about improvement of teacher education are raised. This article contributes to this discussion by shedding new light on the relationship through an analysis of empirical findings recorded in a subject-oriented action research project. The project was conducted as part of the subject Religion, Philosophies of life and Ethics integrated into teacher education at the University of Stavanger in 2008/09, and its name was ‘Teaching about Religious Diversity in School – Applying and Developing an Interpretive Cultural Approach to Religious Education’. As the name indicates, the project has tried out a particular approach to religious education. The tryout has been done by a community of practice. In this article I am asking whether findings from the project are pointing towards pedagogical approaches possible to categorize on a meta-level, and in which way these detected approaches shed new light upon the relationship between theory and practice in teacher education.     

Identity at Risk: Students’ Identity Configuration in the Aftermath of Trauma

Two and a half years after the July 2011 massacre on the Norwegian island of Utøya, 68 of the adolescent survivors were interviewed about their everyday life at school. The interviews revealed changes in the interplay and counterplay between student identity and social identity when new identities connected to the massacre were introduced in the school arena. This dynamic has two prominent contradictory aspects: (1) the strong need to avoid being associated with the massacre, yet (2) they also experience a high degree of imposed external framing of identity configuration. This article investigates school as an arena where unwanted identity changes are played out. School emerges as an arena that can complicate the rehabilitation process by confirming and specifying the changes caused by exposure to trauma. Implications for what trauma support at school could entail for trauma-exposed adolescents are indicated.     

Action research – connecting practice and theory

Teacher education is often criticised for not being relevant and for there being a lack of continuity between practice teaching and the university coursework. In the literature, action research is presented as a way to bridge the gap and connect the two. The present article explores, through a qualitative study, how research-based knowledge communicated at the university and experiences from practice teaching interact in student teachers’ action research projects. The study also explores the outcome, for the student teachers, of conducting research in their practicum. The findings show that student teachers use theory and research in many different ways, and they are both consumers and producers of research. They especially emphasise the outcome of theory interacting with real situations encountered in the teaching practice. Contributing to a positive impact on their outcome were the opportunity they are offered to reflect on their own practice, the possibility they have to focus on something they find important, and the chance to make their own experiences with a particular tool for professional development.     

Deaf and hard-of-hearing adolescents’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion in mainstream and special schools in Sweden

This study examines the question of which school environment – special or mainstream school – is more favourable for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Sweden, when it comes to their well-being, and their social and academic inclusion. The aim is threefold: first to compare the well-being of adolescents who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and have additional disabilities, and who have no disabilities; second to compare the adolescents from the two deaf and hard-of-hearing groups and their experiences of inclusion and exclusion in school; and third to ascertain if any gender differences exist between the two groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing students concerning their experiences of inclusion and exclusion. A total of 7865 adolescents (13–18 years of age) answered a total survey about the life and health of young people in a county in Sweden. The results show that both boys and girls in the hard-of-hearing groups rated their well-being lower and were less satisfied with their lives than pupils without disabilities. They also show that the hard-of-hearing boys and girls attending special school were more satisfied with their lives and to a greater extent felt included both socially and academically than students in mainstream school.