Department of education

The purpose of this article is to gain knowledge about how interactions in a gaming context become constituted as effective resources for a student’s learning trajectory. In addition, this detailed study of a learning trajectory documents how a computer game becomes a learning resource for working on a specific topic in school. The article reports on a qualitative study of students at an upper secondary school who have played the computer game Global Conflicts: Palestine to learn about the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A sociocultural and dialogic approach to learning and meaning-making is employed as an analytical framework. Analyzing different interactional episodes, in which important orientations and reorientations are located, documents how the student’s learning trajectory developed and changed during the project. When engaged in game play in educational settings, experiences with playing computer games outside of school can relevantly be invoked and become part of the collaborative project of finding out how to play the game. However, these ways of engaging with a computer game might not necessarily facilitate a subtle understanding of the specific topic that is addressed in the game. The findings suggest that the constitution of a computer game as a learning resource is a collaborative project, in which multiple resources for meaning-making are in play, and for which the teacher has an important role in facilitating student’s adoption of a multiperspective on the conflict. Furthermore, the findings shed light on what characterizes student-teacher interactions that contribute to a subtle understanding, and offer a framework for important issues upon which to reflect in game-based learning (GBL).

The aim of this article is to gain knowledge about what it means to be a learner using social media in an educational setting. The article presents an ethnographic study of students in a multiethnic community in Oslo who participate in a social networking site called Space2cre8 (S28). In this article, we set out to explore the kind of space for learning that can be created in a lower secondary classroom by a social networking site. The article provides a detailed study of how two students made use of this social networking site as part of school activities, and it outlines two specific ways in which to be a learner using social media in school. The findings suggest that a social networking site such as S28 can provide different resources for different students with different learner identities, and might represent a space in which everyday knowledge and school knowledge merge to offer a hybrid space for learning.

The article reports on a case study detailing a school project at a lower secondary school in Norway, for which students created personal digital stories on the topic of World War II. In contrast to previous research, this study provides a detailed account of how digital storytelling is enacted in an educational practice. A sociocultural and dialogical perspective on learning and meaning-making is employed as an analytical framework. The findings suggest that digital storytelling might contribute to an educational practice that expands students' access to various resources for working on a curricular topic. However, the results show that the potential of digital storytelling has to be considered in light of several issues. Such issues include the degree to which teachers manage to create a balance between institutional demands and student agency, and the manner in which teachers enable students' interpretations of this genre in terms of working on content creation and developing appropriate tools for this purpose. Additional issues include how teachers use student-composed content to expand students reflection upon the topic addressed in the digital story, and how educators develop an understanding of how the diverse interests of the students influence the creation of such a product.

In a Bakhtinian perspective, learning can take place as a consequence of encountering a variety of voices or identities. We explore how the concept of multivoicedness enables us to study meaning-making processes with digital technology, as an important contributor to our underlying theoretical framework. In our discussion of a dialogic approach to meaning making, we combine an approach to multivoicedness with the concepts of line and surface from Vilém Flusser. This leads to what we call the dialogical design of identity, and an elaboration on how identity and literacy can be understood in the context of multivoicedness. Finally, we discuss the potential of digital storytelling, as a way of addressing identity, literacy, and learning in school. This discussion is carried out by presenting empirical data from an ongoing research project on digital storytelling in a Norwegian school, where we argue that experiences with different voices are made possible by digital storytelling with implications for students’ learning.

I dette kapitlet vil jeg ta for meg forholdet mellom dialogisme og læring på tre litt ulike, men likevel overlappende måter: 1. Jeg vil ta for meg et dialogisk perspektiv på meningsskaping og hvordan mennesker som lærende skaper mening i den praksisen de deltar i. 2. Jeg vil også se på det som ofte blir kalt dialogisk læring, og diskutere hvordan denne type læring kan bidra til å utvide kunnskapen som befinner seg i en praksis. 3. I tillegg vil jeg fokusere på hvordan et dialogisk perspektiv kan benyttes til å forstå forholdet mellom læring og identitet.
Ifølge Linell (1998) kan man si at «dialogisme betrakter enhver kognitiv og/eller kommunikativ handling som et ‘svar’, som responderende til noe (ofte kun implisitt) i konteksten» (s. 35–36). Prinsippet om responsivitet er sentralt innenfor et dialogisk perspektiv på læring. Det dreier seg om hvordan våre
handlinger er responser på spesifikke trekk ved konteksten vi handler i. Kort fortalt er kontekst det som omgir oss som handlende mennesker; altså rammen eller settingen for våre handlinger. Dette betyr at vi tilpasser ytringene våre den
settingen vi deltar i. Vi prater for eksempel om andre tema og på andre måter med læreren eller legen vår enn hva vi gjør med nære venner. For å forstå læring eller det å være lærende må man betrakte enhver kognitiv eller kommunikativ handling den lærende utfører, som et svar på noe i læringskonteksten han eller hun befinner seg i. Dette prinsippet ligger til grunn for alle de tre ulike tilnærmingene til læring og dialogisme som vil bli beskrevet i dette kapitlet. I det følgende vil jeg ta for meg de ulike tilnærmingene i samme rekkefølge som de er beskrevet ovenfor.

In this article, we examine the relationship between how students are positioned in social encounters and how this influences learning in a technology-supported science project. We pursue this topic by focusing on the participation trajectory of one particular learner. The analysis shows that the student cannot be interpreted as one type of student having only one type of identity as a learner. His position as a learner shifts multiple times during the instructional trajectory. We discuss the different consequences that this has on the student’s participation and learning of science.

In this article, we examine how assessment is enacted and negotiated in a school project that involves multimodal composition. The case is a project on advertisement in which lower secondary students collaboratively composed multimodal commercials about various products and topics. The theoretical framework is based on sociocultural perspectives on learning and assessment, and video data of classroom interaction are subjected to detailed analysis. The findings document the consequences of decoupling production and assessment practices. The analysis show that written texts and multimodal texts have different statuses in the project because of how they are assessed and that this has consequences for students' participation as learners. In addition, the analysis shows how students position themselves differently towards resources that are intended to help them in summative assessment situations. We discuss issues that teachers may reflect upon when planning and executing multimodal composition in schools.

In this article, I analyze teachers' use of students' everyday knowledge and experiences as resources for learning in educational dialogues. By analyzing video data of teachers' attempts to contextualize instruction in naturalistic settings in a lower secondary school, I examine how teachers use such resources to support and guide student learning. By employing a situated approach to learning, I provide a turn-by-turn analysis of how teachers use students' everyday knowledge as resources to socially construct knowledge when working with academic subject matter. The concepts of intercontextuality and positioning function as analytical tools that enable an analysis of the relationships between the use of everyday experiences and the social organization of participation during teachers' instructional work. The findings show that attempts at contextualizing instruction were identified in many of the lessons. The findings also document that teachers face both challenges and opportunities when contextualizing instruction. A turn-by-turn analysis shows that the function of everyday experiences in educational dialogues depends on how such resources are mobilized, how they are brought into the conversations, as well as the roles assigned to students in the dialogues. In the article, issues contributing to the productive use of everyday resources in educational dialogues are displayed and discussed.

The aim of this article is to examine what resources teachers mobilize when contextualizing instruction. In this instructional method, teachers use students' everyday experiences as tools for teaching subject matter at school. Research has documented that contextualizing instruction can support classroom learning. However, we do not know very much about what types of resources teachers view as relevant in this kind of instructional work. In this article, we analyze video data of student-teacher interactions in 43 lessons, which were collected when following four lower secondary teachers over one academic year. The analysis is based on a sociocultural perspective of learning and teaching in which the focus of analysis is on what kind of everyday experiences teachers orient to when supporting students' participation. The findings show that the resources teachers orient to can be grouped into five categories: (1) teachers orienting to characteristics of the local community, (2) teachers orienting to examples from everyday practices, (3) teachers orienting to personal issues, (4) teachers orienting to concrete objects, and (5) teachers orienting to knowledge from travelling abroad. These categories show variation and multiplicity of resources that teachers use when contextualizing instruction, and the implications of this multiplicity are discussed in the article.

This paper reports on a study of whole-class conversations in science education, with a specific focus on how students' everyday experiences can be used as resources for exploring scientific concepts. The empirical basis is a genetics project involving secondary school students and their teacher. A combination of quantitative methods, in the form of frequency counts of structural features of whole-class conversations, and detailed microanalyses of student–teacher interactions are employed. Findings are that, when the teacher orchestrates whole-class dialogues in which students are positioned as active partners in the conversations, more references to everyday experiences are made. In addition, the analysis shows that the mobilisation of everyday experiences enables the students to reason about complex issues related to genetics as well as enables the teacher to display this complexity and coexisting perspectives. The findings are discussed according to possible implications for instruction and dialogic whole-class activities.