Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Vergleichende und Internationale Erziehungswissenschaft

Vollständiges Programm als Pdf

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

[27.05.2015, 05:00 p.m.]

"Educational Paradise" Versus "Examination Hell": Projecting Images of the "Good" and the "Bad School" onto PISA Top Scorers

Abstract: Educational reforms are frequently "lent" and "borrowed" across national boundaries. Many studies have shown that borrowing always is selective and adapts what is borrowed to the receiving context. The lecture wants to take this line of reasoning one step further: not only does borrowing operate selectively and adaptively, what appears to be borrowed from other contexts does not even have to exist there. Thus, what appears to be transfer from one national context to the other often really should more adequately be called projection. Projections mostly serve to construct positive models from which it is attractive to borrow and which serve to legitimate policy agendas. However, references to "education elsewhere" can also serve to construct negative models with the function of de-legitimating policy agendas. The lecture will look at both of these types of projection. It will explore how PISA top scorers are used as projection screens for conceptions of the "good school" and the "bad school".

Linnéuniversitetet

[28.05.2015, 10:00 a.m.]

Introduction to "Curriculum theory" and the SITE Research Team

Linnéuniversitetet

[28.05.2015, 11:15 a.m.]

The Interplay Between Educational Research and Practice - Examples of Ongoing Evaluation Studies Concerning School Development

Abstract: The question about the interplay between educational research and educational practice is today a topical issue in research, politics and in local school practice. Within the research group SITE there are several projects that are interested in the development of solid theoretical and conceptual models through the interface between research ("knowledge of") and best practice ("knowledge in"). This perspective for generating new knowledge ("knowledge for") is applied in ongoing evaluation projects in cooperation between university, municipality and schools. Projects concern local reform implementation, curriculum innovation and school development. In our presentation we will give a general introduction to our theoretical framework and present two actual examples of ongoing evaluation projects: "Learning Schools and Pre-Schools" and "The Implementation of the Reform on Career Services for Teachers".

Linnéuniversitetet

[28.05.2015, 11:45 a.m.]

Meaning Making Education - Critical Issues in Teaching for Learning

Abstract: The focus of the study is on the borderland between teaching and students’ meaning making. The aim of the study is to provide an opportunity for teachers to develop their teaching and helping students with the critical points of the learning process that occur in students' encounters with instruction on how water is transported through the body. We analyze the teaching of meaning making sequences to detect critical points in biology teaching learning processes. We plan to implement a so-called learning study (Carlgren 2011) with some teachers and their students. Classroom interactions and meta discussions will be studied by the analyzing model PEA (practical epistemology analysis) of Wickman and Östman (2002). This model can be described as a magnifying glass where the learning process / meaning making, as Dewey (1925/1958) describes it, is made visible.

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

[28.05.2015, 02:00 p.m.]

What is Considered Fair in School Inspection in England and Germany? The Inspectors’ Perspective

Abstract: In the age of "accountability" the quality of individual schools has become a key issue and school inspection has become an established instrument to evaluate and judge the quality of schools, both in England and Germany. Although school inspection is highly associated with the claim to objectively measure school quality based on a pre-defined set of quality criteria, research has highlighted the human aspect of evaluation processes which seems to go along with a certain degree of subjectivity. In this presentation I will discuss preliminary findings from a comparative research project, investigating school inspectors’ beliefs about what characterises fair school inspection. As the interview data reveals, objectivity and subjectivity are viewed differently by the inspectors interviewed in terms of what is considered fair or unfair. Moreover, this issue seems to be related to inspectors’ different views about how to actually arrive at a judgement about the quality of a school and the degree to which "intuition" or "feeling" plays a role in this. The presentation aims to illustrate school inspectors’ diverging beliefs on the basis of selected interview sequences.

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

[28.05.2015, 02:30 p.m.]

The Construction of Merit – Swedish Teachers’ Perspectives on the Assessment of Pupils’ Work

Abstract: The curriculum for the Swedish compulsory school (Lgr11) states that teachers should use "all available information" about their pupils’ knowledge and learning in order to assess and grade their work. In the presentation I will discuss the difficulties and dilemmas that Swedish teachers face when grading, and present teachers’ different approaches regarding what to take into account when assessing pupils’ work. The presentation is based on interview material from a comparative research project focusing on teachers’ justice beliefs regarding assessment in school in Sweden and Germany. This study is part of the larger research project "Different worlds of meritocracy? Educational assessment and conceptions of justice in Germany, Sweden and England in the age of 'standards-based reform'" located at the Centre for Comparative and International Education at Humboldt University in Berlin and financed by the German Research Foundation.

Linnéuniversitetet

[28.05.2015, 03:30 p.m.]

Curriculum Change from a Transnational Perspective – Exploring the New Swedish Curriculum, Lgr11

Abstract: During the last two decades, transnational organizations and agreements are increasingly important as actors, networks and shaping forces in curriculum-making, and this also applies to the formation of the Swedish curriculum. The international education policy movement towards standards-based curriculum has been characterized by a top-down accountability and linear dissemination (Andersson-Levitt 2008, Sivesind & Karseth 2011). However, several research studies reveal how the transformation to national cultural education traditions also implies tensions and contradictions. In this study we address how the new Swedish curriculum Lgr11 is contextualised and reconceptualised (Bernstein 2000, Wahlström & Sundberg 2012) as it is transformed from transnational policy and curriculum scripts to teaching practices.

Linnéuniversitetet

[28.05.2015, 04:00 p.m.]

Critical Events in Teacher Students’ Learning to Teach

Abstract: This investigation focuses on critical aspects of competence in teaching and learning to teach as experienced by teacher students in practice parts of teacher education. The focus is on what teacher students experience as critical in critical events occurring during their teaching practice, and if and how they focus on the relation between teaching and pupil learning, critical from a theoretical educational perspective. Four groups of preschool, leisure, literature and physics student teachers, will participate in the research. During a period of teaching practice they will write narratives about critical events in their teaching sessions. Reflecting individual and focus interviews about critical events in the sessions will follow. The different forms of data collection give a possibility of triangulation and comparisons between methods. The general approach to the analysis of the material will be contextual analysis. The focus on critical events in the practice part of teacher education can be expected to increase our knowledge of teaching and developing competence in teaching. To what extent and in what way the relation between theory and practice is focused and reflected on, and in what way, in relation to the critical events experienced, will be an interesting and relevant result.

Linnéuniversitetet

[28.05.2015, 04:00 p.m.]

Interrelations Between the Media-Related "Visual Cultures" of Children and the Demands of School – the "Seeing Glasses" as a Development of "Camera Ethnography"

Abstract: Digital media and children is a very emotive issue of pedagogy. It is difficult to understand that there is a lack of empirical studies on the impacts of media-related and virtual "visual cultures" of children for pedagogy in theoretical-analytical as well as in practical regards. We make use of camera glasses ("seeing glasses": small, not visible cameras, built into ordinary spectacles) during the school lessons in one week to investigate the "visual cultures" of children in terms of the implications of the effects of their gazes on social interrelations. Here we consider diverse learning activities as well as social interrelations, which are undesirable in pedagogical regards, such as "mobbing" (Olweus 1999) etc.