‘What is the Purpose of Feedback when Revision is not Expected?’ A Case Study of Feedback Quality and Study Design in a First Year Master's Programme

This article presents a qualitative case study of feedback practices in the first year of a two-year master's programme. Writing and feedback are viewed as contextualized cultural practices shaped by factors at macro, meso and micro level. The empirical data consists of a text corpus of students’ essays and teachers’ comments, supplemented by interviews. Initial findings showed a discrepancy between the considerable amount of comments given by the teachers and the students’ lack of use of the feedback they received. The text analysis, based primarily on Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) model of feedback revealed several features of the feedback that counteracted learning, but a major problem was unclear goals for the writing combined with a study design that did not include revision of student texts

Opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education

The aim of this interpretative, qualitative research study is to investigate affordances and constraints of dialogic pedagogy in the museums, as well as its broader contribution to society today.  The background is my involvement in a Danish development project called ‘Museums and Cultural Institutions as Spaces for Citizenship,’ initiated by seven art museum educators in Copenhagen and supported by the Ministry of Culture. Denmark has a strong dialogic tradition dating back to Grundtvig’s belief in the power of ´the oral word’ to foster democratic ‘Bildung.’ Museum education, on the other hand, has a long tradition of monologic transmission. Still, a more participatory pedagogy has been gaining ground over many years. This study is based on the observations of three-hour-long teaching sessions in seven museums and has a Bakhtinian framework. While the overall analysis builds on the whole project, two cases are discussed in more detail. The overarching research question is how central aspects of dialogic pedagogy played out in an art museum context and its opportunities and challenges. The subquestions focus on three central Bakhtinian concepts: How did the educators facilitate multivoicedness during the short museum visits? What role did difference and disagreement play? What opportunities emerged for students to develop internally persuasive discourse? I have chosen these concepts because they are central in dialogism and combined them because they are closely connected in Bakhtin’s work. The final reflections open a wider perspective of how dialogic museum education may contribute to overarching functions of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Key findings were that the museum educators’ transition from traditional to dialogic pedagogy was enhanced by their genuine interest in hearing students’ voices. They succeeded in engaging students in multivoiced dialogues but with a tendency towards harmonization rather than the exploration of diversity and difference. The practical aesthetic workshops offered unique opportunities for students to develop their internally persuasive word, i.e., by replacing authoritative interpretations of artworks with their own. Challenges experienced by the educators were, e.g., the dilemmas between preplanning and student choice and between disseminating their professional art knowledge and facilitating students’ meaning making and creativity. In contrast, students found the lack of workshop follow-up problematic. The article provides deeper insight into museums as an alternative pedagogical arena. Museum educators and non-museum classroom teachers may find it useful for cultivating greater dialogic interactions in respective learning contexts

Evalueringen av Kvalitetsreformen. Delrapport 7. Undervisnings- og vurderingsformer: Pedagogiske konsekvenser av Kvalitetsreformen

Tema for denne rapporten er pedagogiske endringer i høyere utdanning under Kvalitetsreformen. Utgangspunktet er de signaler som ble gitt i Mjøsutvalgets utredning (NOU 2000:14) og i Stortingsmelding 27 om ønskede endringer som gjaldt undervisning og vurderingsformer. Hovedspørsmålet vi har søkt svar på er i hvilken grad disse signalene er blitt fulgt opp og hvilke konsekvenser eventuelle endringer har hatt

Profession Based Hierarchies as Barriers for Genuine Learning Processes

Under embargo until: 2021-06-26This chapter describes how profession based hierarchies (stratified social orders between professions) may appear in a teaching context of interprofessionality involving a variety of health professions presenting challenges to learning and offers suggestions on how these challenges can be overcome.acceptedVersio

Opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education

The aim of this interpretative, qualitative research study is to investigate affordances and constraints of dialogic pedagogy in the museums, as well as its broader contribution to society today. The background is my involvement in a Danish development project called ‘Museums and Cultural Institutions as Spaces for Citizenship,’ initiated by seven art museum educators in Copenhagen and supported by the Ministry of Culture. Denmark has a strong dialogic tradition dating back to Grundtvig’s belief in the power of ´the oral word’ to foster democratic ‘Bildung.’ Museum education, on the other hand, has a long tradition of monologic transmission. Still, a more participatory pedagogy has been gaining ground over many years. This study is based on the observations of three-hour-long teaching sessions in seven museums and has a Bakhtinian framework. While the overall analysis builds on the whole project, two cases are discussed in more detail. The overarching research question is how central aspects of dialogic pedagogy played out in an art museum context and its opportunities and challenges. The subquestions focus on three central Bakhtinian concepts: How did the educators facilitate multivoicedness during the short museum visits? What role did difference and disagreement play? What opportunities emerged for students to develop internally persuasive discourse? I have chosen these concepts because they are central in dialogism and combined them because they are closely connected in Bakhtin’s work. The final reflections open a wider perspective of how dialogic museum education may contribute to overarching functions of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Key findings were that the museum educators’ transition from traditional to dialogic pedagogy was enhanced by their genuine interest in hearing students’ voices. They succeeded in engaging students in multivoiced dialogues but with a tendency towards harmonization rather than the exploration of diversity and difference. The practical aesthetic workshops offered unique opportunities for students to develop their internally persuasive word, i.e., by replacing authoritative interpretations of artworks with their own. Challenges experienced by the educators were, e.g., the dilemmas between preplanning and student choice and between disseminating their professional art knowledge and facilitating students’ meaning making and creativity. In contrast, students found the lack of workshop follow-up problematic. The article provides deeper insight into museums as an alternative pedagogical arena. Museum educators and non-museum classroom teachers may find it useful for cultivating greater dialogic interactions in respective learning contexts

Polyphonic Imagination: Understanding Idea Generation in Multidisciplinary Groups as a Multivoiced Stimulation of Fantasy

The primary objective of this paper is to offer a new way of understanding the creative processes of multidisciplinary groups, whose work is to generate innovative ideas. The paper reports from a project focused on organizational creativity at the group level, investigating what characterized such creative processes in that context. This project used ethnography as a qualitative method including participant observation, focus group interviews, and individual qualitative interviews. Furthermore, an inductive approach was used to analyze the data. Findings showed that when group members from different disciplines collaborated on innovative idea generation, the creative processes were characterized by a multivoiced stimulation of fantasy. In the paper, we first discuss how imagination involved new ways of combining knowledge and ideas based on one’s own and others experiences, including the use of technological tools. Secondly, we discuss how imagination was ignited by diversity and tension. Thirdly, we elaborate on the importance of emotion and support for the drive and stimulation of imagination in groups. Finally, we sum up the discussion by presenting a model based on the concept of Polyphonic Imagination, in order to visualize the characteristics of the creative processes. We propose this concept of Polyphonic Imagination, derived from the empirical data, to designate the ways in which different perspectives in the groups created tensions that fed into the group members´ imagination whenever these perspectives acknowledged each other