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Høgskolen i Sørøst-Norge

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Innholdsfortegnelse

Cognitive apprenticeship 1

På spill for læring: Om dataspill som læringsressurs i skolen 16

Veni, vidi, wiki: samarbeidslæring i praksis 40

From Good Student to Outcast: The Emergence of a Classroom Identity 68

En "sykt seriøs" ungdomsgenerasjon? 93

Cognitive apprenticeship

Tittel Cognitive apprenticeshipForfatterUtgiver Cambridge University PressÅrstall 2014UtgaveISBN 9781107014107Sider -

© Materialet er vernet etter åndsverkloven og fremstilt gjennom :bolk, Kopinorskompendietjeneste for høyere utdanning. Materialet kan benyttes av studenter som eroppmeldt til det aktuelle emnet, for egne studier, i ethvert format og på enhver plattform. Utenuttrykkelig samtykke er annen eksemplarfremstilling og tilgjengeliggjøring bare tillatt når det erhjemlet i lov (kopiering til privat bruk, sitat o.l.) eller avtale med Kopinor (www.kopinor.no)

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På spill for læring: Om dataspillsom læringsressurs i skolen

Tittel På spill for læring: Om dataspill som læringsressurs i skolenForfatterUtgiver Cappelen Damm ASÅrstall 2013Utgave 1ISBN 9788202426965Sider -


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Veni, vidi, wiki: samarbeidslæring i praksis

Tittel Små skritt eller store sprang?ForfatterUtgiver Cappelen Damm ASÅrstall 2012Utgave 1ISBN 9788202364380Sider 85-112


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Kapittel 4

Veni, vidi, wiki: samarbeidslæring i praksisAndreas Lund

Dette kapitlet søker å besvare to relaterte spørsmål. Det første dreier seg om hvordan vi kan forstå læring som samarbeid, spesielt når digitale nettverkstek-nologier befordrer (og begrenser) samarbeidet. Dette spørsmålet er besvart gjennom en diskusjon av forskningslitteraturen på feltet. Det andre spørsmålet knytter seg til hva som blir noen av de didaktiske implikasjonene ved bruk av samarbeidsteknologier i skolen. Dette spørsmålet besvares gjennom å disku-tere empiriske funn og analyser fra et lengre forskningsprosjekt om bruk av wikier i videregående skole. Formålet er å gi et bidrag til både lærerutdanning, skolepraksiser og læringsteori. Etter en kort introduksjon om nettverkssamfun-net drøfter kapitlet selve termen samarbeid og hvordan den er forstått – og kanskje misforstått – på ulike måter. Dernest presenteres både forskningslit-teratur og eksempler på IKT-støttet samarbeidslæring. Fire klare utfordringer kommer til syne: behovet for nye oppgavetyper, produktive aktivitetsformer, et teknologisyn som går ut over verktøy- og redskapsmetaforene, og behovet for nye eller utvidete vurderingsformer og -kriterier.

Er to hoder bedre enn ett?Nettverkssamfunnet (Castells, 1996) stiller både lærere, lærerutdannere, studenter, elever og utdanningssystemet overfor en rekke nye utfordrin-ger. Hva som er gyldig kunnskap i informasjonsmylderet, hvordan vi skal skape mening av alle fragmentene, og hvordan kunnskapen skal repre-senteres, er bare noen av de mer overordnede spørsmålene. Dette kapitlet søker å besvare to relaterte spørsmål. For det første: Hvordan kan vi forstå

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læring som samarbeid, spesielt når digitale nettverksteknologier befordrer (og begrenser) samarbeidet? For det andre: Hva er de didaktiske implika-sjonene ved bruk av samarbeidsteknologier i skolen? Formålet er å gi et bidrag til både lærerutdanning, skolepraksiser og læringsteori gjennom å analysere læringsformer som utvikler seg i nettverkssamfunnet. Men for-målet med kapitlet er også didaktisk i den forstand at det er ment å synlig-gjøre hvordan vi kan utvikle produktive, teknologimedierte interaksjoner i klasserommet.

En lang rekke språk, deriblant både norsk og engelsk, har ordtak av typen «to hoder er bedre enn ett». Bak slike utsagn ligger det forestil-linger om og erfaringer med at resultatet blir bedre når fl ere går sammen om å løse en oppgave, at samarbeid «lønner seg». Men gevinsten i en slik arbeidsform ligger ikke alltid opp i dagen. En betingelse for at samarbeid skal gi gode resultater, er at vi deler en forståelse av de oppgavene vi møter (Rasmussen, Krange & Ludvigsen, 2003), at vi kan trekke veksler på et fel-les erfaringsgrunnlag, inkludert det allerede Emile Durkheim (1898/1974) kalte kollektive representasjoner, og at vi organiserer oppgaveløsningen gjennom en målrettet og produktiv arbeidsdeling (Engeström, 1999). Når utviklingspsykologene Jaan Valsiner og Rene van der Veer undersøker hvor ideene kommer fra, og hvordan de oppstår og videreutvikles, fi nner de også en lang tradisjon for kollektiv tenkning og samarbeid (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). Det er ikke bare i den vygotskianske tradisjonen (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986) vi fi nner et sosialt perspektiv på læring og utvikling; Valsiner og van der Veer viser hvordan slike perspektiver historisk har vokst fram i både Europa og USA. Dette perspektivet kalles sosiogenetisk – dvs. at ideene og deres utvikling har sin forankring i tenkning som et sosialt fenomen. Kognisjon og læring oppstår, vedlikeholdes og videreutvikles gjennom samspillet mellom mennesker, mellom mennesker og kulturelle redskaper som tas i bruk (både språklige og materielle), og mellom mennesker og de kulturelle og historiske institusjonene vi skaper. Et slikt perspektiv kommer kanskje klarest til uttrykk gjennom tittelen på Valsiner og van der Veers omfangsrike volum: Th e Social Mind. Construction of the Idea.

I moderne tid har interessen for ulike typer samarbeid økt, og fra en lang rekke vitenskapelige og faglige posisjoner. Fag- og forskningsfelt innen bl.a. fi losofi , psykologi, informatikk og utdanningsvitenskap viser en økende interesse for kollektiv tenkning (se f.eks. Lund, 2005 for nærmere oversikt).

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Dette skyldes ikke minst at vi nå har utviklet – og fortsetter å utvikle – både teknologier og praksiser som støtter, og til og med forutsetter, samarbeid. Det fi nnes klare sosioøkonomiske grunner for dette. Som Marx i sin tid gjennom Kapitalen (Marx, 1867/1983) analyserte det materielle grunnlaget for kapitalismen, gjorde den amerikanske sosiologen Manuel Castells rundt millenniumskift et en tilsvarende analyse av nettverkssamfunnet (Castells, 1996). Nettverket har blitt den samlende metaforen for hvordan vi organi-serer oss både sosialt og teknologisk, og hvordan vi både møter, deler og utvikler kunnskap gjennom informasjonsnettverk. Men der vi tidligere forholdt oss til samarbeid i mindre og samlokaliserte grupper med etablerte relasjoner, åpner nettverkssamfunnet for massesamarbeid mellom aktører som kanskje bare deler en interesse eller et behov, uavhengig av tid, sted, bakgrunn og kultur (Lund & Rasmussen, 2010).

Når de samfunnsmessige betingelsene for tenkning og læring på denne måten endres, har skolen med sitt samfunnsansvar en særskilt oppgave i å forberede elever på å virke under slike betingelser. Med «virke» menes her både å lære og å utvikle kunnskap i fellesskap samt kunne fungere i et arbeidsliv som i økende grad bygger på distribuert kunnskap – den som ikke bare fi nnes i hodene, men mellom dem (Gee, 2000; Gee, Hull & Lanks-hear, 1996). På samme måte hviler det et ansvar på lærerutdanningen for å utdanne lærere som kan lede kollektive former for kunnskapsutvikling. Men det kan være grunn til å spørre om forståelsen for kollektiv kunn-skapsutvikling og teknologistøttet samarbeidslæring er godt nok utviklet, både i skolen og i lærerutdanningen. Riktignok har vi i skolen praktisert ulike former for gruppearbeid, men kanskje ut fra litt naive eller romantiske forestillinger. De mer underliggende, kritiske, teoretiske og prinsipielle tilnærmingene har manglet. Dermed har vi også fått et oppgjør med grup-pearbeid – blant annet har pressen kunnet melde at «Dansk forskar bed om orsaking for å ha innført gruppearbeid i skolen. Norske fagfolk jublar» (Dypvik, 2011). Denne lett tabloide versjonen kan jo lede oss til å tro at to eller fl ere hoder slettes ikke er bedre enn ett, men derimot en dysfunksjo-nell konstellasjon.

For å forfølge de to spørsmålene jeg stilte innledningsvis, vil jeg ana-lysere et longitudinelt forskningsprosjekt med bruk av wikier i to vide-regående skoler. En wiki kan kort forklares som et åpent, internettbasert samarbeidsverktøy der alle kan bidra og revidere andres bidrag, og der alle

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endringer umiddelbart blir synlige for deltakerne. Dette prosjektet blir satt i sammenheng med funn fra en rekke internasjonale studier. Aller først vil jeg imidlertid søke å gi begrepet samarbeid et innhold som gjør at både forfatter og leser har en felles forståelse i fortsettelsen.

Ulike typer samarbeidStudier av gruppedynamikk og gruppers interaksjonsmønstre har siden 1950-tallet oft e vært knyttet til problembasert læring og problemløsning (se f.eks. Hare, Borgatta & Bales, 1955). Viktige bidrag har i særlig grad kommet fra David W. Johnson og Roger T. Johnson, som på 1980-tallet fokuserte på klasserommets store «vi», på positiv gjensidig avhengighet og på hvordanbåde lærere og skoleledere kunne utvikle slike læringsformer gjennom en«samarbeidets didaktikk» (Johnson, Johnson, Haugaløkken & Aakervik,1986; Johnson, Johnson, Holubec & Roy, 1984). Andre viktige bidrag fi nnesi «puslespill»-tradisjonen (the jigsaw classroom), der gruppens deltakeresplitter oppgaven i mindre deloppgaver for hver for seg så å sette sammeninformasjon som er relevant for svaret på oppgaven. (Aronson, Blaney,Stephan, Sikes & Snapp, 1978). Det er viktig å merke seg at i denne tidligefasen av gruppearbeid var «puslebitene» oft est gitt av læreren. Det dreierseg om tiden før man googlet eller oppsøkte Wikipedia.

Slike og lignende tilnærminger til samarbeidslæring er forskjellige fra den som er grunnlaget for CSCL – Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning – og som er helt sentralt for dette kapitlet. Distinksjonen er uttrykt av Pierre Dillenbourg (1999) gjennom begrepsparet kooperasjon og kollaborasjon på følgende måte:

Gjennom kooperasjon fordeler deltakerne arbeidet seg imellom og løser del-oppgaver individuelt for deretter å sette sammen del-løsningene til det samlede resultatet. Gjennom kollaborasjon gjøres alt arbeidet «sammen». (Dillenbourg, 1999, s. 8, min oversettelse.)

I kollaborasjon ligger det altså en kontinuerlig, delt oppmerksomhet på hele oppgaven for alle gruppens deltakere. Kollaborasjon overskrider det individuelle perspektivet som ligger i kooperasjon. Et slikt kollektivt samlingspunkt og dermed en slik felles løsning på problemet krever en

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stadig forhandling om prosedyrer og relevante løsningsstrategier, og en felles meningskonstruksjon. Det utelukker ikke at man inngår i former for arbeidsdeling – alle kan ikke gjøre alt. Men alle deltakerne forholder seg til helheten i oppgaven, det er ikke nok med en avgrenset, tilordnet delopp-gave. Samarbeid som kollaborasjon innebærer en mer krevende tilnærming til oppgaven der samarbeidspartnerne må forholde seg til både helheten og hvordan deres eget bidrag er relevant for helheten. I hverdagsspråket er ikke distinksjonen mellom kooperasjon og kollaborasjon tydelig, og i skolesammenheng ser vi oft e at samarbeid utøves som en form for koo-perasjon – deloppgaver som ikke nødvendigvis fi nner en syntese til slutt.

Rent forskningsmessig er distinksjonen svært viktig. I studier av koo-perasjon kan analyseenheten være individet, og tradisjonelle utdannings-psykologiske metoder brukes oft e, f.eks. eksperimentelt design og pre- og posttester. Studier av samarbeid som kollaborasjon er (oft est) forankret i sosiale teorier om tenkning og utvikling, og i disse studiene utgjør både dialogisme (f.eks. Bakhtin, 1979/2000) og den vygotskianske tradisjonen, med sin vekt på mental utvikling som en sosial prosess mediert av kultu-relle redskaper (språk, symboler og materielle og sosiale ressurser), grunn-leggende prinsipper. I studier av kollaborasjon er det altså selve prosessene i kollektiv tenkning og felles meningskonstruksjon som står sentralt. Slike prosesser utgjør en «black box» som, for å forstå hva som utspiller seg på innsiden, krever at man studerer interaksjoner mellom deltakere og de ressurser de anvender over tid. Slike prosesser må også relateres til de kontekster de utspiller seg i, f.eks. det samlokaliserte klasserommet eller et distribuert interessefellesskap på Internett. Det er altså snakk om å stu-dere både individuelle og sosiale prosesser på samme tid (Sawyer, 2006; Stahl, Koschmann & Suthers, 2006), og dermed har vi straks en mye mer kompleks analyseenhet. En slik kompleksitet fører igjen til behovet for nye typer forskningsdesign og -metoder som setter oss i stand til å analysere og forstå teknologimediert interaksjon.

Innenfor CSCL spiller teknologien en viktig koordinerende rolle for samarbeid som kollaborasjon. Men i tillegg åpner teknologien for at vi også kan utvikle ny kunnskap, siden nettverkene knytter sammen et nærmest uendelig antall menneskelige og materielle ressurser (Akkerman mfl ., 2007; Hakkarainen, Palonen, Paavola & Lehtinen, 2004; Mäkitalo-Siegl, Zott-mann, Kaplan & Fischer, 2010; Sawyer, 2007). Dette kapitlet har ikke som

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formål å gi noen uttømmende analyse av hvordan CSCL-feltet oppstod og har utviklet seg. Det er likevel viktig å peke på at da Timothy Kosch-mann (1996) lanserte CSCL som et nytt paradigme (akronymet hadde vært i bruk siden 1989), betød det et brudd både med en behavioristisk instruk-sjonisme-tradisjon der teknologien fungerte som leverandør av stimuli for (elev-) respons, og med mer kognisjons- og konstruktivistiske tilnær-minger der teknologien tilbød støtte for resonnementer. Felles for disse paradigmene var vektleggingen av forholdet mellom individ og teknologi. Koschmann pekte på hvordan teknologiene kunne brukes til å fremme og danne læringsfellesskap. Det ble nå lagt vekt på interaksjon i mindre grupper der teknologiene medierte mentale prosesser i stedet for å teste dem eller representere dem i form av modeller. CSCL-paradigmet har siden vist seg levedyktig og initiert en serie forskningsprosjekter og studier, ikke minst dokumentert gjennom en lang rekke konferanser samt tidsskrift et International Journal of Computer-Support for Collaborative Learning.

Før vi forlater en gjennomgang av ulike typer samarbeid, er det viktig å peke på en relativt ny type som ikke bare involverer små eller større grupper der deltakerne kjenner hverandre gjennom samarbeid over tid (som f.eks. i skoleklasser). Gjennom kombinasjonen av nettverksteknologier med stor båndbredde, web 2.0-applikasjoner og sosiale medier som muliggjør rask innholdsproduksjon for Internett, åpnes det for raskt å fl ytte informasjon fra mange til mange. Vi kan altså inngå i massesamarbeid i en helt annen skala enn vi har vært vant til. Dette er en type samarbeid som kanskje er best kjent fra Wikipedia. Våren 2012 var det registrert nesten fi re millio-ner artikler i den engelskspråklige versjonen alene. Antallet forfattere er ukjent, men det er snakk om fl ere titusener. Noen tusen frivillige fungerer som kvalitetskontrollører av innholdet, og nærmere 2000 administratorer holder det leksikalske systemet gående etter nærmere bestemte retnings-linjer.1 Et annet velkjent eksempel er programmeringsfellesskapet rundt operativsystemet Linux.2 Nettstedet TakingITGlobal3 knytter sammen ungdom fra hele verden for å identifi sere og fi nne løsninger på komplekse globale utfordringer knyttet til utdanning, helse, miljø og menneskeret-

1. Se http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics for kontinuerlig oppdatert statistikk2. Se http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/130025 for prinsipper om massesamarbeid knyttet til

Linux3. Se http://www.tigweb.org/index.html

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ter etc. Dette er bare enkelte eksempler på massesamarbeid som fi nner sted gjennom både ideelle organisasjoner og i forretningslivet (se f.eks. Lund & Rasmussen, 2010; Sawyer, 2007; Tapscott & Williams, 2006 for en rekke eksempler og implikasjoner, bl.a. for skole og utdanning). I denne typen massesamarbeid ligger det nye kollaborative praksiser som ikke er «didaktisert» i den forstand at de har blitt identifi sert og kultivert i skole og lærerutdanning. Ikke desto mindre tyder utviklingen på at elever må forberedes på å kunne delta i og bidra til slike praksiser. Vi snakker om læring i f.eks. større organisasjoner, lokalsamfunn og interessenettverk, oft e tilordnet begrepet kollektiv læring for å tydeliggjøre at samarbeidslæ-ring her skaleres opp fra et rent gruppenivå (Kafai & Peppler, 2011). Som eksempel kan nevnes at enkelte spill-fellesskap på Internett kan telle opp-til 1,5 millioner deltakere – såkalte Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG). I dette kapitlet vil også termen kollektiv forekomme, tilordnet aktiviteter som involverer mer enn små grupper, f.eks. hele skoleklasser eller fl ere klasser som samarbeider (se avsnittet «Wiki i klasserommet»). Ny forskning viser at massesamarbeid rommer rike muligheter for å løse komplekse problemer (ibid.). I kollektiv læring ligger altså en spennende, men svært krevende, oppgave for (morgen)dagens lærere.

Det første spørsmålet vi stilte i dette kapitlet, gjaldt hvordan vi kan forstå læring som samarbeid, spesielt når digitale nettverksteknologier befor-drer (og begrenser) samarbeidet. Argumentet som har vært ført gjennom disse sidene, konkluderer med at vi må forstå samarbeid som inkluderer bruk av teknologier slik det er gjort innenfor CSCL-tradisjonen. Det er en slik tilnærming vi trenger for å forstå både hva samarbeid betyr, hvordan samarbeid utspiller seg i ulike målestokker, og hvordan det kan utnyttes produktivt i utdanningen. Nettverksteknologier, web 2.0-applikasjoner og sosiale medier gjør samarbeidsprosesser synlige, og gir oss både som lærere, lærerutdannere og forskere muligheter for å forstå hvordan kol-lektiv tenkning kan fremmes og kultiveres – hvordan to og eventuelt fl ere hoder under bestemte betingelser og i møte med bestemte oppgaver kan være bedre enn ett. Tilnærmingen betyr ikke at man overser individenes betydning og bidrag, men at verken prosesser eller resultater kan reduseres til individnivå (Stahl, 2006). I dette ligger det en spenning mellom nivåer, og dermed en betydelig didaktisk utfordring for å realisere potensialet i samarbeidsformer som involverer kollektiv tenkning og kunnskapsproduk-

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sjon. I neste omgang skal vi se nærmere på noen empiriske studier som undersøker ulike former for samarbeidslæring.

Samarbeidslæring i praksisPå bakgrunn av denne begrepsmessige gjennomgangen er det verdt å spørre om forskningen på samarbeidslæring gir noen pekepinn om dens potensial, i hvilken grad samarbeid virker befordrende på den enkelte elevs læring, hvor-dan kollektivets – gruppens eller nettverkets – læring kommer til uttrykk, og om det her ligger et aggregert resultat som utgjør mer enn summen av alle individuelle bidrag. Slike spørsmål betraktes som noen av de mest utfor-drende innenfor læringsvitenskapen (Stahl mfl ., 2006). Vi snakker om kog-nitive prosesser som kommer til uttrykk gjennom deltakernes interaksjoner, både språklig og i deres håndtering av tilgjengelige kulturelle ressurser.

Sawyer (2006) viser hvordan over 20 år med utdanningsforskning på «collaborative discourse» har dokumentert den verdien samarbeidslæring har for elever (og for lærere). Dette gjelder i en rekke ulike fag, som f.eks. matematikk, biologi, programmering, og i ulike skrift lige framstillinger. Det gjelder også i studier der man har søkt å sammenligne samarbeidslæ-ring med mer individuelt orienterte og/eller konkurransepregede lærings-former. Imidlertid må også samarbeidslæring ha en tydelig struktur, ret-ning og ledelse. Det er ikke nok å sette elever sammen i en gruppe og anta at læring materialiserer seg uten videre.

Det samme fi nner Hämäläinen og Vähäsantanen (2011). I en gjennom-gang av 193 studier av sammenhengen mellom samarbeidslæring og krea-tivitet, fi nner de at læreres «orkestrering» – her forstått som en balanse mellom design, ledelse og struktur på den ene siden og improvisasjon, fl ek-sibilitet og frihet på den andre – er avgjørende for kunnskapsutviklingen hos elevene. Målrettet samarbeidslæring kan utvikles gjennom egnede opp-gavestrukturer, produktive interaksjoner og tilgjengelige ressurser som for eksempel IKT. De fi nske forskerne fant imidlertid at lærere som engasjerer seg i slike praksiser, oft e hindres av rigide administrasjons- og kontrollregi-mer og mangel på tillit og felles rom for faglig-pedagogisk utviklingsarbeid.

Både Sawyer (2006) og Hämäläinen og Vähäsantanen (2011) viser til internasjonal forskning. Finnes det så noen tilsvarende undersøkelse fra norsk kontekst?

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Svaret ligger nærmest et «nei», vi mangler kort og godt kunnskap om «samarbeidslæring på norsk». Det betyr ikke at vi mangler en tradisjon. Tankene fra Johnson og Johnson mfl . (1984, 1986) ble tidlig fanget opp i Norge, spesielt av Egil Hjertaker (1990), som fokuserer på samarbeidslæ-ring som metodikk. Men også tradisjonen fra Danmark, der gruppearbeid og prosjektarbeid fi kk en tydeligere ideologisk og samfunnsmessig oppgave (Berthelsen, Illeris & Poulsen, 1985), fi kk innfl ytelse i Norge (Skrøvset & Lund, 1996). Men noen systematisk oppsummering av denne innfl ytelsen er ikke gjort. Og vi har heller ingen vitenskapelig gjennomgang av hvor-dan samarbeidslæring i teknologirike omgivelser kommer til uttrykk i det norske utdanningssystemet. Riktignok fi nnes det en del anekdotisk kunn-skap fra ulike skoleprosjekter, men den er lite systematisert. Imidlertid har Baltzersen og Tolsby (2008) undersøkt hvordan noen norske Wikipedia-skribenter arbeider, og søker i et tankeeksperiment å overføre erfaringer fra «den radikalt gjennomsiktige læringsomgivelsen» (s. 187) til et klasserom. Informantene fra Wikipedia la vekt på at det ligger en sterk både sosial og faglig merverdi i å involvere seg i andres arbeid, og at deltakerne også har glede av å se andre forbedre en tekst de selv har jobbet med, ikke minst når dette anerkjennes.

Andreassen (2010) har en grundig oversiktsartikkel i tidsskrift et Acta Didactica Norge der han analyserer en rekke studier av samarbeidslæring knyttet til leseforståelse hos barn i grunnskolealder. Andreassen fi nner, som Baltzersen, at «samarbeidslæring [har] vært lite forsket på i Norge og Norden for øvrig» (ibid., s. 2), og gjør derfor en metaanalyse av en rekke utenlandske studier. Han ser på både eff ektstudier, faktoranalyse (forsøk på å identifi sere faktorer som kan knyttes til eff ekten av samarbeidslæring) og kvalitative studier (intervjuer). Det er en rekke sider ved de studiene Andreassen har valgt, som skiller dem fra studiene som Sawyer (2006) pre-senterer: De er mer domenespesifi kke (leseforståelse), det er snakk om små grupper (inntil fem elever), og her er ingen dokumentert teknologistøtte. Likevel gir Andreassens metaanalyse en del funn som har høy relevans for hvordan vi analyserer samarbeidslæring i dette kapitlet:

• Diskusjon og dialog er sentrale aktiviteter i samarbeidslæring, positivgjensidig avhengighet er viktig. Elevene opplever diskusjon som hjelptil leseforståelse.

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94 kapittel 4

• Elevene er bevisste på betingelser som bidrar til gode samtaler ogdiskusjon.

• Lærernes kompetanse knyttet til samarbeidslæring er relatert til eff ek-ten av den. Slik kompetanse krever tid å utvikle (2–3 år, ifølge en avstudiene).

• Samarbeidslæring kan med fordel kombineres med direkte instruk-sjon og målrettet arbeid for å utvikle elevenes samarbeids- ogdiskursferdigheter.

• Oppgaven har betydningen for elevenes deltakelse i diskusjon. Å værekonsentrert om en oppgave er både viktig og vanskelig.

• Eff ekten av samarbeidslæring avhenger av en rekke faktorer (f.eks. kon-tekstuelle). Det er altså umulig å presentere samarbeid per se som enuniversalnøkkel til «bedre læring».

Det er følgelig lett å si seg enig med Andreassen (2010) når han konkluderer med å understreke:

(…) behovet for å prøve ut samarbeidslæring systematisk i norsk skole før det kan anbefales som en god måte å organisere læringsarbeidet på her. Slike intervensjo-ner bør studeres både kvantitativt, for å fi nne hovedtendenser, og kvalitativt, for å få kunnskap om hvorfor og hvordan samarbeidslæring virker i norske klasserom (Andreassen, 2010, s. 17).

I det følgende vil vi derfor se nærmere på en serie intervensjoner knyt-tet til norske elevers bruk av samarbeidsverktøyet wiki. Det er snakk om fagene engelsk og nyere historie ved to videregående skoler. I tillegg vil vi trekke inn erfaringer fra bruk av wiki i praktisk-pedagogisk lærerutdanning (PPU). De enkeltstående studiene er primært kvalitative, men gjennom å se på dem i sammenheng kan vi også få øye på hovedtendenser.

Wiki i klasserommetI perioden 2005–2009 jobbet vi – forskere fra Universitetet i Oslo og lærere og elever ved to videregående skoler – med å bruke teknologistøtte for sam-arbeidslæring i fagene engelsk og nyere historie. Blant de mange teknolo-gier som kan støtte samarbeidslæring, valgte vi å bruke wiki-applikasjoner

50


(Leuf & Cunningham, 2001). Grunnen til at vi valgte wiki-applikasjoner, var at de har stor utbredelse i mange ulike sektorer, at de er enkle og fl eksi-ble i bruk, at de oft e bygger på åpen kildekode og derfor kan videreutvikles, at de kan romme både små grupper og større nettverk, og at de bygger på gjensidighet mellom deltakerne. I første omgang testet vi ulike wikier gjennom en serie oppgaver og aktiviteter vi utviklet. I neste omgang brukte vi de mulighetene som ligger i wikiens åpne kildekode, til å videreutvi-kle applikasjonen i tråd med de ønsker og behov vi kunne identifi sere ut fra den innledende bruken. Det var i særlig grad spørsmålene knyttet til vurdering av individuelle bidrag i forhold til wikiens kollektivt utviklede produkt som gjorde dette nødvendig.

Denne delen av kapitlet beskriver og analyserer våre samlede erfaringer med bruk av wikier i klasserommet. De fem ulike intervensjonene i pro-sjektet som er med i tabellen på neste side, var drevet av ulike forsknings-spørsmål. Tabell 1 gir en oversikt over forskningsspørsmål, kort beskrivelse av sentrale aktiviteter og hva som har vært vektlagt i analysen, samt funn som kan knyttes til de enkelte intervensjonene. Fire forskjellige wikier ble brukt, men siden dette kapitlet ikke fokuserer på deres særegne kvaliteter, er en nærmere teknisk beskrivelse av de ulike wikiene utelatt fra framstil-lingen av hensyn til plassen. Imidlertid er det oppgitt referanser til publi-serte studier som gir en mer detaljert gjennomgang. Hele wiki-prosjektet, inkludert de intervensjoner og studier som utgjør tabell 1, er forankret i et sosiokulturelt perspektiv på læring og undervisning, og med særlig bruk av aktivitetsteoretiske og dialogiske tilnærminger (Engeström, 1987; Engeström, Miettinen & Punamäki, 1999; Hauge, Lund & Vestøl, 2007; Wertsch, 1991, 1998).

Tabell 1 kan sies å utgjøre en syntese av nesten fem års forskning (2005–2010) på elevers og læreres bruk av samarbeidsteknologier i form av ulike wikier. Gjennom hele forskningsprosjektet ligger det et prinsipp om å se oppgaver, aktiviteter, teknologier og vurdering i sammenheng. En interven-sjon i form av å introdusere samarbeidsteknologier kan altså ikke bare ses som et teknologisk anliggende, men må ses i forhold til den oppgaven som skal møtes eller løses, og hvordan bidragene i dette arbeidet skal vurderes. Her venter et stort, men spennende forsknings- og utviklingsarbeid for både lærere og lærerutdannere.

51

96 kapittel 4

Tabe

ll 1.

Ove

rsik

t ove

r for

skni

ngss

pørs

mål

, akt

ivite

ter o

g fu

nn fr

a fe

m in

terv

ensjo

ner k

nytte

t til

bruk

av

wik

ier.

Fort

s.

Inte

rven

sjon

Fors

knin

gssp

ørsm

ålAk

tivite

ter.

Analy

tisk

foku

s.Fu

nn

1.•

I hvi

lken

grad

kan

en

wik

i bid

ra ti

l kol

-lek

tiv k

unns

kaps

-by

ggin

g?•

Hvo

rdan

kan

lære

re

ta d

el i w

iki-b

aser

te

aktiv

itete

r?

Enge

lsk vg

1. T

o op

pgav

er: a

) Elev

ene f

orm

idler

sit

t syn

på u

like s

ider

ved

USA

(pro

sjekt

ove

r to

uke

r). b

) Elev

ene b

ygge

r en

virtu

ell, «

typi

sk»

briti

sk sm

åby i

wik

ien (a

ktiv

itet o

ver m

este

-pa

rten

av vå

rsem

este

ret).

Pro

duks

jone

n er

stor

, m

en d

et er

vans

kelig

å ho

lde f

ast e

t fell

es o

bjek

t. Ak

tivite

tene

analy

sere

s i ly

s av u

like m

odell

er

for p

raks

isfell

essk

ap («

com

mun

ities

»).

• To

type

r sam

arbe

id fo

regå

r: a)

sam

loka

liser

t, te

tt sa

mar

beid

i pa

r elle

r i

små g

rupp

er, b

) løs

ere n

ettv

erks

sam

arbe

id o

m w

iki-b

idra

g og e

n fe

lles,

over

ordn

et o

ppga

ve.

• Sa

mar

beid

et i

en w

iki i

nneb

ærer

en ep

istem

olog

i for

ankr

et i

kolle

ktiv

ku

nnsk

apsp

rodu

ksjo

n. D

ette

er u

tford

rend

e for

båd

e elev

er o

g lær

ere.

• W

iki-o

mgi

velse

n gi

r ikk

e et n

atur

lig ro

m fo

r lær

eren

, som

kan

mist

e ov

ersik

ten

over

elev

enes

sam

arbe

id. L

ærer

en m

å des

igne

seg s

elv in

n i

wiki

-akt

ivite

tene

.•

Nær

mer

e bes

krev

et: (

Lund

& Sm

ørda

l, 200

6).

2.•

Hvi

lken

rolle

spill

er

wiki

en fo

r sam

ar-

beid

skom

peta

nse i

et

frem

med

språ

k?•

Hva

slag

s int

erak

-sjo

ner t

ar el

even

del

i?

Enge

lsk vg

1. S

amm

e opp

gave

r og a

ktiv

itete

r so

m o

venf

or. E

leven

e bid

rar t

il å f

orbe

dre

hver

andr

es sp

råkl

ige u

ttryk

k, m

en n

øler

med

å re

vide

re h

vera

ndre

s inn

hold

. Ana

lytisk

foku

s er

på k

ollek

tive p

rose

sser

og g

jensid

ig u

tvik

ling a

v bå

de læ

rings

felle

sska

p og

språ

kfell

essk

ap.

• D

et o

ppstå

r spe

nnin

ger m

ellom

skol

ens h

istor

iske v

ektle

ggin

g av i

ndiv

i-du

ell k

unns

kaps

prod

uksjo

n (s

om k

arak

ters

ette

s) o

g net

tver

kssa

mfu

nnet

s ko

llekt

ive p

rodu

ksjo

n (d

er vi

man

gler

hen

siktsm

essig

e vur

derin

gsfo

rmer

og

krit

erier

).•

Sam

arbe

idsv

erkt

øy (s

om f.

eks.

wiki

er) k

an b

efor

dre b

åde k

unns

kaps

- og

språ

kutv

iklin

g gjen

nom

nye

inte

raks

jons

form

er.

• D

et er

nød

vend

ig å

rede

fi ner

e for

hold

et m

ellom

opp

gave

type

r (fo

r kol

-lek

tive s

var)

, tilg

jenge

lige r

essu

rser

(mat

eriel

le og

sosia

le) o

g vur

derin

gs-

form

er.

• N

ærm

ere b

eskr

evet

: (Lu

nd, 2

006,

200

8).

3.•

Hvi

lken

rolle

spill

er

relas

jone

ne m

ellom

op

pgav

er o

g til-

gjen

gelig

e res

surs

er

i kol

lektiv

kun

n-sk

apsp

rodu

ksjo

n?•

Hva

slag

s delt

akel-

sess

trukt

urer

ser v

i?

Enge

lsk vg

1. E

leven

e und

ersø

ker h

vord

an

angl

o-am

erik

ansk

kul

tur k

omm

er ti

l uttr

ykk

over

stor

e dele

r av v

erde

n. E

leven

e bru

ker e

n re

kke u

like s

amar

beid

sstra

tegi

er, o

gså n

år se

lve

wiki

en b

ryte

r sam

men

rett

før d

e ska

l pre

sen-

tere

sine

bid

rag.

Det

analy

tiske

foku

s er p

å hvo

r-da

n ele

vene

nyt

tiggj

ør se

g sam

arbe

idste

knol

o-gi

er fo

r å lø

se en

kol

lektiv

t orie

nter

t opp

gave

.

• Ko

llekt

ivt o

rient

ert k

unns

kaps

prod

uksjo

n fi n

ner s

ted

både

loka

lt i p

ar

eller

små g

rupp

er, o

g i d

et st

ørre

, glo

bale

klas

sefe

lless

kape

t. D

et er

van-

skeli

g for

elev

ene (

og læ

rern

e) å

kons

entre

re se

g slik

på t

o fro

nter

.•

Det

er b

ehov

for å

utv

ikle

oppg

avet

yper

og v

urde

rings

krite

rier s

om

fang

er b

åde i

ndiv

idue

lle, l

okale

og g

loba

le ak

tivite

ter.

• In

divi

duell

e og l

okale

bid

rag m

å vur

dere

s ut f

ra re

levan

s i fo

rhol

d til

bå

de an

dres

bid

rag o

g det

helh

etlig

e res

ulta

tet.

• N

ærm

ere b

eskr

evet

: (Lu

nd &

Ras

mus

sen,

200

8).

52


Tabe

ll 1.

Ove

rsik

t ove

r for

skni

ngss

pørs

mål

, akt

ivite

ter o

g fu

nn fr

a fe

m in

terv

ensjo

ner k

nytte

t til

bruk

av

wik

ier.

Fort

s.

Inte

rven

sjon

Fors

knin

gssp

ørsm

ålAk

tivite

ter.

Analy

tisk

foku

s.Fu

nn

4.•

Hvo

rdan

kan

lære

re o

g for

sker

e i f

elles

skap

utv

ikle

lærin

gsom

give

lser

som

bef

ordr

er k

olla-

bora

tiv o

g kol

lektiv

læ

ring?

Mod

erne

hist

orie

vg 3

. Des

ign

av b

åde t

ekno

lo-

gisk

e om

give

lser (

re-d

esig

n av

en w

iki)

og p

eda-

gogi

ske a

ktiv

itete

r (in

klud

ert o

ppga

vety

per o

g vu

rder

ings

form

er) s

om st

øtte

r og f

rem

mer

ulik

e fo

rmer

for s

amar

beid

slærin

g. D

et an

alytis

ke

foku

s er p

å co-

desig

n –

en p

rose

ss d

er ak

tøre

r fra

ulik

e akt

ivite

tssys

tem

er (s

kole

og fo

rskn

ing)

ut

vikl

er et

felle

s, te

knisk

-ped

agog

isk o

bjek

t.

• Ko

-des

igne

t res

ulte

rte i

både

tekn

isk u

tvik

ling o

g ped

agog

iske p

raks

iser

som

støt

ter s

amar

beid

slærin

g, in

klud

ert v

urde

rings

form

er so

m fa

nger

in

divi

duell

e bid

rags

forh

old

til h

elhet

en.

• D

enne

type

n te

knisk

-ped

agog

iske d

esig

n stå

r i et

spen

ning

sforh

old

til

tradi

sjone

lle, m

er in

divi

duelt

orie

nter

te ak

tivite

ter,

oppg

avet

yper

og

vurd

erin

gsfo

rmer

.•

Lære

re o

pplev

er å

arbe

ide i

slik

e spe

nnin

gsfo

rhol

d so

m k

onfl i

ktfy

lt. I

kam

pen

mell

om in

nova

tive a

mbi

sjone

r og e

ksist

eren

de p

raks

iser m

ed

tilhø

rend

e «re

gnsk

apsp

likt»

er d

et le

tt å g

i opp

ambi

sjone

ne.

• N

ærm

ere b

eskr

evet

: (Lu

nd, R

asm

usse

n &

Smør

dal, 2

009)

.

5.•

Hvo

rdan

arbe

ider

lære

re m

ed å

utvi

kle

oppg

aver

for b

åde

kolla

bora

tive o

g ko

llekt

ive p

raks

iser?

Nye

re h

istor

ie, vg

3. E

t lær

erte

am d

iskut

erer

og

utvi

kler

nye

opp

gave

type

r som

refl e

kter

er n

ett-

verk

ssam

funn

et. E

leven

e arb

eider

med

opp

ga-

vene

på u

like m

åter

, bl.a

. gjen

nom

å gj

ensk

ape

disk

usjo

nskl

ima u

nder

den

kald

e krig

en o

g ar

gum

ente

re k

ontra

fakt

isk («

Hva

om

…?»

-dis-

kusjo

n). D

et an

alytis

ke fo

kus e

r på s

penn

inge

r m

ellom

trad

isjon

elle o

g net

tver

ksor

iente

rte

prak

siser

. Im

plik

asjo

ner f

or læ

reru

tdan

ning

di

skut

eres

.

• D

et ek

siste

rer e

t misf

orho

ld m

ellom

net

tver

kssa

mfu

nnet

s inf

orm

asjo

ns-

struk

ture

r og l

æreb

oktra

disjo

nen.

• I t

radi

sjone

lle o

ppga

ver e

r det

ster

k ko

blin

g mell

om o

ppga

ver o

g lær

e-bø

ker,

det e

r en

«lukk

et» s

trukt

ur. I

kol

lektiv

t orie

nter

te o

ppga

ver m

øter

ele

vene

en «å

pen»

stru

ktur

som

invi

tere

r til

eksp

lore

ring,

forh

andl

ing o

g å s

kape

men

ing a

v oft e

frag

men

tert

og m

otstr

iden

de in

form

asjo

n.•

Kolle

ktiv

t orie

nter

te o

ppga

ver o

pphe

ver d

ikot

omi m

ellom

lærin

g og

unde

rvisn

ing.

Rolle

ne i

klas

sero

mm

et sk

ift er

rask

t.•

Nær

mer

e bes

krev

et: (

Lund

& R

asm

usse

n, 2

010)

.

53

98 kapittel 4

Diskusjon: fi re utfordringerGjennom å se intervensjonene i tabell 1 i sammenheng, søker vi i dette kapitlet å svare på det andre spørsmålet vi stilte innledningsvis: Hva er de didaktiske implikasjonene ved bruk av samarbeidsteknologier i skolen? Noe av svaret kan vi se fra gjennomgangen av internasjonale studier i første del av kapitlet. Mange av de erfaringene som oppsummeres der, stemmer helt overens med våre egne funn. Imidlertid har vår fokusering på sam-menhengen mellom oppgaver, aktiviteter, nettverksteknologier og vurde-ring gitt oss både noen overordnede og noen mer konkrete innsikter som vi mener er verdifulle for å utvikle produktivt samarbeid i klasserommet. Av analytiske hensyn vil vi i denne diskusjonen kort omtale de fi re elementene separat, og knytte dem til utfordringer, ikke minst for lærerutdanningen.

Nye teknologier – nye oppgaverHistorisk sett har oppgaver i skolen gjerne vært individuelle, knyttet til et kontrollerbart lærestoff i en lærebok, og elevene har blitt vurdert ut fra deres evne til å løse oppgavene uten hjelp eller bruk av hjelpemidler. Denne tradisjonen har gjennom de siste (ti)årene blitt myket opp gjennom at elever også under eksamen kan bruke en rekke hjelpemidler, men typisk nok foregår selve eksamensdagen uten bruk av f.eks. Internett.4 Kombina-sjonen av samarbeid og nærmest ubegrenset adgang til (oft e fragmentert, motstridende eller ikke-verifi sert) informasjon setter den tradisjonelle for-men for oppgaveløsning under press. Det er forståelig at lærere advarer mot en situasjon der bruken av digitale hjelpemidler truer både legitimiteten til og validiteten av eksamen og vurdering i en slik situasjon (se f.eks. Falck Olsen, 2009).

Men dersom oppgaver, testing og vurdering skal ha legitimitet og vali-ditet i nettverkssamfunnet, må dette gjenspeiles i de oppgavene elevene møter. Å gjenskape eller forlenge testsituasjoner der elever er unndratt både sosial og teknologisk assistanse, vil skape situasjoner som ikke prøver eller utvikler den kompetansen som er påkrevet i det 21. århundre. Følgelig trenger vi å se på selve oppgavetypene og -strukturene med friske øyne.

4. Utdanningsdirektoratet opplyser at man vil sette i gang forsøk med Internett til eksamen vednoen skoler våren 2012.

54


Dersom oppgavene kan løses uten utstrakt samarbeid og uten bruk av nett-verksteknologier, er det jo meningsløst å introdusere slike læringsformer.

I kolonne 3 (Aktiviteter og analytisk fokus) i tabell 1 ser vi at elevene ble satt til å fi nne svar på oppgaver som er altfor krevende eller komplekse til å besvares på individnivå. Utgangspunktet for de oppgavene vi brukte i wiki-prosjektet, bygde på O’Neil mfl . (2003), som defi nerer samarbeids-orienterte oppgaver på følgende måte: «en oppgave som forutsetter at ikke bare et enkeltindivid har alle ressursene, og der det er usannsynlig at en enkelt deltaker kan løse problemet eller nå målene uten i det minste noen bidrag fra andre i gruppen» (s. 366, min oversettelse).

Dette er et brudd med det kjente «oppgaveuniverset» som bygger på sterk kobling mellom oppgaver og lærebok. Innenfor dette universet har det vært lite tradisjon for å åpne for annet enn svært begrensede hjelpe-midler. Men dette er også et «lukket» univers, det fordrer identifi serbare ferdigheter og kompetanse, for det meste på individnivå. Svarene på opp-gavene er som oft est kjent, eller de kan kontrolleres mot pålitelige kilder. Gjennom både lærerutdanning og senere praksis blir lærere fortrolige med et slikt lukket oppgaveunivers.

Gjennom bruken av nettverksteknologier og web 2.0-applikasjoner møter vi derimot et «åpent» univers, et som inviterer til og fordrer utfor-sking, forhandlinger og kompetanse til å skape mening av fragmentert og til dels upålitelig eller motstridende informasjon. Hvis vi bare kopierer opp-gavekulturen fra det «lukkete» universet inn i det «åpne», vil det resultere i praksiser som baserer seg på klipp-og-lim. For elevene vil det fremdeles gjelde å fi nne fram til et «riktig» eller relevant svar på oppgaven, og som regel har noen andre ute på nettet allerede gjort den jobben.5 Nå skal det også sies at ikke alle klipp-og-lim-praksiser er identiske med uforstandig og blind kopiering. Mange elever bruker det som en strategi for å nærme seg en problemstilling i form av å opprette utklippsdokumenter der de samler biter av kopiert nettinformasjon for senere å omforme eller sette sammen dette til det som må betraktes som elevens eget svar (Rasmussen, 2005).

Gjennom våre erfaringer med bruk av wiki i skolen har vi identifi sert fem prinsipper for oppgavedesign som forsøker å ta hensyn til samarbeidslæ-ring i teknologirike omgivelser (omarbeidet fra Lund & Rasmussen, 2010):

5. Se f.eks http://www.daria.no/skole/

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• Det må være samsvar mellom oppgaven som skal løses eller besvares,og de kulturelle verktøyene som er tilgjengelige. Å be elever bruke f.eks. en wiki for en oppgave som kan løses individuelt, gir ikke mening ogvil resultere i manglende eller direkte uproduktivt samarbeid.

• Oppgavene bør åpne for at elevene kan vise hvordan deres individu-elle bidrag er relevante i den større, kollektive sammenhengen (f.eks.wikiproduksjonen som helhet) og relevante i forhold til en eller fl eremedelevers bidrag. En slik oppmerksomhet om både lokal og globalkunnskapsproduksjon er krevende, og må utvikles gjennom treningover tid.

• Oppgavene bør åpne for at elevene kan aktivere både læreplanforankret kunnskap og kunnskap og kompetanse de henter fra sin egen livsver-den. Der det er sammenheng eller kontraster mellom kunnskaps- ogerfaringsområder, åpnes det for refl eksjon.

• Kollektivt orienterte oppgaver åpner for at forholdet lærer–elev blirmindre entydig. Begge parter pendler mellom å lære og å undervise,men lærer har et særlig ansvar for å orkestrere aktivitetene.

• Oppgaver som kan beskrives som «metaoppgaver», ser ut til å egne seg for teknologistøttet samarbeidslæring. I fi gur 1 (nedenfor) gis det noen eksempler på oppgavetyper.

I sum blir de nevnte prinsippene til utfordringer som det antagelig vil være svært krevende å møte for den enkelte lærer. Men våre erfaringer med slike oppgavetyper fra videregående skole viser at lærere synes det er både faglig stimulerende og morsomt å designe og prøve ut slike oppgavetyper. Her venter et stort arbeid for både lærerutdanningen og etter- og videreutdan-ning av lærere.

Aktiviteter – lokal og global produksjonUnder prinsippene for kollektivt orientert oppgavedesign (andre kulepunkt ovenfor) var vi inne på hvor krevende det er (for både elever og lærere) å produsere sine egne bidrag til samarbeidet og samtidig holde oversik-ten over hvordan helheten i samarbeidet utvikler seg. Dette er et avgjø-rende, om langt fra det eneste kritiske, forhold som gjør seg gjeldende når elever møter kollektivt orienterte oppgaver. Når vi over tid følger elever i

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slike situasjoner, avtegner det seg et aktivitetsmønster som gjengitt i fi gur 1 (ovenfor), og som bygger på analyse av en rekke aktiviteter i tre ulike wikier (Lund & Rasmussen, 2008).

Figuren leses med klokka, fra toppunktet kl. 12. Den er syklisk i den forstand at en runde eller deler av den gjentas i fl ere omganger. Figuren uttrykker hvordan bidrag fra både enkeltelever og par og små grupper går inn i en større, kollektiv produksjon. Utgangspunktet for aktivitetene er å utvikle et resultat som er mer enn summen av de enkelte bidrag (p1 + p2 + … pn). Det er altså snakk om at samarbeidet skal kunne gi en slagssynergieff ekt, et aggregert uttrykk for de enkelte bidrag, oft est gjennom enserie revisjoner, lenker og metakommentarer. Fortsetter vi mot høyre, servi eksempler på noen oppgavetyper vi har brukt for slike formål (se ogsåtabell 1 tidligere i kapitlet). Det viser seg at når elevene nærmer seg opp-gaver av denne typen, bruker de lang tid på å forstå og angripe; vi noterte

Innhold

Resultat:Sum > p1 + p2 + ... pnIndividuell ≠ kollektiv Oppgavetyper:

• narrativer• scenarier• alternativer• hypoteser• sammenhenger• kausalitet• etc

Språk

Revisjoner

Koordinering, lenking

Tilpasning, relevans for andres bidrag og helheten

Seleksjon av ressurser, arbeidsdeling

Tilnærming til oppgaven

Utkast

Oversikt Klipp-og-limTolkning

Figur 1. Oversikt over elevaktiviteter i wiki-omgivelser

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opptil en time. Det henger dels sammen med at oppgavene er noe uvante, dels med at de krever en mer langsiktig strategi, å velge ressurser som kan være tjenlige, og en hensiktsmessig arbeidsdeling.

Etter hvert begynner elevenes førsteutkast å ta form. Informasjonsbiter hentet fra Internett settes sammen med elevenes forkunnskaper gjennom en fortolkning av relevans og betydning, og resulterer i en første oversikt over det de har valgt å bidra med (jf. klipp-og-lim-praksiser). I neste fase møter elevene en betydelig utfordring, nemlig å relatere deres eget bidrag til de andres og den etter hvert større helheten. Den brukne dobbeltpilen mellom tilnærming og tilpasning søker å illustrere hvordan dette er et stadig pågående justeringsarbeid. Når dette arbeidet lykkes, kommer det til uttrykk gjennom koordinering, innspill på andre elevers bidrag og len-king til relevant informasjon. Gjennom både egne og gjensidige revisjoner av innholdskomponenter og språklig framstilling nærmer elevene seg det ønskede, aggregerte resultatet, som i fi guren er illustrert med toppunktet der vi startet.

Det ovennevnte er en stilisert og ideell framstilling av et forløp. I praksis så vi hvordan en del elever og par / mindre grupper ble perifere i forhold til helheten. Revisjonene var også oft est av språklig karakter (spesielt i engelsk-faget), mens innholdet fremdeles ble knyttet til opphavseleven(e)s private eiendomsrett. Denne private eiendomsretten til innholdsproduksjonen er vel kjent fra tradisjonelle skoleoppgaver som f.eks. stilskriving og arbeids-mapper i naturfag. I dette ligger store utfordringer for lærerutdanningens både teoretiske og praktiske dimensjoner: Når fungerer individuelle eller kollektive tilnærminger best, når virker de sammen, på hvilken måte og i hvilke samarbeidsforhold? I neste omgang ser vi kort på samarbeidstek-nologier i lys av slike spørsmål.

NettverksteknologierSamarbeid over nett forutsetter samarbeidsteknologier som støtter og regu-lerer slike arbeidsprosesser. Men teknologier er ikke alene nok for at samar-beidet skal resultere i læringsutbytte. Uansett hvor sofi stikert applikasjonen er, og hvor rask og pålitelig den digitale infrastrukturen er, vil behovet for en lærers nærvær og ledelse være avgjørende. Innenfor det sosiokulturelle perspektivet kan denne grunnleggende antagelsen føres tilbake til bl.a.

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Vygotsky (1978), som viser hvordan utvikling ikke skjer uten instruksjon eller hjelp fra en (eller fl ere) som ut fra mer utviklet kompetanse kan bistå eleven(e). Men der lærere har lang erfaring i slikt arbeid i samlokaliserte omgivelser som f.eks. klasserom, møter de helt andre utfordringer i distri-buerte eller nettbaserte omgivelser. I et intervju sier en av lærerne som var med i prosjektet, følgende om sine første erfaringer med bruk av en wiki:

Jeg mistet elevene (…) det var vanskelig å spore dem, for meg som lærer (…) og jeg følte at jeg mistet elevene, jeg visste ikke hvor jeg skulle gå for å kunne veilede dem (…) fordi, som regel er det ikke noe stort rom for en lærer [i en wiki]. Det blir en separat verden (…) de [elevene] har en tendens til å forsvinne inn i sin separate verden og det blir vanskelig for meg å veilede dem og holde på min rolle som kunnskapsformidler (…). Jeg vet ikke hva som er sluttproduktet, hva jeg skal vurdere til slutt.

Her berører læreren fl ere problemer som til sammen gjør at hun føler seg satt til side. På mange måter rommer denne lærerstemmen selve profe-sjonens kjernepraksiser: veiledning, tilstedeværelse, kunnskapsformidling og vurdering. Alle disse blir truet i nettverksomgivelsene, og læreren blir naturlig nok ganske rådløs – vi har jo ingen historie for å «didaktisere» aktiviteter som utspiller seg i slike omgivelser, og resultatet kan fort bli at elevene forsvinner «inn i sin separate verden», som læreren så treff ende uttrykker det.

Til sammen reiser dette så mange og omfattende problemstillinger at det vil sprenge rammene for dette kapitlet. Men la oss se på en av de mekanis-mene som inntreff er når mange elever samarbeider i nettbaserte omgivelser: Metcalfes lov (Tongia & Wilson, 2007). Metcalfes lov ble først utviklet rundt 1980 for telekommunikasjon for å vise hvordan verdien av et nettverk øker: Hvis f.eks. en person har en telefaks, har den ingen verdi. Hvis to personer har det, kan de sende meldinger seg imellom. Hvis en tredje person får en telefaks, vil verdien av de to første stige siden de har fått fl ere å utveksle mel-dinger med, osv. Men samtidig øker kompleksiteten ganske dramatisk, siden antall relasjoner mellom deltakerne øker etter hvert som antallet deltakere øker. Matematisk uttrykkes det voksende antallet relasjoner på denne måten:

n(n – 1)/2

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Det vil si at vi tar antall deltakere, ganger med antallet minus 1, og deler på 2. Har vi en klasse på 30 elever, blir altså antallet mulige samarbeidsrelasjo-ner 30(30 – 1)/2 = 435. I vårt prosjekt hadde vi opptil 120 elever i en wiki,noe som gir 7140 mulige samarbeidsrelasjoner. Det er kanskje ikke så rartlæreren følte at hun mistet elevene og ikke fant noe rom for å utfolde yrketsitt slik hun var vant til fra klasserommet?

Lærere og lærerstudenter er ikke forberedt på å praktisere under slike betingelser. Hvis den verdien som ligger i nettverket og samarbeidet (jf. Metcalfe), skal kunne realiseres, må lærere få møte og ta del i de praksisene som utvikler seg. Vi vet fremdeles svært lite om hva det innebærer å være lærer i slike omgivelser, selv om yrkeslivet i økende grad baserer seg på mas-sesamarbeid gjennom nettverk (Sawyer, 2007; Tapscott & Williams, 2006).

Det som lærerne i prosjektet fant mest utfordrende, var å vurdere både elevenes arbeidsinnsats og deres individuelle og kollektive bidrag. Videre i kapitlet skal vi se på hvordan forskere og lærere sammen har forsøkt å møte disse utfordringene.

Vurdering og samarbeidsteknologierFra mange land ser vi hvordan digitale nettverksteknologier utfordrer det historisk sett stabile forholdet mellom lærere, lærebøker, oppgaver og prøver (Clarke-Midura & Dede, 2010). Med web 2.0-teknologier endres betingelsene for kunnskapsutvikling, noe som kan skape et misforhold mellom eksisterende vurderingsprosedyrer og -kriterier og de praksisene som er under utvikling: «Th e explosion of new social network technologies has highlighted the awkward relationship between new ‘21st century’ media practices and existing educational systems» (Hickey, Honeyford, Clinton & McWilliams, 2010).

Gjennom hele wiki-prosjektet ble en slik «awkward situation» i forbindelse med vurdering stadig mer tydelig. Resultatet var at lærere og forskere, infor-matikere og web-designere gikk sammen om å utvikle wikien med et integrert verktøy i form av et «aktivitetskart» (se fi gur 2, nedenfor). Selve samarbeidet er omtalt i detalj annetsteds (Lund mfl ., 2009), så i dette avsnittet vil kun selve aktivitetskartet bli gjenstand for diskusjon. Aktivitetskartet kunne brukes av både lærere og elever for å holde seg orientert om eget og andres arbeid og anskueliggjorde hva som var det individuelle bidraget i forhold til det større,

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kollektive produktet (Lund & Rasmussen, 2008, 2010). Hver gang elevene la inn et bidrag i form av en ny side, en lenke, et stikkord («label») eller en revisjon, kom dette til syne som ulike ikoner plassert på en horisontal linje, tilordnet et navn og i kronologisk rekkefølge. Når man førte musepekeren over et ikon, kom det fram et sprett-opp-vindu der bidraget kunne ses, og der medelever og læreren kunne kommentere bidraget. I tillegg til at aktivi-tetskartet på denne måten fulgte forløpet til hver enkelt elev, illustrerte det også elevenes kommentarer til de andres arbeid. Forbindelseslinjer på tvers av elevenes horisontale, kronologiske arbeid fortalte om hvem som samarbeidet i wiki-nettverket, og på hvilken måte. Aktivitetskartet kunne skaleres på den måten at man kunne fokusere på et kort forløp over f.eks. en skoletime, eller på lengre forløp som f.eks. prosjekter over fl ere uker eller måneder.

Ved siden av den trinnvise utviklingen av aktivitetskartet ble elevene trukket mer med i vurderingsarbeidet. Foruten å produsere selve bidragene ble de bedt om å gjøre rede for to forhold:

Figur 2: Aktivitetskart med ulike ikoner for hva elevene har bidratt med i form av nye sider, kom-mentarer og emneord. Det er forbindelseslinjer mellom elever som samarbeider, og et sprett-opp-vindu som gir informasjon om siste endring samt mulighet for å legge inn en kommentar til denne. I illustrasjonen ovenfor kommenterer en lærer på en elevs arbeid med en fi lmscene i engelskfaget.

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• Hvordan forholder mitt/mine bidrag seg til den overordnede oppga-ven? Vis relevansen.

• Hvordan forholder mitt/mine bidrag seg til (noen) av mine medeleversbidrag? Vis relevansen.

I de to kravene ovenfor kan vi se kimen til nye vurderingskriterier som kan være aktuelle i forbindelse med å vurdere bidrag som er resultat av samarbeid, både med og uten nettverksteknologier. I dette ligger også kimen til å «didaktisere» (Hertzberg, 1999) både fag og læringsaktiviteter når digitale nettverksteknologier utgjør både kunnskapsrepresentasjoner og læringsomgivelser.

Samspill og overskridelseNår digitale nettverksteknologier begynner å påvirke utdanningssituasjo-ner og forløp, er det samspillet mellom oppgaver, teknologier, aktiviteter og vurdering som må studeres. Oft e ser vi studier som begrenser seg til å se på den eventuelle eff ekten av en spesiell teknologi i et fag, den tiden som går med til læring og undervisning med og uten IKT, eller studier av akti-viteter som utspiller seg over relativt kort tid. Felles for slike perspektiver er at fag, kunnskap, undervisning og læring holdes som stabile elementer, mens teknologisynet (i den grad det er uttalt) ser ut til å være forankret i en forestilling om at teknologien enten virker forsterkende eller «svikter». I det siste tilfellet er en konsekvens at man ser satsingen på IKT som skuf-fende, feilslått eller bortkastet.

Men digitale nettverksteknologier kan ikke bare betraktes som rene verktøy eller redskaper som ideelt sett skal føre til «bedre læring». Over tid viser det seg at når digitale teknologier tas i bruk, fører de med seg sine egne praksiser. Et godt eksempel fi nner vi i Furberg og Rasmussens kapittel 2 i denne boka, om elevers kopieringspraksis. Andre studier viser hvordan selve faget kan skift e karakter (Lund, 2009; Vigmo, 2010), og at kunn-skapens representasjonsformer endres og utvikles (Rasmussen mfl ., 2003; Wegerif, 2002). Det blir for snevert å studere digitale læringsomgivelser og teknologi-intensive læringsaktiviteter ut fra et rent kost–nytte-perspektiv. Dette kapitlet har argumentert for at nettbaserte samarbeidsteknologier gir

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oss mulighetene for å overskride begrensningene som ligger i tradisjonell kunnskapsproduksjon.

Wiki-prosjektet lærte oss mye om hvordan lærere, forskere, informati-kere og web-designere kan samarbeide om å utvikle både nye teknologier og nye praksiser for utdanningssystemet. I samarbeidet møtte ulike særin-teresser behovet for å konstruere et nytt, felles objekt: en praksis som gjør kollektiv kunnskapsproduksjon både realistisk og relevant for skolen. Et slikt samarbeid er altfor oft e et manglende mellomledd, en missing link, mellom forsknings- og praksisfeltet. Kollar (2010) peker på hvordan et slikt manglende mellomledd er utenkelig innenfor andre felt som f.eks. medi-sin, og hvordan en separasjon fører til at vi i stedet for samarbeid prøver å presse potensielt innovative praksiser inn i eksisterende strukturer og prosedyrer. Slike forsøk fører til at lærere og andre kan komme til å oppfatte at IKT i skolen er irrelevant eller tilmed mislykket.

KonklusjonDette kapitlet har søkt å vise at når det gjelder teknologiens plass i skole og utdanning, fi nnes det andre perspektiver enn de rent instrumentelle, men at disse også betyr å forholde seg til en høyere grad av kompleksitet. Når vi skal forstå læring som samarbeid mediert av digitale nettverkstek-nologier, må vi ha et teknologisyn som også åpner for overskridelse og nye praksiser. Dette er andre indikatorer enn de som bare fokuserer på hvilken eff ekt teknologi har på eksisterende praksiser. Samtidig ligger det her spen-ninger mellom individuell og kollektiv kunnskapsproduksjon, hvordan vi som lærere og lærerutdannere både kan støtte og vurdere slike prosesser. Videre har en gjennomgang av samarbeidslæring i praksis vist hva som blir noen av de didaktiske implikasjonene av et slikt perspektiv. Fire klare utfordringer kommer til syne: behovet for nye oppgavetyper, produktive aktivitetsformer, et teknologisyn som går ut over verktøy- og redskapsme-taforene, og behovet for nye eller utvidete vurderingsformer og -kriterier. I sum har forhåpentligvis kapitlet gitt et bidrag til både lærerutdanning, skolepraksiser og læringsteori i nettverkssamfunnet.

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From Good Student to Outcast: The Emergence of a Classroom Identity

TittelForfatterUtgiverÅrstallUtgave

Sider

From Good Student to Outcast: The Emergence of a Classroom Identity Stanton WorthamETHOS2004

Vol. 32, issue 2

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From Good Student to Outcast: TheEmergence of a Classroom IdentitySTANTON WORTHAM

ABSTRACT The process of social identification draws on het-erogeneous resources from several levels of explanation. Thisarticle illustrates how, by describing the identity developmentof one student across an academic year in a ninth-grade class-room. Analyses of transcribed classroom conversations showteachers and students drawing on multiple resources as thisstudent goes from being identified as one of many good studentsto being identified as a disruptive outcast. This case provides acounterexample to simple theories of identity development thatdo not recognize the multiple, heterogeneous resources involvedin social identification.

Most work on identity in classrooms studies the processesthrough which groups of students are treated in systematicways. Some studies attend to individual students, but mostoften as examples of how their groups are systematicallytreated or as examples of how an individual can combine

two types of identities. There has been much less attention to whatDorothy Holland and Jean Lave (2001) call “history in person.” Indi-vidual identities exist only in social contexts, and any study of class-room identities must attend to social categories and processes. Butindividuals follow unique “trajectories of participation” across social con-texts, sometimes in unexpected ways (Dreier 2003). We know muchabout how individual students follow typical trajectories of participa-tion within and across classrooms. But we know less about how in-dividuals’ trajectories can deviate from the typical ones in complexways. This article describes how students can develop unique individual

ETHOS, Vol. 32, Issue 2, pp. 164–187, ISSN 0091-2131, online ISSN 1548-1352. C⃝ 2004 by the AmericanAnthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions,University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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identities within social context and how attention to individual trajec-tories of participation can illuminate both personal and sociohistoricalprocesses.

An individual’s identity depends on social categories and processes,as Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and George Herbert Mead (1934) have de-scribed. The process of social identification, even when practiced pri-vately by an individual, involves the use of social resources to constructself-understanding. But how do individuals end up on unique trajectoriesof social identification? Holland and Lave (2001) argue that both socialand individual processes play a role. Neither the individual nor the societyis prior. Both are in motion, and they codevelop. Individuals move alongontogenetic trajectories of identity, constrained by larger patterns but alsopotentially identifiable in various ways at any point. Social groups, insti-tutions, and traditions—including those that carry categories of identityavailable to individuals—also move along extended, more slowly develop-ing trajectories. When an individual comes consistently to be identifiedin one way, in an institutional context that also solidifies as individualsget identified, Holland and Lave (2001) describe it as the “thickening” ofidentity.

Given the various identities that any individual could enact in a givencontext, however, how do individuals come consistently to be identified asa recognizable type of person? Stable individual identities emerge whenvarious actors draw on multiple resources to establish an emergent, pro-visionally stable identity in a given context. Over an academic year in aclassroom, for example, students sometimes become recognizable types ofpeople. Such local identities emerge as teachers and students draw on in-stitutional resources, habitual classroom roles, the curriculum, and otherresources to position students in recognizable ways.

This article describes the identity development of one student acrossan academic year in one ninth-grade classroom. It shows how she devel-ops from being one of several good students to being an outcast in theclassroom, as the teachers, other students, and she herself come con-sistently to position her this way. With ethnographic description of theecology of the classroom as background, the paper traces classroom in-teractions through which this student becomes an outcast. Analyses ofthese interactions do not fully explain this student’s social identity de-velopment. That would require more extensive data, across time and so-cial settings. But the analyses do describe how her social identity in thisclassroom develops, and they illustrate how teachers and students usemultiple resources to thicken this student’s identity over the academicyear. The case shows how an adequate account of identity developmentmust acknowledge the multiple layers of resources that contribute to theprocess.

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MULTIPLE RESOURCES FOR SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION

One central concern of this special issue involves the relationshipbetween “positioning” and “thickening.” I would define positioning asan event of identification, in which a recognizable category of identitygets explicitly or implicitly applied to an individual in an event that takesplace across seconds, minutes, or hours. As mentioned above, Hollandand Lave (2001) define thickening as the increasing presupposability ofan individual’s identity over ontogenetic time, as the individual and otherscome increasingly to think of and position him or her as a recognizablekind of person. Positioning is context-specific and often unpredictable. AsHarold Garfinkel (1967) and Erving Goffman (1976) have shown, indi-viduals routinely get positioned in unexpected, sometimes nonnormativeways. But identities often thicken, such that we can unproblematicallytreat particular individuals as certain types of people. Both psychologicaland sociocultural stability often depend on stable, thickened identities.Among other things, this special issue explores how such stability getsaccomplished in practice, given the indeterminacy inherent in events ofpositioning.

A general account of how identities thicken is beyond the scope ofthis article. A full account would have to explore an individual’s experi-ence, motivation, and cognition over time, as well as the categories andpractices of identity available in both broad and local social groups. Thisarticle has a more modest aim: to describe the heterogeneous resourcesinvolved in the thickening of one student’s social identity in a classroomover an academic year. This description does not suffice to establish oneaccount of “positioning” and “thickening” as correct. But it does presenta counterexample to accounts that privilege one or two types of psychoso-cial resources as primary to social identification. Many resources, drawnfrom diverse realms and complexly layered, can play a role even in rel-atively local, short-term social identification. We should be skeptical ofaccounts that claim to explain all social identification without attendingto such complexity.

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979), Michael Cole (1996) and Jay Lemke(2000) all describe how the resources for social identification come atseveral levels or “timescales.” Each of them claims that accounts of socialidentity development must attend to resources at multiple levels—a claimthat this paper supports empirically. A timescale is the spatiotemporal en-velope within which a process happens. The emergence of capitalism, aprocess which in some respects has taken millennia, and in other respectscenturies (cf. Postone 1993), occurs across a very long timescale. In con-trast, individuals develop their capacities and live their lives at an onto-genetic timescale, across decades. Particular groups develop relationships

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and local habits, like those that emerge within a classroom over a year, atan intermediate timescale. And events take place at shorter timescales,taking minutes or hours. Processes and resources from many timescalesgenerally contribute to the social identification of an individual. But thereis no universal set of resources that constitutes social identification in allcases (Wortham in press). Instead, different configurations of resourcescontribute to the thickening of social identity in different cases. It wouldbe empirically false to claim that some timescale, or some particular com-bination, is naturally basic to social identification.

The analyses below illustrate how one student struggles with andagainst her emerging identity in a classroom. The analyses show how in-termediate timescale processes, like the development of categories withina particular classroom over several months, play an essential role in thethickening of this student’s identity. These particular processes and re-sources are not naturally the right ones for studying all social identifi-cation and social life. The relevant processes and timescales will varydepending on the focal phenomenon being analyzed. Nor have I analyzedall timescales relevant to the social identification of this student in thisclassroom—to do so would require more space and more data. I do showthat adequate analysis of social identification in this case must attend tohow processes and resources from various timescales interconnect. I em-phasize the intermediate timescale processes of teachers and students’months-long development of categories and identities, in order to showhow “micro” and “macro” timescales by themselves will not suffice toexplain social identification.

One resource for social identification is categories of identity drawnfrom the social context. As Bakhtin (1981) puts it, individuals and groupsdo not create unique categories de novo, but must instead “rent” cate-gories from the society in order to make sense of themselves and others.These categories of identity often come packaged in larger models thatshow habitual characteristics, relationships, and events involving recog-nizable types of people. Such models have been described in cognitive psy-chology (e.g., Johnson-Laird 1983), in cultural anthropology (e.g., Hollandand Eisenhart 1990; Levi-Strauss 1960), and in cultural psychology (e.g.,D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Holland et al. 1998). An individual’s identitythickens in part with reference to public models of identity.

As the case below shows, however, categories and models of identitydo not jump from the sociohistorical to the ontogenetic timescale un-changed. Sociohistorical categories and models of identity get mediatedthrough institutional and more local processes before they contribute tothe thickening of an individual’s identity. In the case below, for instance,the teachers and students draw categories and models of identity out ofthe curriculum and apply these to a particular student. The categories

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available to them have a particular form because the teachers (and text-book developers) have constructed curricular concepts in a certain way.Thus, the social identity that gets built with these categories has a specificform, because the categories are mediated through the textbook develop-ers’ selection and presentation of material, through the teachers’ planningof their distinctive curriculum, and through classroom discussion that en-acts curriculum in a particular way.

Teachers and students in this classroom also draw on models of iden-tity specific to the pedagogical aims embraced by the school. These stu-dents are enrolled in a special program, one that follows the “Paideia”(Adler 1982) and “great books” (Great Books Foundation 1991) approachto teaching. Among other things, this approach urges teachers not to con-vey preestablished answers but, instead, to explore students’ arguments.Teachers ask “essentially contestable” questions and invite students totake positions and make supporting arguments. In this context a studentwho dutifully repeats what the teacher has said is not considered success-ful, while a student who challenges the teacher and provides convincingarguments is considered successful. Students who boldly assert their ownpoints of view, as we will see, can be categorized either as successful oras disruptive in this context, whereas they would likely be identified asdisruptive in most classrooms.

The student described below develops from being assertive in the goodsense to assertive in the bad sense, over several months. This transforma-tion did not happen only because these categories of identity were avail-able to characterize her. There were many other categories and modelsof identity potentially available that did not contribute to her thickeningsocial identity, although the sociohistorical and local context might haveallowed them. The students and teachers adopted and applied particularcategories and models of identity as they positioned themselves in variousclassroom events across several months.

The focal student herself, both in how she acts and in how she de-scribes herself, sometimes identifies as a disruptive adolescent who strug-gles against adults like the teachers. At other times, she tries to distanceherself from this identity as a disruptive student and identify herself as as-sertive in a good sense. The teachers also contribute to this student’s socialidentification. Early in the school year they identify her as just anotherof the good students, one who makes arguments and defends them. A fewmonths into the year, however, they begin to identify her as a disruptivestudent, both by explicitly labeling her and by positioning her interaction-ally. Other students also contribute to both the positive and the negativeidentification, following the teacher’s lead. Occasionally, however, as theanalysis shows below, another student will join the focal student and de-fend her against the teachers.

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The student’s identity thickens over time as various people, includ-ing the student herself, position her in mostly convergent ways acrossmany classroom events. (As stated above, a full account of social iden-tification would involve other psychological and social factors, but theconsistent interactional positioning described here plays an importantrole.) The thickening of identity in this case depends on resources fromseveral timescales: sociohistorical models of identity and conventions forclassroom behavior; more local appropriations of these models and con-ventions, mediated through these teachers’ curricular plans and pedagogi-cal expectations; classroom-specific categories and models of identity thatdevelop over several months as these teachers and students interact witheach other; contingent positioning that emerges in classroom events, asteachers and students act with and against each other to create coher-ent interactions. The thickening of identity will in every case depend onsuch a heterogeneous set of resources, but in different cases the specificresources relevant to social identification will often vary.

Methods and Ethnographic Background

Colleoni High1 was a large three-story brick building that occupiedan entire city block. When it was built about half a century ago, Colleonienrolled primarily Catholic children from Irish and Italian backgrounds.When this research was conducted, more than a decade ago, the neighbor-hood had become predominantly African American, together with grow-ing populations of Latino and South Asian immigrants. The student bodywas ethnically mixed and mostly working class. The student populationwas 50 percent black, 25 percent Latino, 15 percent white, and 10 per-cent Asian. The faculty contained many whites, some blacks, and a fewHispanics.

I spent a total of 128 hours at Colleoni over two years, more than 100of them in classes. Three-quarters of these classroom hours came in thefinal year, when I audiotaped most classes that I observed. Throughoutmy time at Colleoni I took field notes, I had many informal conversationswith teachers after classes, and I conducted interviews with teachers,administrators, and students. I spent about 50 hours in one particularclass across the final year. Fifteen of the 19 students in this ninth-gradeclass were black, and 14 were female. Most class sessions I observed wererun by one male and one female teacher, both of them white.

Like many other schools in the city, Colleoni participated voluntar-ily in desegregation by offering a special educational program to studentsthroughout the district. At Colleoni, the program was based on guide-lines from The Paideia Proposal (Adler 1982) and An Introduction toShared Inquiry (Great Books Foundation 1991). Parents and educators

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considered this program to be academically superior to mostneighborhood schools, but not equivalent to the prestigious magnet pro-grams. About one-quarter of the students at Colleoni participated in thisspecial program. Many of these students did not live in the neighborhood,and some commuted over an hour each way.

Adler and the Great Books Foundation recommend that students dis-cuss “genuine questions.” That is, “seminar” discussions should involvestudents presenting and defending positions on complex questions, notsimply parroting back the teacher’s preferred answers. The two ninth-grade teachers I spent most time with, Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Smith, ranjoint history/English classes twice a week, when they had 80-minute sem-inar discussions with their 19 students. The other three days a week eachteacher ran more conventional didactic lessons for 40 minutes each. In-creasingly over the year, they engaged students in rich discussions of com-plex texts—discussions in which students came to recognize issues of en-during human concern and to formulate their own arguments about theseissues.

I made contact with Colleoni through the administrator who ran thespecial program. I told him I was interested in observing the program it-self, as well as classroom language use. He selected certain teachers forme to talk to. I spoke with these teachers, received permission from them,and then began visiting their classrooms. I introduced myself to teachersas someone who had read a lot about classrooms in books, but who did notknow much about them in practice. I tried to minimize any authority Ibrought with me from the university, by presenting myself as a newcomerto educational research who wanted to learn how teaching and learninghappen in practice—which was an honest self-presentation. Nonetheless,teachers were initially uncomfortable with me in their classrooms. I re-ceived many sidelong glances, as well as indirect requests for informationon what I was doing and what I thought of them. Like the teachers, at firstthe students wondered who I was and what I was doing. After a few weeks,however, teachers and students most often ignored me during class. Theyclearly knew I was there, especially when I began audio recording. Aftera particularly bad joke someone would occasionally comment “and thatwas recorded for posterity.” But after the first few weeks of recording, I no-ticed few differences between the classes I had observed without recordingequipment and those I taped.

The analyses for this article focus on “participant examples,” in whichstudents themselves become characters in examples used to discuss thesubject matter (Wortham 1994). As illustrated below, teachers and stu-dents often use such examples to draw categories of identity from thecurriculum and apply them to students themselves (Wortham 2003). Inanalyzing the tapes and fieldnotes from Mr. Smith and Mrs. Bailey’s class, I

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transcribed all participant examples and identified any implications theymight have for students’ social identities. The methods of discourse anal-ysis, which identify types of cues that often serve as signs of identity, aredescribed in Wortham (2001b). In addition, I have gone through all tapesand notes, looking for explicit statements about, and implicit position-ing relevant to, the focal student’s identity. The data analyses in the nextsection present instances from across the year in which this student getssocially identified, plus one typical, extended example that illustrates howteachers and students used multiple resources to position this student andthus reinforce her emerging local identity.

TYISHA THE DISRUPTIVE OUTCAST

From near the beginning of the year in Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Smith’sclass, teachers and most students presupposed that girls and boys havedifferent social identities with respect to school. As Mrs. Bailey said ex-plicitly one day, girls are easier for teachers to deal with, because theyconform to school expectations, and they are also more likely to succeedin school and in adulthood. Boys are more difficult to deal with, becausethey resist school expectations, and they are less likely to succeed both inschool and in later life. This expectation about identity draws on circulat-ing sociohistorical patterns, like those that identify black male studentsas particularly concerned with respect and more likely to resist partici-pation in school (Anderson 1999; Ferguson 2000) and those that identifyadolescent boys as disdainful of school success (Newkirk 2002). But thegender difference was especially salient in this classroom, for two reasons.First, Mrs. Bailey believed what she said—she both explicitly and implic-itly stated it throughout the year, and the girls took many opportunitiesto remind the boys about these alleged gender differences. Second, theboys tried to sit together in the back of the room, and all but one of themgenerally refused to participate, while many girls participated actively anddominated classroom discussions. For more evidence of this local genderdifference, see Wortham (forthcoming).

From Typical Girl to Disruptive Outcast

At the beginning of the year, Tyisha fit this gender stereotype: Shewas an active, successful female student. She was engaged, offering heropinions on many subjects related to class discussion. Most of the studentsstarted the year trying to figure out and parrot back what the teacherswanted them to say. Because Tyisha rarely did this, but instead offeredher own opinions, the teachers initially identified her as a student whomade her own arguments. In a Paideia seminar this is desirable, so Tyisha

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was treated as a normal and even as a good student. This social identitydrew both on locally robust models of gender identity and on locally robustmodels of Paideia or great books students.

The following segment comes from a class on October 9. (“T/B” standsfor Mrs. Bailey; “FST” stands for an unidentified female student; “TYI”stands for Tyisha; transcription conventions are in the appendix).

T/B: okay, we’ve got women having babies. how doesthat relate to having women goddesses?

40 TYI: it doesn’t, to me.T/B: it doesn’t to you. how about you?FST: maybe they think that that’s supernatural.T/B: that that’s supernatural? having a baby is supernatural.

At line 40 Tyisha fails to give an answer the teacher is looking for. She alsoemphasizes her opinion, by adding the phrase “to me.” But Mrs. Baileydoes not evaluate Tyisha negatively. In fact, the teacher repeats Tyisha’sutterance and goes on to ask for another student’s opinion. Mrs. Baileyoften asks several students in turn for their opinions on issues raised in thetext, and here we see how Tyisha’s tendency to offer her own opinions fitswith the teacher’s expectations. Especially early in the year the teachersoften react positively to Tyisha’s offering her own opinions, because theywant other students to do the same.

Later in the October 9 class, Tyisha says something deliberately off-topic, apparently as a joke. In the following segment they are discussingbees, in order to understand a Chinese myth that compares humans toinsects.

T/B: bees do what?TYI: kill.

290 [laughter]MRC: some bee pollen, they raise[ pollenT/B: [ they fertilizeFST: flowers.T/B: what do spiders do? they fertilize plants. bees are

295 people who, are insects who ahh, Cassandra?

At line 290 several students treat Tyisha’s comment as a joke, by laughing.It was a small joke, but apparently successful. Note that the teachers do notdiscipline Tyisha for this, as they would most likely have done later in theyear. Mrs. Bailey simply ignores Tyisha’s comment and continues with thediscussion. Tyisha then reenters the conversation more constructively.

T/B: how long do insects live?CAN: maybe ten days, about[ a weekMRC: [ a week.T/B: a day, a couple of months, alright.

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320 TYI: some of them a day because you know, if they biteyou, they die.

T/B: okay some of them as soon- as soon as they, they, theyput their stinger in it, they’re dead. okay, now put that backto Pampu. why might the Chinese believe or feel that man

325 comes from the earth as an insect. that man is similar toan insect?

At lines 322–23, Mrs. Bailey restates and thus ratifies Tyisha’s comment asa useful contribution, one that allows Mrs. Bailey to articulate her analogybetween the mortality of bees and the idea of humans as insects (at lines323–326).

At the beginning of the year, then, the teachers positioned Tyisha as anormal or a good student. They appreciated her opinions, and they did notdiscipline her when she made jokes. After a month or two, however, sev-eral other students learned to offer arguments and give evidence as calledfor in a Paideia or great books classroom. At this point the teachers in-creasingly distinguished between Tyisha’s comments—which they beganto characterize as “opinions” offered without supporting evidence—andmore successful students who gave better arguments. Tyisha’s behaviorhad not changed much. But relative to the teachers’ expectations and toother students’ increasingly successful participation, it looked as if Tyishawas acting differently. In December and January, her social identity be-gan to shift from that of a good student to one who inappropriately pushesher own opinion, who gives incorrect answers and who disrupts classby leading discussion off topic. Both teachers and other students beganto treat her this way, drawing on a more traditional model of appropri-ate classroom behavior in which students do not disrupt the teacher’sagenda.

Some evidence for this comes from the teachers’ increasingly bluntevaluations of Tyisha. Right before the following segment (from January18), Mrs. Bailey had just given an interpretation of a text from Aristotlethat they had read. Aristotle is not saying that women are slaves to men,only that the relationship between a man and woman is partly analogousto the relationship between a master and a slave.

TYI: okay, when- um Sylvia was talking about the slaveand the master, the master, okay, the slave, he uses

430 his hands and stuff but- they won’t give him a chance to use his- toteach him to read and stuff and the master know how, so he usinghis mind. why does he [ [4 unintelligible syllables]

T/B: [ okay, didn’t- you435 just missed the connection, the con- the thing is that-

do not look at this as saying that slaves are manual workers,slaves- women are slaves. look at these as four distinctrelationships.

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Tyisha’s reasoning wanders a bit from lines 428–433, but she is apparentlystruggling with issues relevant to the academic discussion. Nonetheless,Mrs. Bailey interrupts to tell her that “you just missed the connection”(lines 434–435).

This incident alone might have reflected momentary impatience onthe teacher’s part, but the following evaluation follows immediately.

T/B: and in Greeks- in Greece, there certainly wereslaves that used their mind. yeah?

445 FST: I’m talking about going back to what Tyisha saidabout how slaves that- well- if, okay if a master didn’t teachthe slaves how to read, how did they learn how to read?how did we know how to read and talk ourselves?

T/B: o[kay, you just missed-450 TYI: [ right, thank you.

T/B: you just missed the point.JAS: you missed the point. we’re not compari[ng them.TYI: [I know,

but I’m talking about-455 T/B: okay, look at this again, mental, manual workers,

are mental workers

At line 445 an unidentified student refers back to the earlier comment byTyisha, building on Tyisha’s comment to ask a question. Normally theseteachers encouraged students to refer to each other’s comments, as a wayof developing more complex arguments across the group. And at line 450Tyisha explicitly thanks the other student for resuscitating her point andasking the question.

But Mrs. Bailey immediately jumps in (at lines 449 and 451) and re-turns to her earlier evaluation of Tyisha’s point, with similar phrasing:“you just missed the point.” The speed of Mrs. Bailey’s intervention, andher blunt characterization of Tyisha’s (and the second student’s) point,is uncharacteristic for this class. These teachers want students to de-velop their own arguments, and they generally help students who arestruggling to articulate something. But by January they have started toexpect that Tyisha’s points will not contribute to the conversation—thather comments are disruptive and not substantive. Note that another stu-dent (Jasmine) echoes Mrs. Bailey’s evaluation of Tyisha at line 452. Otherstudents, too, have come to presuppose that Tyisha’s comments will leadthe class off topic and are not worth pursuing. Jasmine also uses “we” inline 452, probably to distinguish Tyisha from the teachers and the otherstudents. Tyisha did have one defender in this instance, the unidentifiedgirl who sided with her at line 445. We will see Jasmine herself side withTyisha in the extended example below. Tyisha and others sometimes re-sist the change in her social identity, trying to retain her identity as astudent who contributes productively to academic discussion, in the face

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of the teachers’ and students’ positioning her as academically incorrectand disruptive.

The split between Tyisha and students who contributed to class broad-ened over time, as Tyisha was increasingly identified as a student proneto give incorrect answers and lead the discussion off topic. The teach-ers continued to react quickly and harshly to many of her comments,presupposing that her contributions were intellectually unproductive anddisruptive. The following segment, for instance, comes from January 25.

T/B: okay. well I think that he’s talking more notabout not being with people, but that he will nothave to have people bail him out at any point. he

1055 can make it on his own.TYI: so you gonna be the only person living

there?T/B: no. that’s not what he’s saying, Tyisha.CAN: he’s saying that he can live without people

1060 helping him.

At lines 1052–1055, Mrs. Bailey is summarizing her interpretation of apoint. Tyisha offers a gloss at lines 1056–1057, a gloss that misstates Mrs.Bailey’s point, and the teacher reacts immediately by telling Tyisha she iswrong. This quick and blunt response contrasts with the teachers’ habitualreaction to other students, and to Tyisha herself earlier in the year, whenthey would have explored her point or been more gentle in evaluating herresponse. Another student gives a more accurate gloss at lines 1059–1060and the class ignores Tyisha and goes on discussing the point.

By February, Tyisha’s identity as a disruptive outcast had thickened.It was then generally presupposable that she was disorganized, prone tooffer comments that took the class off topic, and concerned with her ownideas more than with helping the group develop a coherent discussion.Thus Tyisha became an exception to the gender stereotype that teachersand students continued to presuppose. She was a girl who nonetheless wasnot a good student and was not likely to succeed. In the following segment,for example, from February 11, Mr. Smith explicitly characterizes Tyishaas a bad student who does not listen.

50 T/S: I will do a spot check, spot check your notebook.the notebook, and you better listen Tyisha, because youhave a habit of never listening to me. Tyisha

TYI: I know what you’re talking about[T/S: [no.

55 TYI: you’re talking about[ the notebookT/S: [your ears are unfortunately

closed sometimes.. . .

T/S: number five. who made the laws?65 FST: the assembly.

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T/S: okay[ what page?TYI: [the kingT/S: no. you’re wrong. because you’re guessing without

looking. and that is[70 TYI: [no way.

T/S: exactly what you do as a bad[ student.TYI: [no I wasn’tT/S: halt.

At line 52, Mr. Smith says that Tyisha never listens to him. And at line71 he calls her a bad student. Mr. Smith had a temper, and he sometimesmade inappropriate comments like this about other students. But Tyishawas more likely to be the target, as teachers and students increasinglypresupposed that she made inappropriate contributions and took the classoff topic.

My data contain at least a dozen other telling examples, fromDecember through May, of how Tyisha was explicitly identified as dis-ruptive by the teachers and students. They accused her of not listening,of being wrong, and of making comments that led discussion off track.These comments collectively show that the teachers and students cameto identify her differently than they did earlier in the year. From Septem-ber through November she was just another student, and sometimes agood one, but by December and January she had become a disruptive stu-dent who made incorrect comments that derailed discussions. Instead oftaking time to explore the reasoning behind her comments—and, it mustbe said, there was only sometimes defensible reasoning behind them—theteachers and other students quickly dismissed Tyisha and moved back totheir own discussion.

Tyisha the “courageous liar”

Tyisha did not become a disruptive outcast solely through the teach-ers’ treatment of her. She herself often embraced an oppositional identity.Sometimes she did this in ways that the teachers themselves identifiedas productive, when she challenged arguments made by the teachers andauthors of the texts. Sometimes, however, at least from the teachers’ per-spective, she wasted class time while defending unreasonable positionsand refusing to admit a mistake. She also made arguments and interruptedthe teachers in apparently deliberate attempts to antagonize them. Oc-casionally, she explicitly described herself as opposing social norms andadults like the teachers.

So Tyisha’s development from good student to disruptive outcast in-volved multiple resources. The teachers and some students drew cate-gories of identity both from typical models of classroom behavior (e.g.,students should not waste teachers’ time by guessing out loud or by

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offering irrelevant opinions) and from more local Paideia-inspired mod-els (e.g., students should collaborate with others to develop arguments,instead of pushing their own opinions). But, after initially resisting thisidentity during November and December, in January and February Tyishasometimes positioned herself as a disruptive outcast. Her own actions thuscontributed to her new social identity.

The curriculum provided another resource that students and teachersused to identify Tyisha. In January the class began discussing the relation-ship between individuals and society. In these discussions teachers andstudents often made analogies between the classroom itself and a society.To discuss Aristotle’s arguments about how humans depend on their so-cieties and contribute to a larger whole, for example, they might discusshow individual students contribute to class discussion. These analogiesmade available curricular categories that were used to identify students.For example, teachers and students came to use Aristotle’s concept of an“outcast” to identify Tyisha. While discussing the class as a “society,” inorder to understand what Aristotle meant when he discussed social out-casts, Tyisha was identified as like the outcasts discussed by Aristotle.Because she refused to contribute constructively to the group discussion,preferring to disrupt the group activity, she could be identified using thecategory of outcast that they had developed in their discussion of Aristotle.Thus, teachers and students used the curricular category of “outcast” as aresource to make Tyisha’s emerging identity more specific (see Wortham2003, for an example).

This use of curricular categories to identify students like Tyisha mostoften happened in a particular type of speech event, “participant ex-amples” (Wortham 1994). I have identified eight segments from class-room discussions (lasting on average about half an hour), from Novemberthrough February, in which Tyisha becomes a participant example. Par-ticipant examples include, as a character in the example, at least oneteacher or student who is participating in the classroom discussion. Suchexamples double the roles played by those teachers or students, becausethey become characters in the example as well as participants in the class-room discussion. This doubling of roles makes participant examples richsites for socially salient interactional positioning (Wortham 1994, 2001a).Discussion of participants’ hypothetical identities within the example cancommunicate things about the actual participants, as a sort of double en-tendre. Furthermore, it turns out that the content represented by a partici-pant example and the interactional patterns enacted through that examplecan sometimes run parallel (Wortham 1994, 1997). That is, in discussingcertain events as the content of an example, teachers and students some-times enact analogous events in their classroom interaction. Examplesinvolving such a parallel between representation and enactment use the

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same curricular categories both to discuss the curriculum and to identifystudents participating in the example, and, thus, they facilitate the use ofcurricular categories as a resource for social identification. Tyisha’s iden-tity certainly gets presupposed and reinforced in other classroom events,but I argue that these eight participant examples carry particular forcebecause of the extended focus on her as a topic and because of the powerthat such examples can have (cf. Wortham 1994, 2001b). Each of the eightexamples draws an analogy between an issue in the text and some actualor hypothetical characteristic of Tyisha—usually something about her asa person who acts for her own good without considering the good of thelarger group.

The following example illustrates how a participant example can getenacted and how teachers and students use discussion of the curriculumto thicken Tyisha’s identity as a disruptive outcast. This discussion oc-curred on January 18, while the class was exploring Aristotle’s definitionof courage as articulated in his Politics. At this point in the discussionMrs. Bailey had asked whether a person could courageously obey as wellas courageously resist. She suggested that one could obey courageously,and she gave brief examples like overcoming anxiety to give a presentationin class. Tyisha then volunteered her own participant example, supposedlyto support Mrs. Bailey’s point, saying “Mrs. Bailey, I think I have one.”

As it turns out, however, Tyisha’s example does not illustrate Mrs.Bailey’s point and it leads the class off track. Given that Tyisha laughs whilegiving the example, and that she defends her example with increasinglyoutrageous claims, it may well be that she intended to make a joke andtake the class off topic. She did similar things at other times during theyear. Tyisha introduces her example as follows.

TYI: okay, I(hhh)- I had a friend. and she was like,sneaking out with a boy, and she lied and said that she wasgoing with her friends. (hh) a(h)nd she told me, if my

270 mother call, to tell her she was at the zoo with her friendStacey. now that took her courage to te(h)ll me.

FST: (hhh)[TYI: [ and it took c(hh)oura(h)ge for me to tell her

mother that.275 FST: mhm

T/B: did it take courage for[ her to tell her mother tha[t?FST: [ no [I don’t think soT/B: why would that[

280 TYI: [ yeah it took courage to tell my motherFST: [3 unintelligible syllables]MRC: I don’t think it took courage.

Tyisha gives her example at lines 267–271, and then at lines 273–274she claims that it took courage for her to lie to her friend’s mother.

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Because they are discussing Aristotle’s definition of courage, this mightbe a relevant example to explore—even though it does not illustratethe concept of “courage through obedience” that Mrs. Bailey had askedfor.

But the example presents some interactional problems for the teach-ers, as Tyisha may have intended. Because the example involves immoralbehavior (at least from an adult’s point of view), if Tyisha’s behavior was infact courageous then the teachers would have to acknowledge her couragewhile condemning her behavior. Tyisha might be using this discussion ofsubject matter to put the teachers in an awkward position, or at least toslip illicit topics into an academic discussion in such a way that she cannotbe sanctioned for it. She is both adopting and reveling in an oppositionalidentity, as an adolescent who helps her friend get away with illicit datesand who can also manage to talk about this in an academic discussion—perhaps even in such a way that her oppositional behavior gets classifiedas courageous. Thus, she gives an example of herself being oppositionalin relation to her friend’s mother, and she herself acts oppositional in theclass by giving this as an example.

By laughing several times while she gives her example, Tyisha (at lines267, 269, 271 and 273) and another student (at line 272) seem to supportthis interpretation of her example as partly a joke or, perhaps, an attemptto trap the teachers between illicit topics and academic content. At line276, Mrs. Bailey implies that Tyisha’s behavior was not courageous, and astudent agrees with her at lines 277–278. Tyisha interrupts Mrs. Bailey’snext comment, to restate that she was in fact courageous. Maurice thensides with the teacher at line 283, denying that Tyisha’s lie took courage.So Mrs. Bailey’s initial reaction to Tyisha’s challenge is to deny that Tyishawas courageous in lying to her friend’s mother.

Mr. Smith, however, gives Tyisha another opportunity to make hercase in the next segment. He interrupts Mrs. Bailey’s attempt to changethe topic, saying (at lines 287–288) “let her finish.” Then he asks:

295 T/S: then, which is courage?T/B: shhhFST: [so you gonna sit there and lie to[her faceT/S: [lying [to lie or to tell the

truth be[cause you300 FST: [to tell the truth

T/S: knew that she was wrong.CAN: cause its wrongFST: tell the truth. tell the truthTYI: both of them

305 JAS: both of them take courage [ to meTYI: [both of them take

cou [rage, you all wrongT/S: [ explain how both.

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Mr. Smith calls for Tyisha to elaborate her example, perhaps hoping thatshe will provide something more for them to work with in interpret-ing Aristotle’s account of courage. He also explicitly describes Tyisha as“lying,” for the first time (at line 298). When Tyisha gave the example, sheused the term tell to describe her speech act (lines 270, 273), although shesaid her friend was “sneaking out” and “lied” to her mother (lines 268).

In Mr. Smith’s response it becomes clear that he was not really sidingwith Tyisha. At lines 295 and 298–299, Mr. Smith asks whether it was reallycourageous to lie, or whether it would in fact have been more courageous totell her friend’s mother the truth. At lines 300, 302, and 303, other studentsside with Mr. Smith, claiming that lying is wrong and that telling the truthwould have been more courageous. But at line 304 Tyisha claims that bothlying and telling the truth could have been courageous, and at line 305Jasmine agrees with her. Tyisha ends with a characteristic utterance atline 307—“you all wrong.” Note how she is separating herself off from therest of the class and defending an unpopular position. This separation isnot only enacted in her argument against the teachers and other studentsin the classroom but also presupposed in the content of the example. Bydescribing herself as someone who breaks moral rules, which the teachersand many of the students adhere to, Tyisha further marginalizes herselffrom other members of the group.

Mr. Smith then asks Tyisha to explain how both lying and telling thetruth could be courageous. So she continues.

TYI: because (hhhh[h)310 FST: [ because

T/S: let herTYI: if I lyin’- If I’m sittin’ here lying in another person

mother face, that took courag(h)e. [ and if I’mT/S: [ why?

315 TYI: telling her because you don’t-FST: lies.T/S: have you never lied to your mother?FST: hnuhTYI: no- not- not to no one else’s momma, no.

320 T/S: have you ever lied to a teacher who is a mother?FST: uh(hhh)TYI: that’s different.FST: aw man.STS: [2 seconds of laughter]

325 TYI: that’s very different um- I mean that’s different. I’malways over there visiting this friend and her mother, mighthave had trus- trust in me and I come over and tell her thisbig, bold faced lie.

From lines 309–315, Tyisha reiterates her claim that lying to her friend’smother took courage. Mr. Smith then takes control of the conversation,

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asking her questions at lines 314, 317, and 320. Mr. Smith’s question atline 320 brings the example closer to students’ and teachers’ real identitiesin the classroom, when he asks whether Tyisha has “ever lied to a teacherwho is a mother.” Mrs. Bailey is in fact the mother of a teenage girl. Shehas mentioned this in class, so students know it. Mr. Smith’s questionhighlights the interactional tension that Tyisha’s example raises. Tyishais proud of the fact that she lied to her friend’s mother, even though Mrs.Bailey and other adults would clearly identify with the friend’s mother andconsider this wrong. Mr. Smith thus may be implying that Tyisha opposesMrs. Bailey and people like her.

Tyisha revels in this oppositional identity, as illustrated in the se-quence of increasingly colorful terms that she uses to describe her lie. Asnoted above, she started by using the verb “tell” to describe what she saidto her friend’s mother (at line 270). Mr. Smith reframed this as a “lie” atline 298, and opposed such lying to “telling the truth” (line 298). Anotherstudent spiced up the characterization: “so you gonna sit there and lie toher face” (line 297). Tyisha herself embraced this characterization at lines312–313: “I’m sitting here lying in another person mother face.” And sheends up with: “her mother might have had trust in me and I come overand tell her this big bold-faced lie” (lines 326–328). Far from euphemizingwhat she did, Tyisha embraces the oppositional character of her actionand proudly flaunts social norms. This clearly opposes her to Mrs. Bailey,who might be worrying about her own daughter’s friends doing the samething to her.

In addition to embracing an oppositional identity, Tyisha has embed-ded her assertion of oppositional identity within an academic discussionabout Aristotle’s concept of “courage.” This hijacking of the discussionitself constitutes an oppositional act. Mr. Smith nonetheless continues topursue the discussion for its academic potential. Perhaps he thinks thathe can win the argument about whether Tyisha was in fact courageous.Or perhaps he recognizes that her argument has some merit. It is at leastarguable that one can sin courageously. In the following segment Tyishaand Jasmine pursue this argument.

T/S: did you feel courage or did you feel guilt?330 TYI: I felt both of them [2 unintelligible syllables]

T/S: courage to be guilty? [quizzical intonation contour,mid-low-mid]

TYI: (hhh) nah, but it took courage to do[ that.JAS: [ it do take

335 courage to be guilty.STS: [1 second of laughter]TYI: I know. like we goin’ to [ steal something. it tookT/S: [ you should be guiltyTYI: courage for me to go sneakin out of the store, right?

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340 FST: hahahaT/S: courage to be guilty.JAS: you thief.STS: [1 second of laughter]JAS: cause- and you- okay, you go in the store. and you steal

345 something, I mean [ that take courageTYI: [it took courage to do itJAS: to steal something, and then you gonna be guilty

afterward, right? right?TY I: s- say it. go ahead.

350 STS: [2 seconds of laughter]

At line 329, Mr. Smith returns to the question of whether Tyisha feltcourage or guilt while lying. Tyisha claims she felt both. Mr. Smith thenseems to be making fun of her argument with a “quizzical” intonation con-tour. Students laugh a bit after his remark. After Tyisha reiterates that herlie was courageous at line 333, Jasmine apparently makes fun of Tyisha atlines 334–335, saying “it do take courage to be guilty.” Students laugh atthe joke.

It is ambiguous here, however, whether the other students are laugh-ing at Tyisha or with Tyisha. If my reading has been correct, Tyisha hasall along intended for her example to be at least partly a joke. So it maybe that she has succeeded at getting other students to laugh. Jasmine’scomment at lines 334–335, however, seems to follow up on Mr. Smith’squizzical comment and to make fun of Tyisha. Tyisha responds with asecond example, one involving more serious transgressions than the first,at lines 337–339. She may be trying to build on the success of her first ex-ample, which managed both to make a joke and to condone oppositionalbehavior. But Mr. Smith’s echoes Jasmine’s tease at line 341, and thenJasmine herself laughingly calls Tyisha a thief.

It appears for a moment as if everyone is laughing at Tyisha, but thenJasmine sides with her in the argument against Mr. Smith. At lines 344–348, Jasmine agrees with Tyisha that moral transgressions like stealingtake courage (see also Jasmine’s own earlier comment at line 305). Tyishaechoes this at line 346. It is relevant here that Jasmine is the most ver-bally skilled of the students. She won the schoolwide student talent com-petition that year, and she regularly had the class rolling with laughter.She is entertaining here, judging from other students’ reactions, but hercomments also contribute to the academic argument. Stealing does seemto take courage. By joining Tyisha’s side of the argument, Jasmine maychange Tyisha’s social identity—from an oppositional student disruptingclassroom conversation to a good student offering a plausible argument.In January, other students most often join the teachers in identifyingTyisha as disruptive. But Jasmine’s behavior here illustrates how Tyishaand other students will occasionally reassert her old identity as a good

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student. Tyisha’s identity as a disruptive outcast does emerge in January,but it is also struggled over.

In several subsequent lines, not included here, a student objects thatstealing is wrong while Tyisha and Jasmine defend their claim that stealingcan be both courageous and guilt inducing. Then another student claimsthat stealing is wrong and brings the discussion back to the concept ofcourage.

LIN: I don’t think that’s courage to go and steal a candy bar385 [ because courage- right

MST: [ it’s stupidLIN: cause courage, the virtue of courage, what we read

of courage was to do something- something good, not todo something and go and do something [evil.

390 TYI: [that’s nottrue

FST: [yeah that’sright

TYI: courage is not just doing something good.395 [students talking at once]

TYI: if I go[ shoot you in the headT/B: [ shhhhhh

[students arguing]T/B: ahh, if we can- if we can talk about courage as being

400 something good, the virtue of courage, and go back to thatdefinition, and I know you never bought into it, but the restof us seem to be, using this as a definition, so therefore,we’d ask you to kind of go along with it.

FST: okay.405 T/B: the idea of courage, was not just doing things you’re

afraid to do, but doing things that- overcoming your fearfor a good reason. Linda?

LIN: I was saying what Tyisha said, if you go shootsomebody in the head, you gonna call that courage? or you

410 is gonna call that stupid?

While Linda disagrees with Tyisha and Jasmine’s claim that stealing re-quires courage (at line 384), one of the male students slips in a character-ization of stealing: “it’s stupid” (line 386). One might infer that people likeTyisha who practice and defend such behavior are also stupid. Linda thenmakes an even more evaluative comment about stealing and other moraltransgressions: they are “evil” (line 389). This casts Tyisha and Jasmineas defending something unforgivable.

Tyisha continues to argue that one can courageously commit immoralacts. But at line 396 she chooses an example that does not seem suitedto an academic discussion. “If I go shoot you in the head” is provocative,because of the second person pronoun and because shooting someone iseven more unethical than stealing and lying. By escalating the immorality

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of the topic, Tyisha seems to be pushing the discussion toward what Goff-man (1974) called “flooding out”—bursting out of its character as an aca-demic discussion and becoming simply an occasion for laughter or con-frontation. Tyisha compounds this by speaking in the first and secondperson, imagining herself shooting some of the other students and, per-haps, the teachers.

Mrs. Bailey’s reaction at lines 399–403 frames Tyisha’s comments asan attempt to disrupt the classroom discussion. Mrs. Bailey could havesaid: “that’s an interesting argument Tyisha, but how can an act be bothvirtuous and immoral at once? Would Aristotle have agreed with that?”Instead, she skillfully frames Tyisha’s comment as moving against the willof the rest of the class, without baldly asserting her own authority. Shestarts at lines 399–401 by establishing her version of the contested is-sue as a “definition.” Tyisha has argued that immoral acts can requirecourage, and this seems a defensible position. But Mrs. Bailey assertsthat courage is something good, by definition. Tyisha and Jasmine “neverbought into” this definition, “but the rest of us” did. Tyisha and Jasmine,then, get positioned outside the teachers’ and others students’ group, aspeople who adopt idiosyncratic definitions and, thus, hinder group dis-cussion. Mrs. Bailey acknowledges their dissent and asks them to go alonginstead of imposing her will. It would violate her pedagogical philosophyto tell students what to think. But in fact she has characterized Tyisha andJasmine as the sort of people who refuse to accept agreed-on definitionsand who thus disrupt the productive work that the rest of the class ispursuing.

In this discussion of lying, stealing, and shooting, then, Tyisha bothembraces an oppositional identity and also skillfully manages to insertdiscussion of these topics into discussion of the curriculum. The teachersand other students follow up and identify Tyisha as morally suspect and asan outcast. Their discussion excludes Tyisha from the group of teachersand other students in two ways. First, Tyisha gets (willingly) characterizedas the sort of person who would baldly lie to a friend’s mother, unlikethe rest of them. Second, she positions herself in the discussion, andgets positioned, as a student who makes jokes, takes the class off topic,and refuses to accept generally agreed-on definitions. Her identity as anoutcast and a disruptive student thus thickens further—at Tyisha’s owninitiative, but also with the help of the teachers and students.

CONCLUSION

The teachers and students discussed several participant examples likethis one during the academic year, in which Tyisha was both described

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and interactionally positioned as a disruptive outcast (cf. Wortham 2003;in press). These examples, together with explicit characterizations of heras disruptive, helped teachers and students draw on multiple resourcesto identify Tyisha. From September through November, she was a normalstudent. But in December, January, and February she increasingly becamea disruptive one and an outcast from the group of cooperative students.This social identification emerged in contrast to the local expectation thatgirls are more cooperative and more likely to succeed, and in this respectTyisha’s identity was idiosyncratic.

Teachers and students used more enduring, familiar social categoriesto identify Tyisha. The concept of a disruptive student presupposes com-mon models of appropriate classroom behavior and of teachers’ authority.The category of “loud black girls” also circulates more widely (Fordham1996), and one might argue that Tyisha is being identified with this cat-egory. But an account in terms of more prevalent, longer timescale cate-gories like this would be incomplete. All the students identified as cooper-ative, intelligent, and academically promising in this classroom were alsoblack girls. Tyisha, in particular, was identified as disruptive because ofmore local, shorter timescale processes and actions. As we have seen, forinstance, the category of “social outcast” became available through theseteachers’ local curriculum. Teachers and students applied this category toTyisha, especially through participant examples. Furthermore, studentsengaged in complex acts that facilitated and struggled against Tyisha’semerging identity. Tyisha herself sometimes embraced her identity as anoutcast. Students like Jasmine sometimes reinforced this identity, butsometimes they identified Tyisha as a good student or in other conflictingways. Tyisha’s trajectory of identification across the year, then, is an in-termediate timescale phenomenon that must be explored in practice, notsimply derived from sociohistorical patterns.

The thickening of identity happens across a trajectory of events as cer-tain categories of identity come to identify an individual. Longer timescale,widely circulating categories and models are essential to social identifica-tion, but only as they are contextualized within local settings and particu-lar events. Local settings like a classroom develop versions of more widelycirculating models of identity, and participants in these settings cometo presuppose those models in their events of identification. Individualsin those settings move along (sometimes) idiosyncratic trajectories thatdraw on both sociohistorical and local categories of identity in uniqueways. An adequate analysis of social identification, then, must attend toavailable sociohistorical categories and models of identity, to the particu-lar local versions of these that emerge in a given setting, to the trajectoriesof individuals who get identified over time with respect to local categoriesand models, and to the contingent events in which categories and models

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of identity get contextualized and acts of social identification happen.Different configurations of these resources will be crucial to social iden-tifications in different cases, and we must attend to multiple resourcesand multiple timescales if we hope to explain identity development inpractice.

STANTON WORTHAM is a linguistic anthropologist of education who serves as Professor and Associate Dean forAcademic Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

NOTES

1. All names are pseudonyms. Other details have been changed to disguise the identityof subjects. Administrators, teachers, parents, and students gave permission for this study.Data were collected more than a decade ago.

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APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

‘-’ abrupt breaks or stops‘?’ rising intonation‘.’ falling intonation‘ ’ (underline) stress(1.0) silences, timed to the nearest second‘[‘ indicates simultaneous talk by two speakers, with one utterance

represented on top of the other and the moment of overlap marked by leftbrackets

‘[. . . ]’ transcriber comment‘,’ pause or breath without marked intonation‘(hh)’ laughter breaking into words while speaking.

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En «sykt seriøs» ungdomsgenerasjon?

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En «sykt seriøs» ungdomsgenerasjon? Kristinn Hegna, Guro Ødegård, Åse StrandbuTidsskrift for Norsk Psykologforening2013

Vol 50 (4)

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◗ Unges liv og levekår

En «sykt seriøs» ungdomsgenerasjon?Dagens unge er mer skikkelige, lovlydige og skoletilpasset enn tidligere. Samtidig viser befolkningsstudier at bekym-ringer øker blant tenåringer. Hvilke samfunnsendringer slår inn i ungdomskulturen og gjør skikkeligheten til et tve-egget sverd?

Forsk ning om ungdoms levekår og livsstil gjennomført over de siste to tiår gir grunn til forsiktig optimisme på en rekke om-råder som berører ungdoms hverdagsliv. Det er tydelige spor av nedgang av det som på 80-, 90- og begynnelsen av 2000-tallet bekymret landets myndig heter; rusbruk og atferdsproblemer blant ungdom. Den landsrepresentative studien Ung i Norge¹ viser at andelen tenåringer som betegnes som «gjengangere» eller «erfarne» etter

selvrapportering av en rekke atferdspro-blemer som nasking, hærverk eller inn-brudd, ble klart redusert fra 2002 til 2010 (Frøyland & Sletten, 2012). I 1992 ble 21 prosent av guttene og 8 prosent av jen-tene kategorisert i disse gruppene, i 2010 var det redusert til henholdsvis 14 og 5 pro-sent. Andelen som ikke hadde noen erfa-ring med disse indikatorene på atferds-problemer, ble nær fordoblet i samme periode.

Forfattarbilete kjem seinare

Med mobiltelefonen som en virtuell løpestreng øker foreldrekontrollen samtidig som handlingsrommet for rusbruk, norm- og lovbrudd reduseres

Psykologi og samfunn, denne siden

– Vi må godta atsykefraværsreduksjonhandler om å klare å gå påjobb selv om man ikke erhundre prosent

Magnus Odéen i Forsk nings intervjuet, side 378

Menn som blei rekna som morosame, blei også rekna som meir attraktive, både med tanke på ein rask affære og eit varig forhold, men mest for det første

Forsk nings notiser, side 380

Kristinn Hegna, forsker ved NOVA Guro Ødegård, forsker ved ISFÅse Strandbu, forsker ved NOVA

FAKTA: SKIKKELIGE UNGDOMMER

• Dagens unge ruser seg mindre, er mindre kriminelle, gjør det bedre på skolen og røyker mindre

• Ved 2011-valget stemte 46 prosent av førstegangsvelgerne, den høyeste deltagelsen i denne aldersgruppen målt ved et lokalvalg i nyere tid

• Dagens ungdomsgenerasjon kan beskrives som skikkeligere, mer hardtarbeidende og pliktoppfyllende enn før

• Mindre avstand mellom generasjonene, ny teknologi, et bedre behandlingstilbud til barn og unge, og økende atferdsmedisinering kan, sammen med utdanningssamfunnets strenge krav til individuell mestring, tenkes å bidra til en slik ut vik ling

• Dette nye alvoret kan ha sin pris i form av økt psykisk stress blant unge

Psykologi og samfunn

103185 GRTID Psykologi 1304.indb 374 21.03.13 12:38

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Kristinn Hegna, forsker ved NOVA Guro Ødegård, forsker ved ISFÅse Strandbu, forsker ved NOVA

Tilsvarende viser flere kilder en klar nedgang i bruken av rusmidler blant ung-dom, både basert på internasjonale data (ESPAD²) hvor Norge inngår (Bye, 2012) og norske data som i Ung i Oslo³-studie-ne (Øia, 2012). ESPAD-dataene viser at i 1999 hadde over halvparten av 15/16-årin-gene drukket alkohol siste måned, mens det 12 år senere bare gjaldt en tredel (Bye, 2012). Andelen elever fra 9., 10. og 1. vide-regående klassetrinn som oppgir at de har drukket seg tydelig beruset i løpet av sis-te år, har gått ned fra 45 prosent i 1996 til 29 prosent i 2012 (Øia, 2012). Også ande-len unge som har brukt cannabis, er be-tydelig redusert i begge undersøkelsene (Bye 2012, Øia 2012), og tilsvarende beve-gelse rapporteres for dagligrøyking blant 15-åringer (Samdal, et al., 2012).

På skolefeltet finner vi lignende tegn på bedring. Andelen Oslo-elever som ikke tri-ves på ungdomsskolen er i perioden 1992 til 2012 gått ned med 10 prosentpoeng, fra 17 til 7 prosent. I samme periode sank ande-len som gruer seg til å gå på skole fra 21 til

14 prosent og andelen elever som har skul-ket, har gått fra 47 til 34 prosent (Øia, 2012). Kanskje er det ungdoms økte oppslutning om skolen som disse resultatene tyder på, som igjen har bidratt til at utdanningsre-gistre viser en økning i gjennomsnittlig standpunktkarakter fra 3,91 i 2002 til 4,04 i 2011 (Bakken & Elstad, 2012a, 2012c).

Offentlig statistikk viser også at etter tiår med nedgang i valgdeltagelse – der av-standen mellom unge og voksne har økt

– har nedgangen ved de siste valgene stag-nert blant de yngste. 46 prosent av første-gangsvelgerne stemte ved 2011-valget, denhøyeste deltagelsen i denne aldersgruppen målt ved et lokalvalg i nyere tid (Bergh &Ødegård, 2013 (antatt for publisering)). Deter med andre ord flere tegn i forsk nings -litteraturen som peker i retning av at da-gens ungdomsgenerasjon kan beskrivessom skikkeligere og mer hardtarbeidende og pliktoppfyllende enn før. Hvilke sam-funnsmessige ut vik lings trekk kan vi peke på som kan bidra til å forklare disse end-ringene? Fire trekk er verdt å merke seg.

Generasjonskløften som ble borteMens 1960- og 70-tallet var preget av stor avstand mellom unge og voksnes kultu-relle, sosiale og verdimessige preferanser, er denne generasjonskløften langt på vei borte. Helt opp til 80-tallet ble ungdoms-relevant pop- og rock så å si ikke spilt i ra-dio. Nå fyller ulike sjangere alle kanaler, og foreldre deler gjerne musikksmak med sine barn. Foreldre i dag ville ikke hevet et øyenbryn om tenåringen gikk i fillete olabukser, men moten nå er isteden pre-get av straighte chinos og tekkelige bluser med sløyfer. Den gruppen som tydeligere beskriver en generasjonskløft med man-glende forståelse av ungdomslivet, er unge med foreldre som har innvandret til Norge. For disse norske ungdommene – og i særlig grad jentene – oppleves handlingsrommet ofte som trangt. At de kulturelle motset-ningene mellom generasjoner er svekket, betyr ikke at alle forskjeller eller foreldre-autoriteten er borte, men opposisjonen sy-nes erstattet av forhandlinger, større like-

TUNG BØR: Unge i Norge er mer edru og ordentlige enn sine forgjengere. Men den samlede vekten av utdanningskrav og fremtidsdisiplinering kan være så sterk at det bidrar til økt psykisk stress. Illustrasjon: YAY Micro


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verd og delte verdier, både med mor og far. Fører delte verdier til økt skikkelighet og mindre normbrudd?

Ny teknologiFor 20 år siden ante ingen hvilken revo-lusjon mobiltelefon, Internett og sosi-ale medier ville innebære for ungdoms samværsmønster. I Ung i Norge-studien fra 1992 spurte vi hvor mange ganger de unge hadde hengt på et gatehjørne siste uke. I 2013 kan spørsmålet virke absurd for mange unge. De som henger på ga-tehjørnet, får spalteplass i A-magasinet som Emo og del av en subkultur. Tidlig på 2000- tallet ble SMS og chatting betraktet som risikoatferd (Torgersen, 2004). I dag er det fravær av nettkommunikasjon som kan bekymre, samtidig som den over-drevne tidsbruken til «unyttig» eller av-hengighetsskapende dataspilling trekkes fram som årsak til fedme-problematikk og psykiske problemer (Brunborg, Hansen & Frøyland, 2013). Store deler av ungdoms-livet leves på ungdomsrommet i et virtu-elt fellesskap, og med smarttelefonen har de hele sitt sosiale liv i lommen. Men der er også foreldrene. «Hvor er du?», «Hvem er du sammen med?». Med flyttingen inn fra gata og mobiltelefonen som en virtuell løpe streng øker foreldrekontrollen sam-tidig som handlingsrommet for rusbruk, norm- og lovbrudd reduseres.

AtferdsmedisineringBarn og unge har vært en prioritert gruppe i Opptrappingsplan for psykisk helse fra 1999 til 2006 (Sosial- og helsedepartemen-tet, 1998). Flere unge i dag enn før får der-med hjelp til sine alvorlige psykiske van-sker. Samtidig har det funnet sted en sterk økning i antallet unge diagnostisert og medisinert for ADHD. I reseptregisteret (www.reseptregisteret.no/Prevalens.aspx) gjenfinnes dette ved en fordobling av antall barn i alderen 10–19 år som fikk ADHD-medisin i perioden 2004 til 2011. Vi vet lite om sammenhengen mellom behandling og medisinering av alvorlige psykiske van-sker på den ene siden og konsekvensene dette får på et samfunnsmessig plan. Kan det tenkes at noe av nedgangen i atferds-problemer skyldes bedre behandling og oppfølging av barn og unge?

UtdanningspressetSosiologen David Baker kaller dagens samfunn for det skolerte samfunn (Ba-ker, 2009). Utdanningseksplosjonen har skapt nye ideer om hvilken kunnskap som er relevant, og nye definisjoner av personlig suksess. Utdanning er den do-minerende mekanismen bak samfunnets lagdeling, og for den enkeltes mobilitet. Mens 60-talls-ungdommen fikk sin frihet gjennom arbeidslivet, får 2010-generasjo-nen friheten gjennom utdanning. Men

i utdanningsløpet gis det mindre frihet. Består man ikke de mange testene Kunn-skapsløftet bærer med seg, stenges adgan-gen til en framtidig yrkeskarriere (Falch, Borge, Lujala, Nyhus, & Strøm, 2010). Sko-letrøtte 16-åringer kan ikke lenger reise til sjøs, ta seg arbeid på fabrikken eller job-be på butikk. De blir definert som proble-matiske «drop-outs» – som marginaliserte man prøver å sluse inn igjen i utdannings-sporet. Ungdom i dag har ikke råd til å trå for mye utenfor – og de vet det.

Endringstrekkene har skapt en mer «konform» ungdomsgenerasjon. Skolen må mestres, kroppen trenes, helsen være god. Unge må forvalte ungdomstida som en verdifull kapital for framtida. Kommer man på etterskudd, har man bare seg selv å takke. I vår individualiserte tid blir struk-turelle problemer personlige. Da tilslø-res det faktum at karakterer, helseatferd, politisk engasjement og det å dette ut av skolen ikke er jevnt fordelt mellom grup-per av unge (Bakken & Elstad, 2012b; Falch, et al., 2010; Samdal, et al., 2012; Ødegård & Berglund, 2008), noe som kan bidra til at sosial ulikhet reproduseres fra generasjon til generasjon.

Alvorets generasjonEr denne framtidsdisiplineringen et tveeg-get sverd som tærer på de unges psykiske helse? Nyere befolkningsstudier med mål

Tabell 1. Forekomst av psykiske vansker som respondenten har vært ganske eller veldig mye plaget av i hhv 1996, 2006 og 2012. Ung i Oslo. Gutter og jenter samlet. Kilde: Øia 2012.

Symptomspørsmål 1996(N=11425)

2006(N=11500)

2012(N=10 000)

Totalt Gutter Jenter

Følt at alt er et slit 39 35,6 43,4 35,5 51,0

Hatt søvnproblemer 21,9 24,4 35,4 31,2 39,5

Følt deg ulykkelig, trist eller deprimert 21,1 21,3 26,8 17,5 35,5

Følt håpløshet med tanke på framtiden 15,6 22,0 26,5 20 32,4

Følt deg stiv eller anspent 24,4 24,5 28,4 22 34,6

Bekymret deg for mye om ting 35,6 37,0 43,3 32,6 53,5


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ReferanserBaker, D. P. (2009). The educational transforma-

tion of work: towards a new synthesis. Journal of Education and Work, 22(3), 163–191.

Bakken, A., & Elstad, J. I. (2012a). For store forventninger? Kunnskapsløftet og ulikhetene i grunnskolekarakterer. In NOVA (Ed.), NOVA rapport (Vol. 7/12). Oslo: NOVA.

Bakken, A., & Elstad, J. I. (2012b). Kunnskapsløf-tet og sosial ulikhet i karakterer. Bedre skole. Tidsskrift for lærere og skoleledere, 2012(4), 56–60.

Bakken, A., & Elstad, J. I. (2012c). Sosial ulikhet og eksamensresultater i Oslo-skolen. Trender i perioden 2002–2011. Tidsskrift for ungdoms-forskning, 12(2), 67–88.

Bergh, J., & Ødegård, G. (2013 (antatt for publise-ring)). Ungdomsvalget 2011. Norsk statsviten-skapelig tidsskrift.

Brunborg, G. S., Hansen, M. B., & Frøyland, L. R. (2013). Pengespill og dataspill. Endringer over to år blant ungdommer i Norge. In NOVA (Ed.), NOVA rapport (Vol. 2/13). Oslo: NOVA.

Bye, E. K. (2012). Bruk av alkohol og cannabis blant ungdom i perioden 1995–2011. Tids-skrift for ungdomsforskning, 12(2), 89–101.

Falch, T., Borge, L.-E., Lujala, P., Nyhus, O. H., & Strøm, B. (2010). Årsaker til og konsekvenser av manglende fullføring av vidergående opp-læring SØF-rapport (Vol. 03/10). Trondheim: Senter for Økonomisk Forskning.

Frøyland, L. R., & Sletten, M. A. (2012). Mindre problemsatferd for de fleste, større problemer for de få? En studie av tidstrendeer i proble-matferd 1992, 2002 og 2010. Tidsskrift for ungdomsforskning, 12(2), 43–66.

Samdal, O., Bye, H. H., Torsheim, T., Fismen, A.-S., Haug, E., Smith, O. R. F., et al. (2012). Trender i sosial ulikhet i helseatferd. Tidsskrift for ungdomsforskning, 12(2), 21–41.

Sosial- og helsedepartementet. (1998). Om opptrappingsplan for psykisk helse 1999–2006. Endringer i statsbudsjettet for 1998. Oslo: Sosial- og Helsedepartementet.

Torgersen, L. (2004). Ungdoms digitale hverdag: NOVA.

Von Soest, T. (2012). Tidstrender for depressive symptomer blant norske ungdommer fra 1992 til 2010. Tidsskrift for ungdomsforskning, 12(2), 3–20.

Ødegård, G., & Berglund, F. (2008). Political par-ticipation in late modernity among Norwegian youth: An individual choice or a statement of social class? Journal of Youth Studies(11), 593–610.

Øia, T. (2012). Ung i Oslo 2012. Nøkkeltall. In NOVA (Ed.), NOVA notat (Vol. 7/12). Oslo: NOVA.

på unges psykiske helse viser at bekym-ringer, søvnløshet og håpløshet med tan-ke på fremtida øker blant tenåringer. I Ung i Oslo 2012 svarer mer enn halvparten av jentene at de bekymrer seg for mye om ting, og at alt er et slit – vanlige tegn på psy-kisk stress (se tabell 1, kilde Øia, 2012). På den annen side finnes studier som anven-der strengere mål på depressive symptomer som ikke viser en økning. Tilmann von So-est viser i analyser av Ung i Norge-studi-en en økning i enkelte symptomer⁴ i løpet av 90-tallet, særlig blant gutter (Von Soest, 2012). Fra 2002 og fremover viser disse data-ene ingen endring i depressive symptomer.

Økt psykisk stress. For oss som har vært på ungdomsforsk nings feltet gjennom flere tiår, er det lett å se at forskningens innhold skifter med det som til enhver tid er myn-dighetenes bekymringer; fra rus- og pro-blematferd på 90-tallet til bekymring for frafall i skolen på 2000-tallet. Endringene i ungdomskulturen er omfattende. Man bør blant annet spørre seg om det ensrettede trykket på utdanning og fremtidsdisipli-nering er så sterkt at det skaper økt psy-kisk stress - og dessuten bidrar til en brat-tere motbakke for de som får problemer med å mestre utdannings samfunnet. l

1. Ung i Norge ble gjennomført i 1992 (N=8543), 2002 (N=9291 og 2010 (N=6931). Den omfat-tet ungdom i ungdomsskole og de to første årene i videregående skole.

2. ESPAD (The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs) er gjennomført fem ganger (1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2001) med 36 deltakende land. Antall respondenter varierer fra 4020–3200.

3. Ung i Oslo ble gjennomført i 1996 (N=11425), 2006 (N=11500) og 2012 (N=ca 10 000). Den omfattet ungdom på 9., 10. og 1. videregå-ende klassetrinn.

4. I analysene av Ung i Norge benytter von Soest «svært mye plaget» som avgrensning av seks ulike symptomer på depressivt stemningsleie. Tormod Øia har slått sammen «svært mye plaget» og «ganske mye plaget» i sine analyser, og har ikke sett på gutter og jenter hver for seg. Spørsmålstil-lingen er lik.

DOKTORGRADER

Emosjonell oppmerksomhet ved depresjonMari Strand forsvarte 17. januar 2013 avhandlingen Emotional information processing in recurrent MDD for ph.d.-graden ved Universitetet i Bergen.Kontakt: [email protected]

Tre eksperimentelle studier ble gjen-nomført. Funnene viser at en gruppe pasienter i bedring av depresjon proses-serer emosjonell informasjon likt som en kontrollgruppe, men oppmerksomhet mot emosjonell informasjon kan være relatert til grad av depressive sympto-mer. Studien viste også at informasjon fra ansikter ble oppfattet slik at det kan påvirke hvordan man oppfatter annen type emosjonell informasjon. Pasienter gjorde også flere feil i oppfattelsen av positiv emosjonell informasjon enn en frisk kontrollgruppe, og det blir diskutert om dette kan bidra til en sårbarhet for å utvikle depressive symptomer igjen. l

Bedringsprosesser ved bipolare lidelserMarius Veseth forsvarte 23. januar 2013 avhandlingen Recovery in bipolar disorder: A Reflexive-collaborative exploration of the lived experiences of healing and growth when battling a severe mental illness for ph.d.-graden ved Universitetet i Bergen.Kontakt: [email protected]

Basert på to kvalitative undersøkelser vi-ser avhandlingen hvordan de som har bi-polar lidelse selv er aktive agenter i arbei-det med å skape et rikt og meningsfullt liv. Utfordringene de møter og strategiene de bruker er svært lik de utfordringene og strategiene mennesker uten en psykisk lidelse opplever og bruker. Avhandlingen vektlegger betydningen av førstepersons-perspektivet i det psykiske helsefeltet, og bygger på en nyskapende metode der personer med levde erfaringer av fenome-nene som undersøkes deltok i forsknin-gen. Avhandlingen drøfter hvordan denne metoden kan bidra til å heve kvaliteten på studier og undersøkelser. l

Tidlig på 2000-tallet ble SMS og chatting betraktet som risikoatferd. I dag er det fravær av nettkommunikasjon som kan bekymre


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www.oecd.org/edu/whatworkswww.oecd.org/edu/ceri

ORGANISATION DE COOPÉRATION ETDE DÉVELOPPEMENT ÉCONOMIQUES

ORGANISATION F OR E CONOMICCO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT

OECD/CERI International Conference“Learning in the 21st Century: Research, Innovation and Policy”

Optimising Learning: Implications of Learning Sciences Research

by R. Keith Sawyer

www.oecd.org/edu/whatworkswww.oecd.org/edu/ceri

ORGANISATION DE COOPÉRATION ETDE DÉVELOPPEMENT ÉCONOMIQUES

ORGANISATION F OR E CONOMICCO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT

1

OPTIMISING LEARNING IMPLICATIONS OF LEARNING SCIENCES RESEARCH

BY R. KEITH SAWYER1

This chapter introduces the field of learning sciences, and outlines some of its key findings in recent years. It explains that while the standard model of schooling was designed to prepare students for the industrial age, the global shift to the knowledge economy will require the rethinking of schooling in order to accommodate evolving needs. Several key findings of learning sciences research and how they align with the needs of the knowledge economy are explained.

Introduction

Learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning. Learning scientists study learning in a variety of settings – not only the more formal learning of school classrooms, but also the more informal learning that takes place at home, on the job, and among peers. The goal of the learning sciences is to better understand the cognitive and social processes that result in the most effective learning, and to use this knowledge to redesign classrooms and other learning environments so that people learn more deeply and more effectively. The sciences of learning include cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, sociology, information sciences, neurosciences, education, design studies, instructional design, and other fields. In the late 1980s, researchers in these fields who were studying learning realised that they needed to develop new scientific approaches that went beyond what their own discipline could offer, and to collaborate with other disciplines. Learning sciences was born in 1991, when the first international conference was held, and the Journal of the Learning Sciences was first published. This new science is called the learning sciences because it is an interdisciplinary science; the collaboration among these disciplines has resulted in new ideas, new methodologies, and new ways of thinking about learning. The first comprehensive overview of the field was published in 2006: The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006b).

Learning sciences researchers are working to design more effective learning environments – including school classrooms, and also informal settings such as science centres or after-school clubs, on-line distance learning, and computer-based tutoring software. These classroom environments combine new curricular materials, new collaborative activities, support for teachers, and innovative educational software. Learning sciences research suggests several alternative models of learning, particularly those that involve deep links between formal schooling and the many other learning institutions available to students – libraries, science centres and history museums, after school clubs, on-line activities that can be accessed from home, and even collaborations between students and working professionals. In this report, I draw on learning sciences findings to identify a set of principles that should guide the development of alternative models of learning.

1 Associate Professor of education, psychology, and business at Washington University, St. Louis. He is an

expert in creativity research and learning sciences. Author of Group Genius: the Creative Power of Collaboration (2007) and editor of the Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2006).

2

The standard model of schooling

By the 20th century, all major industrialised countries offered formal schooling to all of their children. These many educational systems took different paths, but eventually converged on essentially the same model of schooling. When this model emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries, scientists did not know very much about how people learn. Even by the 1920s, when schools started to become the large bureaucratic institutions that we know today, there still was no sustained study of how people learn. As a result, this model of schooling was based on common-sense assumptions that had never been tested scientifically:

x Knowledge is a collection of facts about the world and procedures for how to solve problems. Facts are statements like “The earth is tilted on its axis by 23.45 degrees” and procedures are step-by-step instructions like how to do multi-digit addition by carrying to the next column.

x The goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into the student’s head. People are considered to be educated when they possess a large collection of these facts and procedures.

x Teachers know these facts and procedures, and their job is to transmit them to students.

x Simpler facts and procedures should be learned first, followed by progressively more complex facts and procedures. The definitions of “simplicity” and “complexity” and the proper sequencing of material were determined either by teachers, by textbook authors, or by asking expert adults like mathematicians, scientists, or historians – not by studying how children actually learn.

x The way to determine the success of schooling is to test students to see how many of these facts and procedures they have acquired.

Because this traditional vision of schooling has been taken for granted for so long, it has not been explicitly named until recently. Within the OECD/CERI programme “Alternative Models of Learning” project, this traditional model is referred to as the standard model. Learning scientists often refer to the traditional model as instructionism, a term coined by Seymour Papert (1993), because it assumes that the core activity of the classroom is instruction by the teacher. Other education researchers have called this a transmission and acquisition model of schooling (e.g. Rogoff, 1990), because it emphasises that a knowledgeable teacher transmits knowledge, and a learner then acquires that knowledge.

Standard model schools effectively prepared students for the industrialised economy of the early 20th century; schools based on this model have been effective at transmitting a standard body of facts and procedures to students. The goals of standard model schools were to ensure standardization – all students were to memorise and master the same core curriculum – and this model has been reasonably effective at accomplishing these goals. Standard model schools were structured, scheduled, and regimented in a fashion that was explicitly designed by analogy with the industrial-age factory (Callahan, 1962), and this structural alignment facilitated the ease of transition from school student to factory worker.

The shift to the innovation economy

In recent decades, many OECD member countries have experienced a rapid transformation from an industrial to a knowledge economy (Bell, 1976; Drucker, 1993). The knowledge economy is based on “the production and distribution of knowledge and information, rather than the production and distribution of things” (Drucker, 1993, p. 182). In the knowledge economy, knowledge workers are “symbolic analysts” (Reich, 1991) who manipulate symbols rather than machines, and who create conceptual artefacts rather than physical objects (Bereiter, 2002; Drucker, 1993). Several economists have begun to argue that in

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today’s economy, knowledge is an intrinsic part of the economic system – a third factor, added to the traditional two of labour and capital (Florida, 2002; Romer, 1990).

These analysts emphasise the importance of creativity, innovation, and ingenuity in the knowledge economy; some scholars now refer to today’s economy as a creative economy (Florida, 2002; Howkins, 2001). Florida argued that “we now have an economy powered by human creativity” (2002, pp. 5-6) and that human creativity is “the defining feature of economic life” (p. 21). Florida represents an economic school of thought known as New Growth Theory, which argues that creativity and idea generation are central to today’s economy (Cortright, 2001).

By the 1990s, educators had begun to realise that if the economy was no longer an industrial-age factory economy, then our schools were designed for a quickly vanishing world (Bereiter, 2002; Hargreaves, 2003; Sawyer, 2006c). This consensus led major governmental and international bodies to commission reports summarising learning sciences research; these reports include the United States National Research Council’s How People Learn (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000), the OECD’s Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: Implications for Education and Learning (2004), and a study of 28 countries conducted by the International Society for Technology in Education, called Technology, Innovation, and Educational Change: A Global Perspective (Kozma, 2003).

In the standard model of schooling, the role of educational research is to help schools more effectively transmit facts and procedures to students. But when learning scientists first went into classrooms in the 1970s and 1980s, they discovered that schools were not teaching the deep knowledge that underlies knowledge work. By the 1980s, cognitive scientists had discovered that children retain material better, and are able to generalise it to a broader range of contexts, when they learn deep knowledge rather than surface knowledge, and when they learn how to use that knowledge in real-world social and practical settings. In the late 1980s, these learning scientists began to argue that standard model schools were not aligned with the knowledge economy.

Many of today’s schools are not teaching the deep knowledge that underlies innovative activity. But it is not just a matter of asking teachers to teach different curriculum, because the structural configurations of the standard model make it very hard to create learning environments that result in deeper understanding. One of the central underlying themes of the learning sciences is that students learn deeper knowledge when they engage in activities that are similar to the everyday activities of professionals who work in a discipline. This focus on authentic practice is based on a new conception of the expert knowledge that underlies knowledge work in today’s economy. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists began to study science itself, and they began to discover that newcomers become members of a discipline by learning how to participate in all of the practices that are central to professional life in that discipline. Increasingly, cutting-edge work in the sciences is done at the boundaries of disciplines; for this reason, students need to learn the underlying models, mechanisms, and practices that apply across many scientific disciplines, rather than learning in the disconnected and isolated six-week units that are found in many standard model science classrooms – moving from studying the solar system to studying photosynthesis to studying force and motion, without ever learning about connections among these units.

Studies of knowledge workers show that they almost always apply their expertise in complex social settings, with a wide array of technologically advanced tools along with old-fashioned pencil, paper, chalk, and blackboards. These observations have led learning sciences researchers to a situated view of knowledge (Greeno, 2006). “Situated” means that knowledge is not just a static mental structure inside the learner’s head; instead, knowing is a process that involves the person, the tools and other people in the environment, and the activities in which that knowledge is being applied. This perspective moves beyond a transmission and acquisition conception of learning that is implicit in the standard model; in addition to

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acquiring content, what happens during learning is that patterns of participation in collaborative activity change over time (Rogoff, 1990, 1998).

In the knowledge economy, memorisation of facts and procedures is not enough for success. Educated graduates need a deep conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge. They need to be able to critically evaluate what they read, to be able to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing, and to be able to understand scientific and mathematical thinking. They need to learn integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalised and decontextualised facts emphasised by instructionism. They need to be able to take responsibility for their own continuing, lifelong learning. These abilities are important to the economy, to the continued success of participatory democracy, and to living a fulfilling, meaningful life. The standard model of schooling is particularly ill-suited to the education of creative professionals who can develop new knowledge and continually further their own understanding.

Key learning sciences findings

In the three decades that learning sciences research has been under way, several key findings have emerged. These findings align with the needs of the knowledge economy, as identified above.

The importance of deeper conceptual understanding

Scientific studies of knowledge workers demonstrate that expert knowledge includes the facts and procedures that the standard model is designed to transmit to learners. However, these studies also demonstrate that acquiring those facts and procedures is not sufficient to prepare a person to perform as a knowledge worker. Factual and procedural knowledge is only useful when a person knows which situations to apply it in, and exactly how to modify it for each new situation. The standard model of schooling results in a kind of learning which is very difficult to use outside of the classroom. When students gain a deeper conceptual understanding, they learn facts and procedures in a much more useful and profound way that transfers to real-world settings. This deeper conceptual understanding has several components, as described in the following sections.

The cognitive bases of expertise

One of the most surprising discoveries of cognitive science in the 1970s was that everyday behaviour was harder to represent computationally than expert behaviour. Some of the most successful artificial intelligence (AI) programmes simulated expert performance in knowledge-intensive domains like medicine, manufacturing, telecommunications, and finance (Liebowitz, 1998). As a result of these efforts, cognitive science developed a sophisticated understanding of the cognitive bases of expertise. Everyday common-sense behaviour remains beyond the abilities of AI computer programmes, even as expert performance in many knowledge-intensive domains like medicine has been successfully simulated.

A large body of cognitive science research shows that expertise is based on:

x A large and complex set of representational structures.

x A large set of procedures and plans.

x The ability to improvisationally apply and adapt those plans to each situation’s unique demands.

x The ability to reflect on one’s own cognitive processes while they are occurring.

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Problem solving

Cognitive scientists have spent several decades attempting to identify the cognitive bases of problem solving. One of the most persistent theories about problem solving is that it depends on a person having a mental representation of a problem space (Newell and Simon, 1972) which contains beliefs and mental representations – of concepts, specific actions, and the external world. Problem solving is then conceived of as searching through the problem space until the desired goal state is reached. Because knowledge work typically requires problem solving, many learning sciences approaches to learning are based on this research. For example, Koedinger and Corbett’s cognitive tutors (2006) assume that production rules are used to move through the problem space, and Kolodner’s case-based reasoning (2006) assumes that case lookup and matching algorithms are used.

Thinking

Educators often talk about the importance of higher-order thinking skills, but educational programmes that emphasise thinking skills are often not based on scientific research. Instead, they are based on one or another intuitively-based taxonomy of thinking skills, with almost no scientific justification of why this specific set of skills should be taught in schools (Kuhn, 1990, p. 2). Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, cognitive psychologists began to study informal reasoning (Voss, Perkins and Segal, 1991) – the good and bad reasoning that people engage in everyday, when faced with real-life problems that do not have simple solutions. They also began to study everyday decision making, discovering a wide range of common thinking errors that most people make (Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, 1982). Also during this time, developmental psychologists began to identify a range of good and bad thinking strategies and how these strategies develop over the lifespan. They extended Piaget’s original insight, showing how children’s thinking differs from that of adults – information that is absolutely critical to education based on the learning sciences (e.g., Dunbar and Klahr, 1989).

Focusing on learning in addition to teaching

Before Jean Piaget, most people held to the common-sense belief that children have less knowledge than adults. Piaget argued a radically different theory: although children certainly possess less knowledge than adults, what’s even more important to learning is that children’s minds contain different knowledge structures than are in adults’ minds. In other words, children differ not only in the quantity of knowledge they possess; their knowledge is qualitatively different.

By the 1980s, researchers had confirmed this fundamental claim that children think differently from adults. Educational researchers had discovered, for example, that children do not get math problems wrong only because they did not study hard enough or because they forgot what they read in the textbook – they often got the problems wrong because their minds were thinking about the math problems in a different way than educators expected, and math education was not designed to correct these misconceptions. Learning scientists began to identify the cognitive characteristics of children’s “naïve math” and “naïve physics”, and began to accumulate an important body of knowledge about the typical misconceptions that people have about these content areas (diSessa, 2006; Linn, 2006). This body of research allows designers of learning environments to connect learning to students’ prior knowledge and misconceptions.

Constructivism explains why students often do not learn deeply by listening to a teacher, or reading from a textbook. Learning sciences research is revealing the deeper underlying bases of how knowledge construction works. To design effective learning environments, one needs a very good understanding of what children know when they come to the classroom. This requires sophisticated research into children’s cognitive development, and the learning sciences draw heavily on psychological studies of cognitive development (e.g. Siegler, 1998).

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Building on prior knowledge

One of the most important discoveries guiding learning sciences research is that learning always takes place against a backdrop of existing knowledge. Students do not enter the classroom as empty vessels, waiting to be filled; they enter the classroom with half-formed ideas and misconceptions about how the world works – sometimes called “naïve” physics, math, or biology. Many cognitive developmentalists have studied children’s theories about the world, and how children’s understanding of the world develops through the preschool and early school years. The basic knowledge about cognitive development that has resulted from this research is absolutely critical to reforming schooling so that it is based on the basic sciences of learning.

Standard model schools were developed under the behaviourist assumption that children enter school with empty minds, and the role of school is to fill up those minds with knowledge. Standard model curricula were designed before the learning sciences discovered how children think and what knowledge structures they bring to the classroom.

Reflection

The learning sciences have discovered that when learners externalise and articulate their developing knowledge, they learn more effectively (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000). This is more complex than it might sound, because it is not the case that learners first learn something, and then express it. Instead, the best learning takes place when learners articulate their unformed and still developing understanding, and continue to articulate it throughout the process of learning. Articulating and learning go hand in hand, in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. In many cases, learners do not actually learn something until they start to articulate it – in other words, while thinking out loud, they learn more rapidly and deeply than studying quietly.

One of the reasons that articulation is so helpful to learning is that it makes possible reflection or metacognition – thinking about the process of learning and thinking about knowledge. Learning scientists have repeatedly demonstrated the importance of reflection in learning for deeper understanding. Many learning sciences classrooms are designed to foster reflection, and most of them foster reflection by providing students with tools that make it easier for them to articulate their developing understandings. Once students have articulated theirincreasing comprehension , learning environments should support them in reflecting on what they have just articulated. One of the most central topics in learning sciences research is how to support students in educationally beneficial reflection.

Scaffolding learning

One of the most important topics of learning sciences research is how to support students in this ongoing process of articulation and reflection, and which forms of articulation and reflection are the most beneficial to learning. The learning sciences have discovered that articulation is more effective if it is scaffolded – channelled so that certain kinds of knowledge are articulated, and in a certain form that is most likely to result in useful reflection. Students need help in articulating their developing understandings; they do not yet know how to think about thinking, and they do not yet know how to talk about thinking.

Scaffolding is the help given to a learner that is tailored to that learner’s needs in achieving his or her goals of the moment. The best scaffolding provides this help in a way that contributes to learning. For example, telling someone how to do something, or doing it for them, may help them accomplish their immediate goal; but it is not good scaffolding because the child does not actively participate in constructing that knowledge. In contrast, effective scaffolding provides prompts and hints that help learners to figure it out on their own. Effective learning environments scaffold students’ active construction

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of knowledge in ways similar to the way that scaffolding supports the construction of a building. When construction workers need to reach higher, additional scaffolding is added, and when the building is complete, the scaffolding can be removed. In effective learning environments, scaffolding is gradually added, modified, and removed according to the needs of the learner, and eventually the scaffolding fades away entirely.

Design principles from the Learning Sciences

Research emerging from the learning sciences is still too premature to specify a single, well articulated alternative model of schooling. However, learning sciences findings imply several principles that can be used to guide the development of new models of schooling that are more closely aligned with the innovation economy.

Customised learning

In the standard model, everyone learns the same thing at the same time. Many parallel structures and processes of these schools align to enforce standardisation. However learning sciences findings suggest that each student learns best when they are placed in a learning environment that is sensitive to their pre-existing cognitive structures; and learning sciences research has shown that different learners enter the classroom with different structures. Learning sciences research suggests that more effective learning will occur if each learner receives a customised learning experience.

Educational software gives us the opportunity to provide a customised learning experience to each student to a degree not possible when one teacher is responsible for six classrooms of 25 students each. Well-designed software could sense each learner’s unique learning style and developmental level, and tailor the presentation of material appropriately (see Koedinger and Corbett, 2006 for an example). Some students could take longer to master a subject, while others would be faster, because the computer can provide information to each student at his or her own pace. And each student could learn each subject at different rates; for example, learning what we think of today as “5th grade” reading and “3rd grade” math at the same time. In age-graded classrooms this would be impossible, but in alternative models of schooling there may be no educational need to age-grade classrooms, no need to hold back the more advanced children or to leave behind those who need more help, and no reason for a child to learn all subjects at the same rate. Of course, age-graded classrooms also serve to socialise children, providing opportunities to make friends, to form peer groups, and to participate in team sports. If learning and schooling were no longer age-graded, other institutions would have to emerge to provide these opportunities.

Diverse knowledge sources

The standard model is based on a transmission-and-acquisition approach, where the teacher is assumed to possess all of the knowledge, and classroom activities are designed to facilitate the teacher-to-student transfer of knowledge. In the constructivist and project-based learning suggested by learning sciences research, students gain expertise from a variety of sources – from the Internet, at the library, or through email exchange with a working professional – and the teacher will no longer be the only source of expertise in the classroom. Learners will acquire knowledge from diverse sources; of course, expert support from the teacher can facilitate these learning processes, but the teacher’s involvement will not be one of transmitting knowledge.

Distributed knowledge

In knowledge intensive occupations, people act intelligently by making frequent use of books, papers, and technology. Knowledge work occurs in teams and organisations, so that several times every hour, a person is interacting with others. But in today’s schools, there is a belief that a student only knows

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something when that student can do it on his or her own, without any use of outside resources. There is a mismatch between today’s school culture and the situated knowledge required in the knowledge society.

At the same time, learning sciences research is showing that collaborating student groups can accelerate learning (Sawyer, 2006a). Here is a case where learning sciences research supports increased classroom collaboration, and the innovation economy, as well, demands graduates who are highly skilled at creating together in groups (Sawyer, 2007).

Curriculum

Standard model schools typically have highly regimented and articulated curricula. A central question guiding education research must always be: What should be taught in second grade math, or in sixth grade social studies? In the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, practicing scientists became heavily involved in the development of school science curricula (Rudolph, 2002). These new curricula were an improvement on what previously existed. However, learning scientists have discovered that what seems more simple to an adult professional is not necessarily more simple to a learner, and that the most effective sequencing of activities is not always a sequence from what experts consider to be more simple to more complex. Children arrive at school with naïve theories and misconceptions; and during the school years, children pass through a series of cognitive developmental stages. Even these 1960s textbooks and curricula, developed in collaboration with expert scientists, were designed before learning scientists began to map out the educational relevance of cognitive development. In the next ten to twenty years, new curricula for K-12 education will emerge that are based in the learning sciences.

Related to the issue of curriculum is the sensitive topic of coverage – how much material, and how many topics, should students learn about at each age? In the standard model, the debate about curriculum is almost exclusively a debate about topic coverage – what should be included at each grade, and how much. But this focus on breadth is misguided. According to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which compares student achievement in math and science in 50 countries every four years, United States science and math curricula contain much more content than other countries as a result of their survey approaches to material – but rather than strengthening students’ abilities, this survey approach weakens United States achievement relative to other countries (Schmidt and McKnight, 1997). In a typical United States classroom, each topic is taught as its own distinct unit – and the new knowledge is often forgotten as soon as the students turn to the next topic. Studies of the TIMSS data show that children in nations that pursue a more focused, coherent, and deep strategy do substantially better on the mathematics assessment than do children in the United States (Schmidt and McKnight, 1997). This is consistent with the learning sciences finding that students learn better when they learn deep knowledge that allows them to think and to solve problems with the content that they are learning.

The role of the teacher

In a knowledge economy school, teachers should also be knowledge workers, with equivalent skills to other knowledge workers such as lawyers, doctors, engineers, managers, and consultants. They should deeply understand the theoretical principles and the latest knowledge about how children learn. They should be deeply familiar with the authentic practices of professional scientists, historians, mathematics, or literary critics. They will have to receive salaries comparable to other knowledge workers, or else the profession will have difficulty attracting new teachers with the potential to teach for deep knowledge. To align with the innovation economy, teachers will require more autonomy, more creativity, and more content knowledge.

These teachers should be highly trained professionals, comfortable with technology, with a deep pedagogical understanding of the subject matter, able to respond in an improvised manner to the uniquely

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emerging flow of each classroom (Sawyer, 2004). To foster collaborative and authentic learning, they will lead teams of students – much like a manager of a business or the master in a workshop – rather than controlling students autocratically, as the factory bosses of old.

Assessment

In the knowledge economy, today’s assessments have two critical flaws, both due to the fact that today’s assessments were designed for the standard model of schooling. First, whereas the schools of the future will increasingly result in customised learning, today’s assessments require that every student learn the same thing at the same time. The standards movement and the resulting high-stakes testing are increasing standardisation, at the same time that learning sciences and technology are making it possible for individual students to have customised learning experiences. Customisation combined with diverse knowledge sources enable students to learn different things. Schools will still need to measure learning for accountability purposes, but we do not yet know how to reconcile accountability with customised learning.

Second, today’s standardised tests assess relatively superficial knowledge and do not assess the deep knowledge required by the knowledge society. Standardised tests, almost by their very nature, evaluate decontextualised and compartmentalised knowledge. For example, mathematics tests do not assess model-based reasoning (Lehrer and Schauble, 2006); science tests do not assess whether pre-existing misconceptions have indeed been left behind (diSessa, 2006; Linn, 2006) nor do they assess problem-solving or inquiry skills (Krajcik and Blumenfeld, 2006). As long as schools are evaluated on how well their students do on such tests, it will be difficult for them to leave the standard model behind.

One of the key issues facing the learning sciences is how to design new kinds of assessment that correspond to the deep knowledge required in today’s knowledge society (Carver, 2006; Means, 2006). Several learning sciences researchers are developing new assessments that focus on deeper conceptual understanding.

The learning sciences and alternative models of learning

Following the above discussion, a set of key findings has emerged from learning sciences research:

x The importance of learning deeper conceptual understanding, rather than superficial facts and procedures.

x The importance of learning connected and coherent knowledge, rather than knowledge compartmentalised into distinct subjects and courses.

x The importance of learning authentic knowledge in its context of use, rather than decontextualised classroom exercises.

x The importance of learning in collaboration, rather than in isolation.

These key findings imply that the most effective learning environments will have the following characteristics:

x Customised learning. Each child receives a customised learning experience.

x Availability of diverse knowledge sources. Learners can acquire knowledge whenever they need it from a variety of sources: books, web sites, and experts around the globe.

x Collaborative group learning. Students learn together as they work collaboratively on authentic, inquiry-oriented projects.

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x Assessment for deeper understanding. Tests should evaluate the students’ deeper conceptual understanding, the extent to which their knowledge is integrated, coherent, and contextualised.

To date, the standard model of schooling does not align with these characteristics. Learning is standardised; knowledge sources are limited to the teacher and the textbook; most learning occurs by a solitary learner; and assessment typically measures the memorisation of superficial facts and procedural knowledge. Some of these characteristics can be implemented within the standard model; for example, existing classrooms could introduce collaborative learning tasks (as many schools are doing today). But some of these characteristics will be extremely difficult to implement within the standard model; for example, the notion of customised learning is inconsistent with the high degree of standardisation associated with the standard model school.

The work of the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) on alternative models of learning needs to explore whether or not there are other models of learning that align more naturally with these learning sciences characteristics. A natural place to start the exploration is to study non-school locations where learning occurs – whether called self-directed learning or informal learning. Many non-school learning environments have existed through history and continue to exist alongside formal schooling. One example that has been widely studied is apprenticeship (Collins, 2006; Rogoff, 1990) – where a young adult who aspires to learn a trade works closely with an older expert. In some disciplines, such as medicine, apprenticeship is a core feature of the learning experience; in medical school, students spend two years in classrooms and then two years in the hospital, working alongside senior physicians. Apprenticeship is a core component of education in craft trades such as carpentry and electrical wiring. A second example of non-school learning that has been widely studied is the huge amount of knowledge that young children acquire, at home, in the years before they begin formal schooling – they learn their first language, and a wide range of physical and social skills.

Many learning scientists are experimenting with new models of learning that blend some features of formal schools with some features of these non-school learning environments. Institutions where self-directed learning is common have been of particular interest; these include museums and public libraries. In recent years, the managers of these institutions have been expanding their educational offerings. Science centres have already taken the lead in this area, developing inquiry-based curricula and conducting teacher professional development, but art and history museums may soon follow suit. Over time, these institutions could evolve into full-fledged learning resource centres, and some segments of the school day might be better spent in these institutions, rather than in traditional schools.

The creative economy is also a learning society, one in which all workers must continue to acquire new knowledge throughout their lives. It is no longer possible to imagine that education ends by a certain age, after which learning is no longer necessary. As a result of these broader economic changes, the boundary between formal schooling and continuing education could begin to break down. The milestones of a high school and a college diploma could gradually decrease in importance, as the nature of learning in school begins to look more and more like on-the-job apprenticeship and adult distance education. Many types of knowledge – for example, the trade knowledge that is today acquired through apprenticeship – are better learned in workplace environments; this kind of learning will be radically transformed by the availability of anywhere, anytime learning, as new employees take their laptops or handhelds on the job with them, with software specially designed to provide apprenticeship support in the workplace. Professional schools could be radically affected; new forms of portable just-in-time learning could increasingly put their campus-based educational models at risk.

The Internet provides an opportunity for a new kind of learning environment: a sophisticated form of distance learning, where the learners and the teachers may all be in different physical locations, communicating via the network. As of 2005, twenty-two of the United States had established on-line

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virtual schools; during the 2003-04 school year, the Florida Virtual School became the state’s 73rd school district, and now receives per-student funding from the state just like any other district. In the 2004-05 school year, 21 000 students enrolled in at least one of its courses (Borja, 2005). When each student is working at their own computer, there is no longer a compelling social reason to group students by age; students could easily be grouped according to their current level of understanding, allowing the customised learning implicated by the learning sciences.

Conclusion

The standard model of schooling emerged during the industrial age, and it has been effective at generating the kinds of graduates needed by the industrial economy. However, the broad global shift to an innovation economy has revealed some weaknesses with the standard model. The learning sciences offer us a set of research findings that allow us to begin to create new models of learning. Those societies that can effectively develop alternative models of learning that are in accordance with learning sciences principles will be the leaders in the 21st century (OECD, 2000, 2004).

We are at an exciting time in the study of learning. Researchers have been working since the 1970s, developing the basic sciences of learning – beginning in psychology, cognitive science, sociology, and other disciplinary traditions, and in the 1980s and 1990s, increasingly working closely with educators and in schools. Researchers have just begun to explore what models of schooling might emerge in response to the new research emerging from the learning sciences, and to the computer technology that makes these new learning environments possible. As these scholars continue to work together in a spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration, the end result will be an increasingly detailed understanding of how people learn. Existing schools should redesign themselves with a foundation in the learning sciences, and should work closely with non-school learning environments – libraries, museums, after-school clubs, on-line virtual schools, and the home – to develop a new model of learning for the future. As our scientific understanding of the processes of learning is increasingly refined, the final step to transform schools must be taken by our whole society: parents and teachers, and the administrators, policy makers, and politicians with whom we entrust our schools.

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Stallard, C.K. and J.S. Cocker (2001), The Promise of Technology in Schools: The Next 20 Years, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD.

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