From activity to transdisciplinarity and back again – preschool teachers’ reasoning about pedagogical goals

This study presents an analysis of preschool teachers’ reasoning about pedagogical goals. Of specific interest is how teachers in a Swedish and a Finnish context describe goals for children’s learning and how they describe them implementing these goals into their practice. The research question is thus: How are pedagogical goals perceived and enacted, in the thematic-oriented and play-based pedagogical practice of preschool? In-depth interviews were conducted with six preschool teachers, of which three expressed learning goals guiding their pedagogical work. The Variation Theory of learning is the guiding principle throughout the analysis, and reveals indirect and direct objects of learning and content for learning described by the three teachers. A deeper analysis of the features of these provides a comprehensive picture of pedagogical goals that are intertwined and move between activity goals, working goals and transdisciplinary goals. These results contribute to our understanding of the characteristics of preschool pedagogy and the complex pedagogical practice preschool entails.     

Vision and Embodied Knowing: The Making of Floral Design

This article focuses on assessment actions in floristry education, addressing how interaction with flowers influences and mediates vocational knowing. Using video recordings from floristry education for adults, the article explores the interaction between teacher and student when assessing on-going work and performance as a way to frame the teacher’s seeing in situ. Influenced by conversation analysis and moment-by-moment methods ─ including talk, gestures, and flowers as resources ─ the findings contribute to a holistic perspective on vocational floristry knowing. Different features of vocational floristry knowing are detected as part of the content in assessment actions: (i) aesthetic standards reflected in suggestions made by the teacher and student, (ii) financial awareness as a way of seeing flowers, and (iii) the use of context and change of perspective to take the customer into account. The findings demonstrate situated floristry knowing in action, which is displayed when the teacher enables the student to visualise and understand professional vision of flowers, traditions, and standards.     

Differential growth patterns in emerging reading skills of Turkish-German bilingual and German monolingual primary school students

Students from Turkish-speaking families are the largest minority language group in Germany. Yet, little is known about this group’s literacy development. Using data from a 3-year longitudinal study, we examined whether the same base reading skills are involved in early reading comprehension of 100 Turkish-German bilingual and 69 German monolingual children. We applied a basic theoretical model of reading development to examine how emerging literacy develops for monolingual compared to bilingual children. Both the bilingual and monolingual children in this sample developed the investigated base reading skills at the same rate. However, the relations among phonological awareness, German vocabulary, and word decoding showed differential patterns in the development of German reading comprehension skills for the two groups: monolingual children appeared to make use of their phonological awareness skills more, whereas reading comprehension depended more on vocabulary skills for bilingual readers. Our findings indicate that bilingual emerging readers require specialized models of reading development to account for their unique routes into reading comprehension. The results of the study point to a need for increased attention to vocabulary building in the early phases of literacy acquisition for bilingual children.     

Promoting basic arithmetic competence in early school years–using a response to intervention model

This study investigated whether mathematics education based on a multi-tiered response to intervention (RTI) model can support students' arithmetic competence in primary schools in Sweden. The intent was to identify and support students at risk of failure. In this study, 113 students participated in the intervention, and 30 students participated in the control group. Both groups were followed from Grade 1 to the end of Grade 2 and compared. During the first semester in Grade 1, all students were taught basic addition and subtraction with explicit instructions in Tier 1. Those who did not respond to Tier 1 after one semester were provided support within Tier 2 during the second semester. The same was repeated in grade 2 and the students that did not respond to Tier 2 were supported within Tier 3. At the end of Grade 2, students in the intervention group performed significantly higher on the basic arithmetic competence in the number range 1–9 than the control group. No significant difference was found in a test measuring basic arithmetic competence in the number range 10–19. This study shows that using multi-tiered RTI might be sufficient to identify and support students at risk in early arithmetic competence.     

Ambiguity as a motor for communication—Differences between hearing and deaf students’ ways of reasoning about energy

Ambiguity in group discussions as a resource for communication is studied. How students, aged 13–15 years, elaborate on the concept energy through dialogue is described. Group interviews were conducted with 15 hearing and 20 deaf students. Three probes were used to initiate discussions on different meanings of energy. The results show that the dialogues are less elaborated for deaf learners compared with hearing learners. It is argued that dialogues between hearing students have a greater chance of becoming ‘joint productive activity’, since the ambiguity of the word energy in Swedish lays the ground for shared meaning-making. To deaf learners, the ambiguity between the Swedish word and the signs used produces uncertainty and puts an end to further dialogue.     

Nonuniform Fuchsian codes for noisy channels

We develop a new transmission scheme for additive white Gaussian noisy (AWGN) channels based on Fuchsian groups from rational quaternion algebras. The structure of the proposed Fuchsian codes is nonlinear and nonuniform, hence conventional decoding methods based on linearity and symmetry do not apply. Previously, only brute force decoding methods with complexity that is linear in the code size exist for general nonuniform codes. However, the properly discontinuous character of the action of the Fuchsian groups on the complex upper half-plane translates into decoding complexity that is logarithmic in the code size via a recently introduced point reduction algorithm.