The organizing and regulation of mountain guiding in Scandinavia 1820–2016, with a glance at the Alps

Abstract

In this article, we study how mountain guiding was organized and regulated in Scandinavia and the Alps between 1820 and 2015 and focus on the most important differences and similarities in Scandinavia, and between Scandinavia and the Alps. We conclude that Switzerland and Chamonix (France) represent two different systems in the Alps during the nineteenth century. However, through the emergence of national and international guide unions the regulation of mountain guiding in the Alps today appears unified, with a close connection between national regulation and mountain guide unions. In Scandinavia, Norway and Sweden historically had similar practices organizing and regulating mountain guiding, where a relatively strong layman tradition emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. In 2008, legal decisions led Sweden to change its system to match the Alp model, while Norway held on to the layman tradition. This leaves mountain guiding in Norway as a distinctly less regulated field than in France, and Switzerland, as in and Sweden.     

The creative use of companion values in environmental education and education for sustainable development: exploring the educative moment

Our paper addresses the emergence and evolution of values in educational settings. It builds upon and extends earlier work on companion meanings to develop a theory of the creative use of companion values and meanings in education. The recognition of companion values in educational practices highlight epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic transactions that occur in ways we characterize as ‘other than modern.’ Introducing the idea of educative moments allows us to identify situations where value spheres interpenetrate and interrogate each other in the meaning-making of students and teachers. These moments occur when students suddenly experience companion meanings and values such that teacher and student must deliberate together rather than the teacher dictating some dominating epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic value. This way, it is possible to accommodate critical and creative reflection in education where new values can emerge or evolve. We illustrate the theory by empirical examples from classroom conversations.     

Gaining and Sustaining TEL in a 1:1 Laptop Initiative: Possibilities and Challenges for Teachers and Students

The uptake and use of digital technologies is studied in Unos Umeå, a joint one-to-one (1:1) research project between Umeå University and the municipality of Umeå in Sweden. This article presents the results of the third phase of the classroom work with laptops. Using the ecology of resources model (Luckin, 2010), these possibilities and challenges can be interpreted as the manifestation of filters in the learning environment. Alleviating technical problems, targeting low student laptop use, teacher collaboration, and teacher professional development (TPD) may help teachers and students gain and sustain technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in this 1:1 initiative.     

The limits of socialisation

The article deals with the question of living with others, one of the most significant relationships of human life, and challenge the common understanding of the origins of living with others, where a human being is not just becoming a social but also a moral being through social institutions of societies. This common understanding of a social relationship, fostered and nurtured by a given society, places the responsibility for the possibility of living with others on the other. Drawing on the work from the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and George Simmel and the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Løgstrup we argue that the possibility of living with others is based on the rights of the other rather than of the rights to determine whom the other is.By focusing on the relation between the individual and the society on the one hand, and the connections between being moral and being social on the other hand, we suggest that the process of socialisation is devastating not only for human beings individuality and his or her moral capacity but also for a responsive educational praxis. We explore the ways in which an understanding of socialisation as the making of the social being is intimately linked to how institutional education ‘thinks itself.’ This exploration is followed by a critical discussion of the limits of socialisation, and therefore also the limits of education. By considering some of the problems about the making of the social being we arrive at the conclusion that there is the possibility for education to be somewhere else rather than within socialisation. This conclusion leads us to explore the possibilities for an educational praxis that embraces the other without holding the individuals otherness against them.     

Quality Assurance Issues in European Distance Education

Four major issues concerning quality in European distance education are addressed. (1) The lack of flexibility in educational institutions is a threat to the quality of the present education system. (2) New technologies offer new potential, but also confront us with a need for quality assessment and assurance. (3) New markets in industry and in new regions of Europe highlight the need for quality standards and guidelines. (4) Finally, public assessment and control of quality are under continuous discussion. In general, quality assurance should be approached in various ways and with different measures at institutional, national and international levels.     

Diversity of occupational orientations in Sales vocational education and training

The article examines the ways students in the school-based part of the vocational education and training (VET) in Sales begin to make sense of the world of work they are about to enter. Drawing on a qualitative study of upper-secondary Sales VET students in Norway, a four-fold typology of orientations to retail work is analysed: first, the disoriented Drifter who is restless and eager to move on to other activities or drifts on to retail apprenticeship without developing any substantial interest; second, the product-oriented Consumer is driven by a strong personal interest in the line of products, for example fashion, music, cars or electronics, and the sense of lifestyle they convey; third, the service-oriented Professional reasons on the basis of satisfaction deriving from the act of providing service to customers; and fourth, the career-oriented Aspirer who is motivated by career advancement opportunities within the retail sector. The article aimed to extend understandings of the initial process of becoming by elucidating the students’ subjective accounts of their diverse paths into retail work within the weakly established Sales education, approaching a labour market sector depicted in terms of low-skill and high turnover.     

Teaching one thing at a time or several things together? – teachers changing their way of handling the object of learning by being engaged in a theory-based professional learning community in mathematics and science

Twelve lower secondary schoolteachers in mathematics and science were asked to teach a topic of their choice during a lesson that was video-recorded. We were able to analyse 10 of the cases and we found that all of them were similar in one respect: concepts and principles were introduced one at a time, each one followed by examples of the concept or principle in question, apparently to highlight its essential meaning. All the teachers participated in three modified lesson studies with three cycles in four different groups during three semesters. The modified lesson studies were built on a theoretical idea supported by a large number of recent studies. The theory states that new meanings (of concepts and principles, for instance) are learned through engaging with instances of contrasting concepts and principles. The core idea is that new meanings derive from differences, not from sameness. After the three modified lesson studies, the teachers were asked to once again teach the same topic as in the recorded lessons before the lesson studies. The new lessons were also recorded and the analysis showed that there was one thing in common in all cases: all of the 10 teachers dealt with the relevant concepts and principles in relation to each other (i.e. simultaneously) and not one at a time. By thus bringing out the differences between them, their meaning was made possible to grasp for the students. The study lends support to the conjecture that the modified lesson study is a powerful tool for enabling teachers to structure the content of their teaching in accordance with a principle that is more powerful in making learning possible, even if this contradicts their taken-for-granted practice.     

Measuring strategic processing: comparing task-specific self-reports to traces

This research compares the strategic processing reported on right after the completion of a reading task with physical traces of the same strategies that were found in the study materials. In addition, both task-specific self-reports and traces of strategies were used to predict performance, both in the task context where the strategy data were generated and in another context. Using a sample of 177 Norwegian tenth-grade students, a quite close correspondence was found between learners’ task-specific self-reports about strategies and the strategies traced in the study materials. Moreover, both self-reports and traces of strategies predicted performance not only on the specific reading task but also beyond that context, on the PISA literacy tests. In both contexts, however, strategy data that traced what learners actually did when working on the reading task seemed to predict performance better than did task-specific self-reports.     

Enacting the role of special needs educator – six Swedish case studies

With the increasing focus on inclusion, special needs educators (SNEs) are now expected to share responsibility for pupils with teacher colleagues and to lead school development, but it is a challenge to enact this role in schools. The aim of the study was to explore how professional roles of Swedish SNEs are enacted in local school contexts. From a survey of SNEs in 10 Swedish municipalities, six participants whose work tasks were expected to correspond to the degree ordinances for their university training were chosen. The participants were followed at work, and data were collected through observation of the participants at work, participants’ diaries and interviews with the participants, their teacher colleagues and their school principals. The analysis involved both quantitative and qualitative methods. First, based on the researchers’ observations of the participants at work, categories of SNEs’ tasks were discerned, and the amount of time devoted to those categories of tasks was summarised. Second, case study narratives of the SNEs’ work were constructed to describe how the participants, their teacher colleagues and their school principals view the SNE role and to describe how the work is enacted in various school contexts. The results revealed seven categories of work tasks practised to varying degrees by the six SNEs. The case study narratives exposed large variation in how the SNEs conceptualised their role and how it evolved in relation to local school contexts. The results of the study are discussed with regard to the role of the SNE in relation to policies of inclusion.