This paper is based on preliminary results of an on-going study. The aim is to investigate entanglements of children, teachers and digital technology, where humans as well as materiality are considered as actors. Learning is a main concept in the research field of didactics and preschool practice. Research is also highly dominated by a deterministic and dialectic approach. Instead, this study investigates the becoming of an entangled child, where the child continuously is in intra-actions with other humans and digital technology. In this setting Barads (2007) agential realism becomes a way to problematise widespread beliefs about the learning child. In this study, the concept intra-action (Barad, 2007) is used to analyse the becoming of the digital child. Preschool children 4-5 years old, preschool teachers and preschool teacher students participated. They explored a digital App (Toontastic 3D) and created a story with sound and moving images in a Digital Laboratory Centre (DLC). Field notes and video registrations were used for documentation. Ethical standards were assured through written informed content by all parents and personnel, and oral consent from the participating children. Results show that children together with digital technology are strongly bound to each other during the activities. In these entangled becoming actions is reliant both of the children and the technology. Also, the spectrum of action possibilities increases during the process. It is interesting to further discuss the concept of learning in an agential realism perspective as learning emerges without any involvement of teacher students or preschool teachers.

The aim of the project is to study students’ learning in a transformed course in Theory and Methodology of Science (TMS), a compulsory course in all teacher education programs in Sweden.

The students perceive the course TMS as difficult and abstract. At the same time it offers an important foundation for their continued education such as their final thesis and other research-related courses. Hereby it’s important for students to successfully pass, not only for the course itself, but also for subsequent courses. In a wider perspective, it is also sigificant for the development of the educational field, and to the students’ future workplaces. Our students should be able to understand and apply research for years to come. Heavy courses can also be problematic for economic reasons. Since few students are passing, they do not generate as much money as courses that many students pass. There are also examples where teachers are asked by the management to lower the requirements to increase the pass rate.

As teachers we have put a lot of effort into the course to support and help students learning. Despite this, only 35% passed the exam in spring 2016, which gave rise to the learning experiment we designed and studied this fall. The pedagogical idea is based on a problem-oriented learning, participatory learning and self-organized learning. This means that the students themselves are largely responsible for the organization of their learning. Teachers work with lectures and seminars, as well as coaching and scaffolding. The course is designed as an authentic empirical research project where both quantitative and qualitative data is used as a starting point. Students work in teams. They organize their work in the project by them selves and write a common research rapport. Through the reformed course, learning is combined with a great student responsibility, where students meaning making, socialization and co-learning are central. Hence, the most important research group work takes place is the project-office-rooms where the students’ main course work is performed. The organization of the course involves that students themselves designates project managers and that they take responsibility for their joint work, week by week. They can also request extra support from the teachers, if necessary.

The result of the study shows that 86% of the students received a passing grade. The aspects that matter most to the success are: 1) common spaces, the project office, which creates opportunities to exchange knowledge and experience IRL, 2) problem-oriented learning, participatory learning and self-organized learning, increasing participation and motivation, 3) Collective responsibility for knowledge formation during the project period, and 4) Authentic approach of the course, which by its design as closely as possible should simulate real research projects.

There is a lack of empirical studies that examine the influence of neoliberal ideas in preschool music and teaching. Neoliberal ideas have primarily been studied in a broader educational perspective and related to preschool policy reforms. The aim of this paper is to study preschool teachers’ rhetoric concerning music contents and music activities related to neoliberal ideas. Data consist of group conversations with preschool teachers and of video observations of daily music activities, at one preschool in Sweden. Discursive psychology has been used as a micro-sociological methodological approach. The findings show that music in this preschool is characterized by popular music, and varied consequences for knowledge content and early childhood learning are highlighted and analyzed. Also, it is argued that neoliberal ideas, in varied ways, determine the establishment of music content. For many reasons, rhetoric concerning the choice of musical content is of great importance to the field of preschool education. For example, it is essential to music education research and to preschool teachers’ everyday work, as it can improve teaching and learning qualities and become a knowledge contribution in society at large. © 2016 informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis group

Traditionally, pedagogical research has been child centered, where materialities often have been considered as objects and tools. However, in recent posthuman research, attempts have been made to consider human materiality combinations to have impact on pedagogical activities in preschool, but to a large extent music as an issue has been neglected. Therefore, the aim of this research study is to discuss pedagogical quality and knowledge content in music activities in preschool by focusing on combinations of human and materiality subjects as “cyborgs.” Particularly, this is essential for preschool, teacher education, and research, contributing alternative understandings of learning settings. A theoretical framework emanates from posthumanist theories, where the authors apply methodological concepts used in their earlier work to study music activities. The empirical material was produced in Spring 2013. The analysis of video observations identifies two different characters of a cyborg, the guitar-human, and the CD human having quite different impacts on the music activities. Nevertheless, they have in common that they create intensities with the children, where entanglements between human and materiality become the activity. Finally, the cyborgs are discussed, where issues and dilemmas related to pedagogical quality, knowledge content, agency, and competence are addressed.

The aim of this study is to investigate norms and constructions of children in previous research concerning preschool children and digital technology. Digital technology is an important part of preschool activities. The number of children and preschool teachers who have access to computer tablets and clever boards in their everyday practice has increased in recent years (e.g. Couse & Chen, 2010, Edwards, 2013). This development has led to the need of extended knowledge concerning the critical contextual factors of digital technology use in preschool context (e.g. Lindahl & Folkesson, 2012). In the analysis of the material, social constructionism and discursive psychology (Wheterell & Potter, 1992, Potter, 1996) were used. This paper is based on a critical integrative literature review (Torraco, 2005) regarding research on preschool children and digital technology. The review draws from a number of scholarly research articles conducted between 2000-2015. Ethical considerations were met by showing respect and responsiveness to other researchers work (e.g. codex.vr.se). Preliminary results indicate that children often are marginalised in research and focus is more likely to be on an adult's point of view (such as the teacher or the parent). In this sense, children have a weak "voice" in research regarding digital technology use in preschool, therefore, the lack of the child's perspective is evident. The results, we argue, have important implications for researchers, preschool teachers and teacher educators in further discussions of how, when and for what purposes digital technology should be used in preschool children's activities.

The public and academic debate about mathematics education has been intensified during the last decade. In relation to this it is important to investigate what ideas concerning mathematics education that are expressed by teachers and students. The aim of this article is to study how teachers and students in primary school talk about the math book and to emphasize, discuss and problematize emerging discourses. The article is part of a larger project about mathematical education. Data consists of group conversations with 120 students and 8 teachers in two elementary schools in Sweden. The math project was supported by the National Agency for Education 2010-2012. All together 17 hours of video and audio documentation were produced. The theoretical framework is built on poststructuralist and social constructionist theory and two approaches to discourse analysis are applied; the micro oriented discursive psychology as formulated by Potter, and discourse theory as formulated by Laclau and Mouffe. Findings show three prominent discourses emerging from the empirical data: School mathematics, Balance and Mathematical ontology. Related to earlier research in mathematics education this article represent a shift of interpretation as it highlights how teachers and students themselves are talking about and describing what is desirable and not. The results are then discussed with respect to quality in mathematics education.

The aim of this article is to re-think the results of four larger studies conducted by the authors during the last decade, all with a discourse analytical approach. The studies are empirical and concern the Swedish field of arts in education and deal with a comprehensive material consisting of interviews, observations and field notes. In the results of these studies three prominent discourses emerges. A Curriculum discourse, where content knowledge is connected to traditions, norms and values of educational institutions, a Feel-good discourse that deals with content knowledge where social and personal aspects are essential, and a Snacking on knowledge discourse where content knowledge is portrayed as something students are able to pick and choose according to their own preference. Ideas of late modern society and arts in education are then used as a basis to carry out a critical discussion about the emerging discourses. Also different teacher and student positions are problematized.

For a good four decades, a communicative approach has been promoted as an effective way of teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). In short, in a communicative classroom, learners engage in a range of interactive and creative tasks that not only encourage practice with language systems, language learning skills, and subject specific content, but which also encourage use of the whole body, and the whole classroom space with the incorporation of arts-based elements of music, poetry, drama, art etc.

Despite the Swedish national curriculum for English also promoting a communicative approach, and despite much good practice, an analysis of trainee teacher narratives detailing personal experiences of learning English reveals that it is still not uncommon for English lessons in Swedish schools (at all levels) to be constructed in a way best described as “a painting-by-numbers” approach. The narratives depict classroom environments where learners sit in rows and work chronologically through a textbook guided by teacher instruction (often in Swedish) to turn to a specific page, read the text silently/aloud, and to write down the answers to any accompanying exercises. Typical homework exercises require the learning of a glossary of ten unconnected words for a future test.

Thus, an aim of our teacher training programme is to encourage the adoption of a communicative approach. In doing so, an interesting phenomena has occurred in which the students consider the course in English as “more aesthetic” than courses where drama, music and dance etc. exist as independent subjects. This has given rise to a research project which explores the dissolving of boundaries between English and the Arts in Teacher Education.

In this workshop, participants will experience how new life can be breathed into a chapter from any language text book/written or spoken text by lifting the content off the page and transforming it into a cohesive lesson complete with dynamic and integrated activities of a creative and communicative nature. 

In our work as teacher educators we have identified an interesting problem. Teacher students consider a course in English as “more aesthetic” than courses where e.g. drama, music and dance exist as independent subjects. This has aroused our curiosity, and made us want to study the phenomenon further. What activities are implemented in the English course? What teaching activities do the students describe as aesthetic? What knowledge content can be identified? How are those contents related to English methodology? The aim is to study how English and different aesthetic subjects are combined within the course English for Primary School Teachers Earlier Years.

The study is based on a discourse psychological methodology and has an ethnographic approach. Empirical data consists of student evaluations, filmed observations and group conversations with students participating in the course. This initial study will form the foundation for the design of a larger national project about aesthetics in different parts and subjects in teacher education. The production of empirical data has started and will continue during spring 2015.

Preliminary results show that the dissolving of boundaries between the English subject, the Arts and English methodology creates an integrated/interwoven totality. Aspects of student influence and flexibility, both considering content and form, appears as vital. The results are important especially to the development of teaching in compulsory school and in teacher training. By extension, our hope is that increased knowledge also will lead to improved quality in respect of the inclusion of the Arts in all teaching, regardless level of education or subjects.