I en pågående studie om gymnasieskolans kurs "gymnasiearbete" undersöks hur 20 svenska gymnasieelever resonerar kring sin undervisning och sitt självständiga arbete mot bakgrund av de förändringar som blev en följd av Lgy11. Vårt syfte är att utforska vilka värden, normer och premisser som ligger till grund för deras föreställningar om kursen. Detta gör vi genom att iscensätta och analysera fokusgruppssamtal samt klassrumsobservationer. Under denna presentation belyses forskningsprojektet såväl empiriskt som teoretiskt. Ett av våra huvudresultat visar att eleverna ser sig beroende av sin lärare i hög grad. De tillskriver henne en strukturerande roll, bland annat med avseende på tidsramarna i arbetsprocessen. Detta är intressant att diskutera och problematisera i relation till såväl deras ambitionsnivå som beskrivna arbetsinsats. Vidare pekar resultatet på att elevernas uppfattning om hur arbetet bedöms blir avgörande för synen på det egna lärandet.

All students in Swedish upper secondary school have to do one mandatory project work course aimed at developing general skills such as independence, initiative, creativity and imagination. The students have to pass the course to receive their upper secondary diploma. Our study aims to investigate how students talk about the task of doing ‘independent’ project works in the diploma course.

Three focus group conversations of totaling twelve students are filmed and analyzed through topic analysis, an analytical approach based on dialogism as theoretical framework. The empirical material is analyzed from a perspective of how the design of the project course and the assessment regime influences the students work. Findings indicate that the students rely heavily on help and instruction from the teacher. They perceive of this help as a crucial asset in passing the diploma course. They state that the kind of help they receive are strongly focused towards the dividing line between pass and fail. Help is hardwired towards the scientific form and the content of their essays are treated as almost uninteresting. Support for independence therefore seems to be significantly restricted in practice. The teacher is in fact working as a facilitator guiding students towards dependence. This is accomplished through framing doing project work as doing template science.

All students in Swedish upper secondary school have to do one mandatory project work course aimed at developing general skills such as independence, initiative, creativity and imagination. The students have to pass the course to receive their upper secondary diploma. Our study aims to investigate how students talk about the task of doing ‘independent’ project works in the diploma course.

Three focus group conversations of totaling twelve students are filmed and analyzed through topic analysis, an analytical approach based on dialogism as theoretical framework. The empirical material is analyzed from a perspective of how the design of the project course and the assessment regime influences the students work. Findings indicate that the students rely heavily on help and instruction from the teacher. They perceive of this help as a crucial asset in passing the diploma course. They state that the kind of help they receive are strongly focused towards the dividing line between pass and fail. Help is hardwired towards the scientific form and the content of their essays are treated as almost uninteresting. Support for independence therefore seems to be significantly restricted in practice. The teacher is in fact working as a facilitator guiding students towards dependence. This is accomplished through framing doing project work as doing template science.

Jag ser fram emot en dialogkonferens i dubbel mening. Förutom att vi bokstavligen deltar i en konferens med dialogisk inramning, berör mitt konferensbidrag just dialogfilosofisk pedagogik. Jag skulle vilja lägga fram ett nyskrivet artikelmanus som i teoretiskt avseende bygger i huvudsak på Mikhail Bakhtins dialogfilosofi och Eugene Matusovs pedagogiska forskning i Bakhtins anda.

Arbetet, som har titeln “Addressing children’s addressivity in other-oriented teaching: a matter of finalizing intersubjectivity or unfinalizing alterity?”, problematiserar den traditionella definitionen av intersubjektivitet inom pedagogik och föreslår begreppet alteritet som ett än mer demokratiskt, mindre linjärt, mindre instrumentellt samt mindre konsensusorienterat dialogiskt alternativ. Institutionell kommunikation och instruerande undervisning diskuteras också på ett kritiskt vis och relateras vidare till frågan om dialogiskt lärande. Teoretiska resonemang illustreras med exempel från empiriska studier där barn är involverade i pedagogiska dialoger.

Nyckelord i sammanhanget är: dialogic pedagogy, Bakhtin, children, intersubjectivity, alterity, finalizing dialogues, unfinalizing dialogues.

Under min tilltänkta presentation kommer såväl det teoretiska (filosofiska) innehållet som de empiriska excerpten att diskuteras. Jag hoppas på en livfull diskussion i polyfonisk anda!

In this discussion, Roger Säljö turns to the educational scholar’s role in current times where schooling tends to be dictated by narrow political goals and normative concepts. He urges the field to consider both theoretical and practice-oriented implications carefully. In doing so, he points to interrelated consequences, seeking to problematize existing views on education. For example, children’s and other students’ need of engaging in sense-making in schooling, beyond the predominant outcome-based learning discourse that problematically overlooks non-measurable and more open-ended knowledge forms and values of being educated. In his eyes, educational theory is too often neglected, but indeed has a significant potential to contribute with a deeper picture, combined with a substantiated empirical body of research as well.

Jan verkade för att utveckla livsvärldsfenomenologin som empirisk forskning. Han visade också ett stort intresse för försök att generera ny teoretisk förståelse inom området filosofisk pedagogik. I ett aktuellt bokprojekt utvecklade han och jag tankar om hur existensfilosofi kan relateras till bildningsfrågor i vår senmoderna samtid. Med andra ord hur personliga livsvärldar och kulturellt erfarande kan förstås utifrån ett fokus på erfarenhetsbaserat lärande. Det är främst Jans och Merleau-Pontys filosofiska bidrag som utvecklades, i relation till sociologer, pedagoger och bildningsteoretiker. Detta bidrag skulle jag vilja berätta om under denna dag till Jans minne.

Detta paper är av dialogfilosofiskt slag. Med intentionen att endast föra en filosofisk musikpedagogisk diskussion redovisas därför inte det empiriska underlaget från det artikelprojekt som ligger till grund för bidraget (Kullenberg & Pramling, in press). Med avstamp i ett urval av den musikpedagogiska forskning som gjorts kring problematiken med den instrumentella utbildningsdiskursen, argumenterar jag i liknande anda. Mer precist förs resonemanget med stöd i internationell musikpedagogisk forskning som bygger på Mikhail Bakhtins anti-instrumentella förståelse av såväl mellanmänsklig kommunikation som estetiska uttryckssätt.

Att pedagogiska relationer har en avgörande roll för undervisning är idag en vedertagen insikt inom pedagogisk forskning. På samma vis är det tämligen accepterat att kommunikation och språkbruk är av central relevans för lärande. Däremot råder inte lika stor enighet kring vilka slag av dialoger som är betydande. Detta bidrag uppehåller sig därför vid frågor om hur mellanmänskliga dialoger kan förstås. Bidragets syfte är att synliggöra, begreppsliggöra och problematisera utbildningsdialogens funktion och natur. I texten diskuterar författarna pedagogiska implikationer av relevans för fältet relationell pedagogik. Mer precist är det relationen mellan lärare och elever som problematiseras med stöd i dialogfilosofi utifrån Mikhail Bakhtin och Martin Buber samt pedagogisk forskning på området. En konceptuell distinktion utvecklas och illustreras med episoder från svenska klassrum: ontologisk vs. instrumentell samexistens. Slutsatsen är att instrumentell pedagogik kan och bör problematiseras med avseende på etik, demokrati och intersubjektivitet

The dissertation examines children’s dialogical sense-making in task-oriented teaching activities, the aim of which is to explore children’s values and ideas in musical learning, in order to investigate how musical knowledge is constructed collaboratively through different levels of dialogicality. Hence, the study addresses the organizational resources and values at stake when children take part in pedagogical dialogues. The four children studied are allocated the pre-given task of instructing each other, without the presence of adults, to sing songs in dyads (two and two). Five singing activities are video-documented, transcribed and analysed in depth through dialogical activity analysis, and group interviews with the children in pairs are also conducted, transcribed and analysed. A sociocultural perspective on learning and communication with an approach based on dialogue theory forms the analytical point of departure for the study, where constitutive relations between the mediating acts of the participants and the resources in use – in the shape of discourses, cultural tools, representations, interaction orders, activity frames and values – are focused upon, and where teaching and learning are viewed as primarily communicative activities, and where learning as a purely individual process is dismissed. The practice of musical teaching is seen to be an embodied and materialized practice, even though the young practitioners taking part in the study displayed different knowledge ideals, as well as different educational strategies, throughout the instructional phases of activity. In other words, they emphasized that there was a distinction between learning the songs and knowing the songs. The participants also used signing and singing with the help of artefacts, words and their bodies in a number of multi-functional, multi-semiotic and subtle ways. Moreover, the children organized their activities as traditional classroom teaching in several ways, and displayed skills in schooling as practitioners of a social practice. Accordingly, they established a school-specific task culture that took the form of a communicative activity type, where their orientation to double dialogicality, that is, the dialogue of the culturally established dimension on the one hand, and the interpersonal, local context on the other, is of significance.

Memory research has traditionally conceived of memory as an individual skill. Its inherent dialogicality has consequently been neglected and, moreover, little attention has been paid to its communicative functions in the educational practice. The aim of this case study is to explore the role of conversational remembering in preschool education. Using a dialogic lens in the spirit of Bakhtin, the research questions concern pedagogical premises for conversational remembering: how preschool children make sense of conversational remembering and how discursive frameworks might facilitate or restrict young students’ creative reasoning. The empirical case contains transcribed interviews and interaction data from three preschool children (aged 5-6-years old) and their instructing teacher, participating in an educational game about parts of the world. The children’s creative remembering did not merely reveal communicative functions of cognitive memories. They also displayed a sense-making discourse that vividly propelled peers’ reasoning into imaginary play worlds, conceptualised as a narrative play world discourse. This particular discourse contrasts the other key discourse at play: the institutional preschool discourse. Finally, I discuss the findings in relation to the issues of teacher roles and children’s agency in schooling. Allowing for students’ salient voices, as the teacher did in this case, clearly facilitated both peers’ conversational remembering and creative reasoning in and through dialogic spaces.

This paper is a theoretical paper that highlights some implications of a dialogic ontology in educational research. However, for the sake of clarity we will very succinctly setting off to describe the background which is our empirical point of departure. The aim of our current empirical study is to explore how 12 adult students in a Swedish secondary school interpret the school task of doing ‘independent’ project works, addressing the questions of how students talk and reason about their own processes and values of the activity-specific task. In brief, the method is focus group conversations (three participant groups) and the result reveals the fact that the participants appreciated their common teacher, who was considered as a very successful guide. The teacher systematically provided orders, instruction, feedback and, most importantly, planning and staging in a stepwise fashion. In doing so she paradoxically also indirectly fostered her students to be even less independent, that is, more easily adapted to the institutional requirements without bothering too much about how to manage the tasks themselves. Project work is commonly described as a self-regulated form of the task; a common mode of student work in Swedish schools (Eklöf, Nilsson & Ottosson, 2014). As Bergqvist & Säljö (2004) highlight, it could further be conceived of as a disciplining, student-centered practice that is widely used to produce self-organizing learners. Although the students are supposed to work independently, they are considerably dependent on the instructional, organizational and evaluative work of the teachers (Åberg, 2015).

Drawing on a sociocultural perspective on learning, as we do, the notion of individualistic independency is well-known as a problematic stance (e.g., Wertsch, 1998). In the sociocultural version of dialogism social interdependence is a dialogic premise on both the epistemological and ontological level (Linell, 2009). Wegerif (2008) describes how the functional role of difference between learners’ voices is of significance to the Bakhtin-influenced take on multi-voiced dialogue (cf. Kullenberg & Pramling, 2016; Lefstein & Snell, 2014). In such a dialogic framing the teacher is not striving to overcome these differences between, for example, the student’s and the teacher’s opinions. Such recognition holds interpersonal difference seriously and moreover address a fairly uncommon approach to the educational notion of intersubjective agreements (Matusov, 1996, 2015; Wegerif, 2011).

This dialogic approach stresses the issue of student agency and, thus, democratic values of teaching acts. When respecting and promoting students’ own voices a genuine interaction of consciousnesses is possible to create throughout the pedagogical dialogues (cf. Bakhtin, 2004; Matusov, 2015). Hence, what constitutes a genuine interaction is the other-orientation toward the difference of the other, recognizing the learning potentials of the gap between distinct consciousnesses. Philosophically speaking, it further suggests the conceptual need to stress alterity in other-orientation (cf. Linell, 2009).

Recalling our examined students, they report a situated learning that is basically grounded in a “teacher-pleasing relationship” (Matusov, 2011). While working successfully they are heavily dependent on their teacher’s agency rather than developing their own. Indeed, as sociocultural scholars we might notice that there exists a considerably confined teacher agency as well; an agency which is clearly bound to pre-determined institutional goals. This contextual condition did not facilitate the student (and teacher) opportunity to learn and experience something radically unpredicted, for example, being dialogically surprised or challenged by the genuine other. The students in our study do not neither regard themselves as truly independent nor creatively personalized. Due to a Bakhtinian approach to education, independency is an illusion anyhow, but being personalized, rather than socialized, in and through education is a central dialogue theoretical issue (Lobok, 2014).

In our fully elaborated paper we will dwell upon the dialogue philosophical issue on other-orientation and the role of alterity, briefly described above. In addition we intend to provide a more detailed sketch of our study and the implications for dialogic pedagogy, informed by Bakhtin and educational scholars within the field.

References

Åberg, M. (2015). Doing project work: the interactional organization of tasks, resources, and instructions. Diss. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.

Bakhtin, M. M. (2004). Dialogic origin and dialogic pedagogy of grammar: Stylistics in teaching Russian language in secondary school. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 42(6), 12-49.

Bergqvist, K. & Säljö, R. (2004). Learning to plan: A study of reflexivity and discipline in modern pedagogy. In J.V.D. Linden & P. Renshaw (Eds.) Dialogic learning: Shifting perspectives to learning, instruction and teaching (pp. 109-124). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Eklöf, A., Nilsson, L.-E., & Ottosson, T. (2014). Instructions, Independence and Uncertainty: student framing in self-regulated project work. European Educational Research Journal, 13(6), 646-660.

Kullenberg, T & Pramling, N. (2016). Learning and knowing songs: a study of children as music teachers. Instructional Science, 44(1), 1-23.

Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2014). Better than best practice: Developing teaching and learning through dialogue. London: Routledge.

Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically : interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publ.

Lobok, A. (2014). Education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter. Dialogic    Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2, S1-S5. DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2014.84.

Matusov, E. (1996). Intersubjectivity without agreement. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3(1), 25-45.

Matusov, E. (2011). Authorial teaching and learning. In E. J. White & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Bakhtinian pedagogy: Opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe (pp. 21–46). New York: Peter Lang.

Matusov, E. (2015). Comprehension: A dialogic authorial approach. Culture & Psychology,   21(3), 392-416.

Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347–361.

Wegerif, R. (2011). Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 6, 179-190

Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Att pedagogiska relationer har en avgörande roll för undervisning är idag en vedertagen insikt inom pedagogisk forskning. På samma vis är det tämligen accepterat att kommunikation och språkbruk är av central relevans för lärande. Däremot råder inte lika stor enighet kring vilka slag av dialoger som är betydande. Detta bidrag uppehåller sig därför vid frågor om hur mellanmänskliga dialoger kan förstås. Bidragets syfte är att synliggöra, begreppsliggöra och problematisera utbildningsdialogens funktion och natur. I texten diskuterar författarna pedagogiska implikationer av relevans för fältet relationell pedagogik. Mer precist är det relationen mellan lärare och elever som problematiseras med stöd i dialogfilosofi utifrån Mikhail Bakhtin och Martin Buber samt pedagogisk forskning på området. En konceptuell distinktion utvecklas och illustreras med episoder från svenska klassrum: ontologisk vs. instrumentell samexistens. Slutsatsen är att instrumentell pedagogik kan och bör problematiseras med avseende på etik, demokrati och intersubjektivitet.

The article takes “music as symbol” as its analytical point of departure, described by Jorgensen (2003). In doing so, the authors stress the role of symbolic functioning in music, focusing at how children understand and make sense of music in talk and practice. The aim of this text is to theoretically explore the nature of dialogical music education. In order to do so we reuse empirical data from a previous study. These data contain four children’s instructional interaction in a teaching activity, that is, the task to teach each other singing songs. Further, we examine our data through the lenses of two theoretical concepts, based on communication theory: double dialogicality and communicative formality. Our interactional data point at the contextual nature of musical sense making. The children’s communication was not only merely interpersonal in nature. Rather, it also clearly referred to an embedded cultural context that existed beyond the local interactional context. This article illustrates how such kind of music-educational sense making is socially constructed in action.

In this interview, Eugene Matusov develops his take on an alternative to what he sees as a positivist paradigm and its associated concept(s) of truth. In doing so, he explicates the relationship between theory and practice and contemplates the role of dialogue. However, he is not talking about dialogues in general, but a particular dialogic attitude: personalized dialogues which radically turn to the subjectivity of all research participants rather than seeking to erase it, or hide it. The researcher’s own subjectivity is no exception. What kind of educational research could we expect from that, and how to conceptualize such an approach?

Tina Kullenberg

This study concerns children’s aesthetic meaning making in terms of how it is constituted musically, emotionally, and dialogically. We investigate how two 10-year-old children collaboratively engage in the task of teaching and learning to sing a song. The research questions concern what musical and emotional expressions the participants responsively construct and how these expressions are addressed, both explicitly and implicitly. Adopting a perspective grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogue philosophy and more recent educational research in this tradition, the study explores how children’s affective reasoning is co-constructed in the process of song sharing that is also a sense-making enterprise. Interactive talk episodes, including facial displays, are transcribed, analyzed, and discussed. We demonstrate, from moment to moment, how emotive expressivity comes into play and how it refers to double dialogicality, both at the interpersonal and activity-specific level. Finally, on the basis of our findings, we discuss conflicting artistic and educational values.

In this study we analyze how learners constitute what it means to learn and know a song. This is investigated in the context of four 9- to 10-year-old children in dyads teaching each other to sing a song of their own choosing. How the children take on this task is studied in terms of how they dialogically co-construct pedagogical and musical values throughout the collaborative tasks. The empirical data consist of video observations of the children engaged in dyads. Informed by a sociocultural perspective, with an emphasis on mediational means, scaffolding and appropriation, the study seeks to examine how young people’s instructional methods are facilitated and constrained by communicative resources of different kinds. The empirical data is analyzed as interactively unfolding activity. The study shows that the children make a distinction between learning and knowing a song, in terms of tool use. In teaching, learning is communicated as supported by mediational means in the form of external visualization tools, while knowing the song, from the participants’ point of view means to be able to sing the song without any such mediational means. From a sociocultural theoretical perspective, this difference is conceptualized as the gradual learning process of moving from a materialized practice, based on external artifacts, to an embodied practice, that is, a change in mediational means rather than developing musical knowing without tools.

In this study we analyze how learners constitute what it means to learn and know a song. This is investigated in the context of four 9- to 10-year-old children in dyads teaching each other to sing a song of their own choosing. How the children take on this task is studied in terms of how they dialogically co-construct pedagogical and musical values throughout the collaborative tasks. The empirical data consist of video observations of the children engaged in dyads. Informed by a sociocultural perspective, with an emphasis on mediational means, scaffolding and appropriation, the study seeks to examine how young people’s instructional methods are facilitated and constrained by communicative resources of different kinds. The empirical data is analyzed as interactively unfolding activity. The study shows that the children make a distinction between learning and knowing a song, in terms of tool use. In teaching, learning is communicated as supported by mediational means in the form of external visualization tools, while knowing the song, from the participants’ point of view means to be able to sing the song without any such mediational means. From a sociocultural theoretical perspective, this difference is conceptualized as the gradual learning process of moving from a materialized practice, based on external artifacts, to an embodied practice, that is, a change in mediational means rather than developing musical knowing without tools.

Learning and development generally cannot be observed per se. As scholars we have to draw conclusions about such central psychological processes by making inferences from indicators of some kind. This implies that metaphors play a central role when we make such phenomena into objects of analysis. Dominant conceptions view learning as a means of achieving a pre-given endpoint understood in terms of mastery of fixed skills. In sociocultural and pragmatist perspectives such an interpretation appears as reductionistic, due to its finalizing character and the assumption of a closure of epistemological meaning-making. As an alternative, education, learning and development may be conceptualized metaphorically as increasing capacities of cultural and dialogic participation. We discuss and exemplify a number of significant learning metaphors, suggesting alternative and competing conceptions of learning and development, which contribute to dialogic growth as an element of education and everyday practices. 

The background of the article is an interest in theories of learning and the metaphors of learning they build on and propagate. The basic argument is that the discursive construction of learning plays a central role in theoretical perspectives in research but also in discussions of societal issues in a wider sense. An initial observation is that current metaphors of learning oscillate between emphasizing socializing/reproductive dimensions and perspectives which foreground new-thinking transformations of existing collective knowledge; the culturally given. Hence, our aim is to explore conceptions of learning underpinning dominant theoretical perspectives as behaviorism, cognitivism, pragmatism, and various sociocultural traditions, in the light of this theoretical tension. Our conclusion is that the views of communication and learning inherent to the radical dialogic perspective on communication that stresses the unfinalizable nature of knowing, offered by Bakhtin, add to our understanding of how learning may be conceptualized in contemporary society. Such a dialogic perspective, emphasizing open-ended agency, plurality of voices, and performative potentials of creatively expressing opinions when learning from each other, offers a perspective on learning worth considering in times of diversity, unpredictable risks, and the need for critical self-reflexivity.

The goal of this article is to compare and contrast dialogic analysis versus discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy to address Bakhtin’s quest for “human sciences” and avoid modern traps by positivism and by post-truth. We argue that dialogic analysis belongs to dialogic science, which focuses on studying “the surplus of humanness” (Bakhtin, 1991, p.37). “The surplus of humanness” is “a leftover” from the biologically, socially, culturally, and psychologically given – the typical and general – in the human nature. It is about the human authorship of the ever-unique meaning-making. Dialogic analysis involves the heart and mind of the researchers who try to reveal and deepen the meanings of the studied phenomena by addressing and replying to diverse research participants, other scholars, and anticipated readers (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019, in press). We argue that dialogic science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “What does something in question mean to diverse people, including the researchers, and why? How do diverse people address and reply to diverse meanings?” In contrast, traditional, positivistic, science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “How things really are? What is evidence for that? How to eliminate any researchers’ subjectivity from the research?” (Matusov, 2019, submitted). Positivist (and monologic) science focuses on revealing patterns of actions, behaviors, and relationships. We argue that in the study of dialogic pedagogy, it is structural and/or functional discourse analysis that focuses on studying the given and objective aspects of dialogic pedagogy. In the paper, we consider, describe, interpret, and dialogically re-analyze a case of dialogic analysis involving science education coming from David Hammer’s and Emily van Zee’s (2006) book. We also discuss structuraland functional discourse analysis of two pedagogical cases, a monologic and a dialogic one, provided by David Skidmore (2000). We dialogically re-analyze these two cases and Skidmore’s research. We conclude that in research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond, on social sciences in general) both dialogic science (involving dialogic analysis) and positivist science (involving discourse analysis) are unavoidable and needed, while providing the overall different foci of the research. We discuss the appropriateness and the limitations of discourse analysis as predominantly searching for structural-functional patterns in the classroom discourses. We discuss dialogic tensions in the reported dialogues that cannot be captured by discourse analysis search for patterns. Finally, we discuss two emerging issues among ourselves: 1) whether discourse analysis is always positivist and 2) how these two analytic approaches complement each other while doing research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond).

Within research on examination cheating, a common assumption is that plagiarism in the context of examination is increasing epidemically. A uniform definition of plagiarism does not exist, but plagiarism is the category most frequently used when students at Swedish universities are notified and sanctioned for deception. Text Comparison is frequently presented as an effective technology for addressing plagiarism. Plagiarism Detection Services (PDS) are used for detecting text overlaps, particularly in higher education. While Higher Education Institutions in some countries appear to have uncritically accepted the use of text comparison technology, the reception in other countries have been ambivalent or even critical. The present project studies consequences of the use of text comparison through teachers meaning making regarding the pedagogical task to grade students and the moral task, to report students that try to deceive. We hypothesize that teachers’ epistemological views are contingent on technology and discourses on technology. Text comparison technology, therefore, runs the danger of introducing consequential biases to the assessment of student performance. The material has been gathered in four focus group conversations. Focus has been introduced through the presentation of reports from a Plagiarism Detection System. A topical analysis has been performed on the transcribed conversations. From our results, we conclude that teachers’ epistemological views are contingent on technology and discourses on technology. Text comparison, therefore, runs the danger of introducing a consequential bias to the assessment of student performance leaving students open to the accusation about deception.

Within research on examination cheating, a common assumption is that plagiarism in the context of examination is increasing epidemically. A uniform definition of plagiarism does not exist, but plagiarism is the category most frequently used when students at Swedish universities are notified and sanctioned for deception. Text Comparison is frequently presented as an effective technology for addressing plagiarism. Plagiarism Detection Services (PDS) are used for detecting text overlaps, particularly in higher education. While Higher Education Institutions in some countries appear to have uncritically accepted the use of text comparison technology, the reception in other countries have been ambivalent or even critical.

The present project studies consequences of the use of text comparison through teachers meaning making regarding the pedagogical task to grade students and the moral task, to report students that try to deceive. We hypothesise that teachers’ epistemological views are contingent on technology and discourses on technology. Text comparisont echnology, therefore, runs the danger of introducing consequential biases to the assessment of student performance. The material has been gathered in five focus group conversations. Focus has been introduced through the presentation of reports from a Plagiarism Detection System. A topical analysis has been performed on the transcribed conversations. From our results, we conclude that teachers’ epistemological views are contingent on technology and discourses on technology. Text comparison, therefore, runs the danger of introducing a consequential bias to the assessment of student performance leaving students open to the accusation about deception.

Livsvärldsfenomenologin är en fruktbar utgångspunkt för att beskriva praktiskt pedagogiskt handlande genom att den tar utgångspunkt i elevernas och lärarnas levda värld och erbjuder ett språk för att hantera denna. I svensk och nordisk forskning har ansatsen inspirerat till mycken empirisk pedagogisk forskning. Trots sin styrka är utgångspunkten i den här artikeln att livsvärldsfenomenologin inte på ett tillfredsställande sätt teoretiskt förklarar undervisning och lärande. För att svara mot de begreppsliga krav som pedagogiken som vetenskap ställer finns ett behov att bättre förklara hur den lärande människan kan komma att överskrida sin livsvärldsbaserade socialisering. Lika viktigt är att förklara vilken betydelse och roll det pedagogiska handlandet ska tilldelas i den processen. Det här kapitlets vetenskapliga kontribution består därför i att granska hur den icke-affirmativa pedagogiska handlingsteorin (Benner, 2015; Uljens, 1998; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017) kan användas för att precisera och vidareutveckla den livsvärldsfenomenologiska lärandeteorin. En sådan diskussion har inte förts i tidigare forskning på området.

One important implication for educators is therefore that non-affirmative education is emphatically critical of educational ideas, ideologies, and curricular policies that overemphasise either socialisation to existing norms in society or the fostering of values that form a predetermined future. In school didactics, the contents of teaching are located at the very centre of the teaching/studying/learning process, maintaining a distinction between the content as intended, as practised, as experienced, and as evaluated. A challenge for both didactics and life-world phenomenology is to what extent they contain conceptually satisfying answers to the question of how teaching is seen as related to learning: in other words, how they explain pedagogical interaction as a movement from one ‘shared world’ to another. Conceptualising subject didactics for school settings is thus different from subject didactics aimed for understanding teaching, studying, and learning outside school settings. In philosophy, there are various ways to understand subject-centred and inter-subjectivity based conceptions of subjectivity.

One important implication for educators is therefore that non-affirmative education is emphatically critical of educational ideas, ideologies, and curricular policies that overemphasise either socialisation to existing norms in society or the fostering of values that form a predetermined future. In school didactics, the contents of teaching are located at the very centre of the teaching/studying/learning process, maintaining a distinction between the content as intended, as practised, as experienced, and as evaluated. A challenge for both didactics and life-world phenomenology is to what extent they contain conceptually satisfying answers to the question of how teaching is seen as related to learning: in other words, how they explain pedagogical interaction as a movement from one ‘shared world’ to another. Conceptualising subject didactics for school settings is thus different from subject didactics aimed for understanding teaching, studying, and learning outside school settings. In philosophy, there are various ways to understand subject-centred and inter-subjectivity based conceptions of subjectivity.

In this conversation we explore Eva Vass’s scholarship towards re-imagining learning and teaching (and therefore theorising and research on these) as an interdisciplinary, embodied, creative, receptive-responsive dialogue. Eva’s research approach in this spirit is experimenting with the understandings of “Natural Inclusionality” (Rayner, 2017), a refreshing take on the scientific study of nature. In this interview Eva discusses her attempts to establish a research trajectory which can signify and illustrate the shift towards substantive, lived, receptive-responsive dialogue in various dimensions of educational inquiry and practice.

In this conversation, Rupert Wegerif generously shares his own guiding life experiences as a child, a young student, a young man and finally as an educational scholar. These existential experiences are all about struggling with meaning; the meaning in life, the meaning of schooling and the meaning of educational theory. He suggests how these intricate issues are related in theory and practice. In doing so he also contrasts his pedagogical visions with classical ‘heroes’ who have influenced pedagogy and educational systems profoundly throughout history, questioning their validity from a dialogic stance. Finally, Rupert reports about his new book: the exploration of a novel research approach.

Tina Kullenberg