Undervisning i förskolan:

The paper argues that Swedish preschool teachers tend to be depicted mainly as subjects for policy implementation when it comes to their mission to teach in preschool. Taking the perspective of inside-out-professionalism, the paper aims to make visible how preschool teachers have developed professional knowledge about teaching from within the preschool context. The methodology is based on content analysis of semi-structured interviews with ten experienced preschool teachers. Teaching is defined openly as a conscious arrangement for learning. Dewey’s notions of experience, environment and subject content further informed the interpretation of the results. Two main categories were discerned, both emphasising the experience and active participation of the child: identifying potential subject components in children’s experience, and arranging an environment in which the child becomes a part. Each main category further included two sub-categories. Thus the present issue of implementing teaching in preschool could gain from research on established preschool practice based on inside-out-professionalism and made visible through Dewey’s theorical lens.

Lärares överväganden kring att leda undervisning

Previous research describes classroom management as both complex and demanding. Therefore, teachers as leaders need to make many choices about how to handle situations and students. The aim of this study is to describe teachers’ considerations when they are managing the classroom. The study was conducted by a teacher-research team. The data consist of 12 focus-group interviews with 46 Swedish teachers, spanning from primary to upper secondary school. Through thematic analysis, the following four themes of consideration emerged: (a) control – how much control teachers as leaders should have and how much co-decision that should be given to the students, (b) role – if teachers should be strict or personal, (c) focus – if teachers should focus on the subject or relations to students, and (d) differentiation – if teachers should focus on each individual or on the entire group. This result is an important contribution to understanding the challenges teachers face when managing the classroom and trying to provide learning and development to all students.

Reflective Writing on an ESL Writing Course

Research shows that student reflective writing is a valuable window into student learning, particularly student metacognition; however, our knowledge of the challenges of accessing metacognition to inform curriculum design and assessment practices in the ESL (English as a Second Language) context is less robust. This paper reports two qualitative studies of student reflective writing on an ESL writing course within a teacher education programme. The studies investigate how student metacognition manifests itself in reflective papers and how mapping student metacognition can inform evidence-based curriculum design and assessment. The data comes from several iterations of an ESL writing course and is analysed using directed and conventional content analyses. Our results expose a complex relation between metacognition, curriculum design and assessment practices: 1) unless scaffolded by the curriculum design to use precise terminology, students resort to expressing their understanding of the course content in terms of everyday, vernacular language and 2) student reflective writing not only provides a more nuanced picture of their learning than the final course grades but is invaluable for developing scaffolding and assessment practices. Based on our results, we recommend integrating structured reflection as part of the regular curricula to gauge ESL student metacognition and monitor more precisely their uptake of course content.

The Writing Mentoring Program:

In 2013, the University of Vienna’s Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) implemented a pilot project, which has since grown to become the core of the university’s academic writing services for students. The writing mentoring programme was designed with the goal to create a means for disseminating knowledge about writing processes amongst students in earlier stages of their studies. The programme’s organisational structure is based on the experience that, to ensure scalability, an institution as large as the University of Vienna (approx. 90.000 students) needs to rely on multipliers and on the cooperation of stakeholders in its many academic departments. Regarding the writing mentoring programme, this translates into a focus on the processes of academic writing and sensitivity towards disciplinary cultures. In this position paper, we aim to demonstrate how writing mentoring can be implemented to provide structures which allow advanced Bachelor and Master-students to support other students’ academic writing in meaningful ways. In this way, a programme like ours can help in transforming organisational practices.

Sustainable Writing Support:

Higher education is today characterised by increasing student groups and high pressure on teaching staff. In these circumstances, it may be difficult to provide appropriate scaffolding of activities that many students find challenging, for example, academic and discipline-specific writing. It may also be difficult to align such support with principles associated with effective learning. In this paper, we present the design of the bachelor thesis writing support for students at a university of technology. The support is delivered by a communication division and reaches approximately 900 students each year. The paper describes the principles guiding the design and use results from a student survey to illuminate the challenges and affordances of the approach. The survey results show that students appreciate the module and its focus on dialogic feedback, student engagement and student activity. Our results also show that one of the challenges for some students is to negotiate advice from multiple sources, primarily content supervisors and writing staff. Despite such challenges, the design is an example of a sustainable, large-scale writing module based on research on feedback and learning.

How Do I Cook an Impact Factor Article If You Do Not Show Me What the Ingredients Are?

Doctoral studies in the Czech Republic are highly individualized with little coursework outside the supervisor/supervisee dyad, and the PhD students are mandated to publish prior to the dissertation defense. This mandate is troublesome because writing development has been on the fringes of the Czech education culture. In addition, the publications often must be in English, and many doctoral students struggle with English. In this exploratory study, we examined how this mandate translates into practice, how doctoral students learn to meet the requirements and how university administrators/supervisors perceive doctoral writing development. To answer our questions, we interviewed 7 university administrators/dissertation supervisors and 7 doctoral students from various backgrounds and universities, looking for diverse views on the issue. Our analysis confirmed the formal status of supervisors as the key doctoral writing literacy brokers. While the supervisors acknowledged their role, they also tended to view doctoral writing as a matter of self-study and funding, thus indirectly emphasising the publication outcomes. In contrast, doctoral students called for structured support of their writing processes. We propose a systemic approach to introduce writing pedagogies into the Czech discourse. With this study we hope to contribute to research on doctoral writing for publication of EAL (English as an Additional Language) students in Central Europe.

Supporting and Encouraging Writing

COST Action 15221 (Advancing effective institutional models towards cohesive teaching, learning, research and writing development) strives to create synergy among supports for four crucial components of academic career – teaching, learning, research and writing.

NB!Write

This position paper takes the dichotomy between the unified context for teaching writing and writing research in North America and the diversified contexts for writing in Europe as its point of departure to outline several challenges such diversification in Europe may present to students and staff in higher education. The paper further argues for the need of unifying initiatives and describes the rationale for NB!Write, The Nordic and Baltic Network for Writing in Higher Education and outlines the goals of this initiative. The network strives to determine how the Nordic and Baltic institutional, national, and cultural contexts may help find possible answers to common pedagogical questions and develop sustainable solutions for writing support.

Academic Writing in the Baltic States

In the project Bwrite (Academic Writing in the Baltic States: Rhetorical Structures through Cultures and Languages), we aim to address the lack of an empirically grounded holistic understanding of non-Anglophone writing traditions by mapping the academic writing traditions in the national languages of the Baltic States: Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. We aim to achieve this by using machine learning and other computational methods (both quantitative and qualitative) for capturing writing tradition features at scale. By identifying and studying those features, we will not only create a body of knowledge on writing tradition(s) of the Baltic States, but the project will also provide a methodological basis for studying writing traditions elsewhere.

Systemic Leadership in Nordic Kindergartens

This is a scoping review of peer-reviewed journal articles within Nordic Early Childhood Education and Care research from 2014 to 2020. We aim to explore if and how the concept of systemic leadership is employed within Nordic research on kindergartens. Forty-two studies were included. The results show the study types, methods and informants used. Based on a qualitative content analysis, six dominating leadership perspectives were identified in the studies. These can be briefly described as: 1) leadership mirroring the outside world, 2) leadership as a collaborative process among humans, 3) hybrid leadership between solo and distributed, 4) shared formal leadership, 5) leadership as organizational learning and development, and 6) leading in the professional context. These approaches consider the ways in which systemic leadership is employed and they highlight the collective and relational dynamics of leadership beyond the individual leader. Despite a growing body of research, there remains a need for further theoretical and quantitative investigations, and studies that focus on staff without pedagogue education as informants.