Roger Säljö | University of Gothenburg (original) (raw)
Books by Roger Säljö
De senaste decennierna har digitaliseringen förändrat vår vardag. En fråga som måste ställas är h... more De senaste decennierna har digitaliseringen förändrat vår vardag. En fråga som måste ställas är hur lärarrollen förändras när mobila digitala resurser finns i klassrummet? Vad blir lärande och utbildning i sådana omgivningar?
I LÄRARE I DEN UPPKOPPLADE SKOLAN presenterar en rad forskare studier kring digitala resurser och lärande. Utgångspunkten är att digitala resurser kommer att ha en given plats i skola och undervisning eftersom de är en del av de flesta andra verksamheter i samhället. Övergången till digitala resurser är ett avgörande språng in i nya sätt att läsa, skriva, räkna, lära sig språk och umgås med information. Lärarens roll och betydelse när de digitala medierna kommer in i skolan har debatterats. Och hur lärarens roll kommer att förändras är långt ifrån självklart. Att ange konkreta riktlinjer för hur undervisning ska se ut enbart utifrån en viss teknologi är inte möjligt av flera skäl. Teknologier bestämmer inte hur lärare kommer att agera; de blir en del av den pedagogiska miljön och kommer att användas på ganska olika sätt. För att kunna verka som lärare i en tid av ständiga teknologiska innovationer som rör informations- och kunskapsförmedling, behöver man utveckla strategier för undervisning som innebär att digitala verktyg integreras på produktiva sätt i de många olika undervisningssammanhang som modern utbildning innebär. Det blir då viktigt att utveckla förhållningssätt och aktiviteter där de digitala resurserna blir tillgångar för lärande som är produktiva för de elever man arbetar med. Beroende på miljö och ämnesområde kommer de digitala resurserna naturligtvis att leda till olika arbetssätt i undervisningssituationen.
Boken innehåller aktuella studier som bygger på empirisk forskning där implikationerna för pedagogens roll i undervisning är i fokus. I de olika kapitlen diskuteras hur kunskapssynen och därmed lärarrollen behöver förändras för att få ut det man vill av aktiviteter som bygger på användning av digitala resurser. Digitaliseringen är här för att stanna, frågorna nu rör hur de blir produktiva och inspirerande i skola och utbildning.
Papers by Roger Säljö
I Jewitt, Carey (red)(2009). The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2009
The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering fro... more The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. We do this in four different empirical contexts. Learning and remembering are understood as meaning-making processes that are dependent on and co-constituted by mediating tools that enable practices to extend across time and space. Our interests are precisely in what ways the “tools” people employ in these studies mediate activities of learning and remembering, and how they contribute to the organization of collective forms of knowing. We also address how we analyze the specific material features of tools that co-determine the unfolding of the activities. Overall focus and issues addressed The overall focus of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. It is nowadays not uncommon to think of learning and remembering in terms of sociomaterially entangled and distributed practices, but th...
Medical Teacher, 2008
Background: How students are introduced to their studies will affect the quality of learning. Thi... more Background: How students are introduced to their studies will affect the quality of learning. This project deals with tools for lifelong learning to increase students' awareness of learning how to learn. In parallel to an introductory course for students, a course for teachers was given with a focus on tutoring students. Aims: To evaluate an interprofessional transition course for first-year health science students, the LearnAble project, and a teachers' course aiming to support students to be successful in their learning. Method: The project was followed up by a computer-based course evaluation, reflective journals, the Learning Process Questionnaire and the Approaches to Teaching Inventory. The questionnaires were distributed before and after the courses. Teachers (n ¼ 31) and students (n ¼ 270) in two courses from different health educations participated. Results: Students' approaches to the course and to learning could be described as technical/reproductive, seeking for an identity or as reflective/transformative. The evaluation indicates that a deep approach to the studies among the students was related to higher age and female gender. Teachers with earlier pedagogical education supported students more in the attempts to question their own understanding. Conclusion: The most obvious result was the positive impact of being a tutor for a group of students in parallel to studying pedagogy.
Science Education, 2009
Much of the research on students' understanding of the greenhouse effect and global warming repor... more Much of the research on students' understanding of the greenhouse effect and global warming reports poor results. Students are claimed to hold misconceptions and naïve beliefs, and the impact of teaching on their conceptions is also low. In the present study, these results are called into question, and it is argued that they may to a large extent be seen as artifacts of the research methods deployed, in particular when written questionnaires are used. When following students' project work in school over a long period, many of the misunderstandings reported in the literature do not appear. It is argued that the appropriation and use of scientific language when discussing complex socioscientific issues is a gradual process. When observing the language and mediational means students use over time, it is obvious that they are able to identify and use central distinctions in their interactions. They are also able to make productive use of texts and other materials that allow them to successively approximate scientific modes of reasoning. Thus, what students know emerges in communicative practices where they interact with others and with cultural tools in a focused activity. It is argued that students' knowledge of complex
Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 2009
Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research Vol. 53, No. 5, October 2009, 497514 ... ISSN 0031-... more Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research Vol. 53, No. 5, October 2009, 497514 ... ISSN 0031-3831 print/ISSN 1470-1170 online © 2009 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research DOI: 10.1080/00313830903180794 http://www.informaworld.com
British Journal of Educational Psychology, 1976
... Login to save citations to My List. Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Journal Article]. Onqualit... more ... Login to save citations to My List. Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Journal Article]. Onqualitative differences in learning: I. Outcome and process. Marton, F.; Saljo, R. British Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 46(1), Feb 1976, 4-11. Abstract. ...
International Journal of Educational Research
Abstract Goodwin’s notion of professional vision suggests that learning to see in professionally ... more Abstract Goodwin’s notion of professional vision suggests that learning to see in professionally relevant ways includes appropriating the visual practices within a domain. This observational study aimed to analyze how experts communicate these visual practices to novices to help them make meaning of domain-specific representations. Informed by a sociocultural perspective and founded on conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, video-recorded discourse and interaction between one expert in radiology and four laypeople were analyzed. The findings indicate three visual practices the medical expert uses to teach the novices how to see: highlighting, rotating, and zooming. The qualitative analyses suggest that learning to see professionally can be described as the mastering of expert practices in a focal domain. Implications for visual expertise research are discussed.
Encountering Algebra
The analyses in the chapters have taken us into a variety of classrooms at the particular point i... more The analyses in the chapters have taken us into a variety of classrooms at the particular point in time when students are introduced to algebra. There are similarities as well as differences between the classrooms documented in terms of the instructional practices that unfold and the cultures of learning they represent. The empirical results show how teachers, on the basis of their experiences and conceptions about what it means to learn algebra, design classroom activities that they consider conducive to introducing algebra. At the same time, it is obvious that students struggle with the new concepts and procedures and the requirements of modeling problems in the expected mathematical format. In these learning trajectories, there are signs that students are accustomed to arithmetic procedures and a focus on arriving at numerical answers; experiences and assumptions which seem to make it difficult for them to take on tasks that require algebraic forms of reasoning.
Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
Over the past decades, the proportion of children diagnosed with some kind of neuropsychiatric di... more Over the past decades, the proportion of children diagnosed with some kind of neuropsychiatric disorder, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), has increased dramatically. The consequences of such a diagnosis for children vary. For instance, increasing numbers of children are put on medication (te Meerman et al. 2017). In many countries, there is a strategy of taking children with diagnoses out of the mainstream classroom thus placing them in special classes or even special schools. Behind such segregating tendencies, there is an assumption that children's learning will improve when they are placed in a special class with few pupils, adapted teaching and continuous attention from one, sometimes even more than one, teacher. As has always been the case with special education, the idea is that by putting children in special environments, allegedly adapted to their capacities, and by providing individualised instruction, learning will improve and, as a consequence, children eventually will catch up and be able to return to a regular class. This compensatory idea rests on the assumption that the teaching that children are exposed to in such special educational settings will prepare them for a return to their regular classrooms and, in general, for a more successful educational career. The likelihood that children placed in such classrooms will 'catch up' with their classmates is debated, but it is clear that this is not always the case; rather they often will be 'educated special needs pupils' (Emanuelsson, 1986). But in practices of streaming, there is much at stake for society as well, whatever motives and arguments are used. Equity and equality of opportunity may be negatively affected. Children from lower socioeconomic strata tend to end up in the lower streams, where the quality of teaching is often lower. Parental and teacher expectations on children's capacities tend to be reduced when children are placed in special classes, as will the motivation for further education of the students themselves. Streaming may also have effects when it comes to gender (with boys being more likely to be taken out of mainstream classrooms), ethnicity and other factors (see Hallam and Parsons 2013). Also, international comparative research on educational performance tends to show that school systems that do not segregate students achieve better results.
Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
This study of institutional categorization reports an investigation of the practices, procedures ... more This study of institutional categorization reports an investigation of the practices, procedures and assumptions of psychiatric staff members when diagnosing ADHD. The main data upon which the study is based consist of transcribed audio recordings of meetings in the psychiatric clinic. Here children referred from primary schools on the suspicion of ADHD are attended to. The tools and procedures for gathering information are shown to produce decontextualized and individualizing representations of children's conduct. The evaluation against a number of norms is found to be central. Finally, the discussions at the central team conferences are shown to reveal the use of hypothesis testing structured around a number of dichotomies, where isolated aspects of the child's life are considered against each other as the source of the difficulties. Together, these practices have cumulative and profound consequences for how children's problems come to be understood as caused by a neurological condition.
Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
This article is based on an extensive study of teaching-learning processes in special educational... more This article is based on an extensive study of teaching-learning processes in special educational settings organised for children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). There is a general assumption that children's learning will be supported through placement in a special class with few students and one or more teachers present. The issues explored concern what educational practices unfold in these settings, i.e. what are the children learning, and how do they participate in the activities? The empirical study is based on videorecorded classroom interaction in eight ADHD-classes during a period of seven years, in total about 200 h. The results show that the interactional format dominating is characterised by one teacher instructing one child at a time. These situations usually seem to follow the well-known Initiative-Response-Feedback (I-R-F) structure. The contributions from the children are generally minimal, and there is no indication that the student's role in such dyads is more active. Thus, there is little evidence that children's learning will improve and that they become more focussed and assume a more participatory role in the interactional formats offered in special classes. Also, it is not obvious how experiences of this kind will prepare children for a return to regular classroom or develop towards becoming active citizens.
Children’s Transitions in Everyday Life and Institutions
Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory, 2009
I-OUTCOME AND PROCESS* SUMMARY. This paper describes an attempt to identify different levels of p... more I-OUTCOME AND PROCESS* SUMMARY. This paper describes an attempt to identify different levels of processing of information among groups of Swedish university students who were asked to read substantial passages of prose. Students were asked questions about the meaning of the passages and also about how they set about reading the passages. This approach allows processes and strategies of learning to be examined, as well as the outcomes in terms of what is understood and remembered. The starting point of this research was that learning has to be described in terms of its content. From this point differences in what is learned, rather than differences in how much is learned, are described. It was found that in each study a number of categories (levels of outcome) containing basically different conceptions of the content of the learning task could be identified. The corresponding differences in level of processing are described in terms of whether the learner is engaged in surfuce-level or deeplevel processing. * This article is based on a paper delivered at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
De senaste decennierna har digitaliseringen förändrat vår vardag. En fråga som måste ställas är h... more De senaste decennierna har digitaliseringen förändrat vår vardag. En fråga som måste ställas är hur lärarrollen förändras när mobila digitala resurser finns i klassrummet? Vad blir lärande och utbildning i sådana omgivningar?
I LÄRARE I DEN UPPKOPPLADE SKOLAN presenterar en rad forskare studier kring digitala resurser och lärande. Utgångspunkten är att digitala resurser kommer att ha en given plats i skola och undervisning eftersom de är en del av de flesta andra verksamheter i samhället. Övergången till digitala resurser är ett avgörande språng in i nya sätt att läsa, skriva, räkna, lära sig språk och umgås med information. Lärarens roll och betydelse när de digitala medierna kommer in i skolan har debatterats. Och hur lärarens roll kommer att förändras är långt ifrån självklart. Att ange konkreta riktlinjer för hur undervisning ska se ut enbart utifrån en viss teknologi är inte möjligt av flera skäl. Teknologier bestämmer inte hur lärare kommer att agera; de blir en del av den pedagogiska miljön och kommer att användas på ganska olika sätt. För att kunna verka som lärare i en tid av ständiga teknologiska innovationer som rör informations- och kunskapsförmedling, behöver man utveckla strategier för undervisning som innebär att digitala verktyg integreras på produktiva sätt i de många olika undervisningssammanhang som modern utbildning innebär. Det blir då viktigt att utveckla förhållningssätt och aktiviteter där de digitala resurserna blir tillgångar för lärande som är produktiva för de elever man arbetar med. Beroende på miljö och ämnesområde kommer de digitala resurserna naturligtvis att leda till olika arbetssätt i undervisningssituationen.
Boken innehåller aktuella studier som bygger på empirisk forskning där implikationerna för pedagogens roll i undervisning är i fokus. I de olika kapitlen diskuteras hur kunskapssynen och därmed lärarrollen behöver förändras för att få ut det man vill av aktiviteter som bygger på användning av digitala resurser. Digitaliseringen är här för att stanna, frågorna nu rör hur de blir produktiva och inspirerande i skola och utbildning.
I Jewitt, Carey (red)(2009). The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2009
The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering fro... more The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. We do this in four different empirical contexts. Learning and remembering are understood as meaning-making processes that are dependent on and co-constituted by mediating tools that enable practices to extend across time and space. Our interests are precisely in what ways the “tools” people employ in these studies mediate activities of learning and remembering, and how they contribute to the organization of collective forms of knowing. We also address how we analyze the specific material features of tools that co-determine the unfolding of the activities. Overall focus and issues addressed The overall focus of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. It is nowadays not uncommon to think of learning and remembering in terms of sociomaterially entangled and distributed practices, but th...
Medical Teacher, 2008
Background: How students are introduced to their studies will affect the quality of learning. Thi... more Background: How students are introduced to their studies will affect the quality of learning. This project deals with tools for lifelong learning to increase students' awareness of learning how to learn. In parallel to an introductory course for students, a course for teachers was given with a focus on tutoring students. Aims: To evaluate an interprofessional transition course for first-year health science students, the LearnAble project, and a teachers' course aiming to support students to be successful in their learning. Method: The project was followed up by a computer-based course evaluation, reflective journals, the Learning Process Questionnaire and the Approaches to Teaching Inventory. The questionnaires were distributed before and after the courses. Teachers (n ¼ 31) and students (n ¼ 270) in two courses from different health educations participated. Results: Students' approaches to the course and to learning could be described as technical/reproductive, seeking for an identity or as reflective/transformative. The evaluation indicates that a deep approach to the studies among the students was related to higher age and female gender. Teachers with earlier pedagogical education supported students more in the attempts to question their own understanding. Conclusion: The most obvious result was the positive impact of being a tutor for a group of students in parallel to studying pedagogy.
Science Education, 2009
Much of the research on students' understanding of the greenhouse effect and global warming repor... more Much of the research on students' understanding of the greenhouse effect and global warming reports poor results. Students are claimed to hold misconceptions and naïve beliefs, and the impact of teaching on their conceptions is also low. In the present study, these results are called into question, and it is argued that they may to a large extent be seen as artifacts of the research methods deployed, in particular when written questionnaires are used. When following students' project work in school over a long period, many of the misunderstandings reported in the literature do not appear. It is argued that the appropriation and use of scientific language when discussing complex socioscientific issues is a gradual process. When observing the language and mediational means students use over time, it is obvious that they are able to identify and use central distinctions in their interactions. They are also able to make productive use of texts and other materials that allow them to successively approximate scientific modes of reasoning. Thus, what students know emerges in communicative practices where they interact with others and with cultural tools in a focused activity. It is argued that students' knowledge of complex
Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 2009
Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research Vol. 53, No. 5, October 2009, 497514 ... ISSN 0031-... more Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research Vol. 53, No. 5, October 2009, 497514 ... ISSN 0031-3831 print/ISSN 1470-1170 online © 2009 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research DOI: 10.1080/00313830903180794 http://www.informaworld.com
British Journal of Educational Psychology, 1976
... Login to save citations to My List. Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Journal Article]. Onqualit... more ... Login to save citations to My List. Citation. Database: PsycINFO. [Journal Article]. Onqualitative differences in learning: I. Outcome and process. Marton, F.; Saljo, R. British Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 46(1), Feb 1976, 4-11. Abstract. ...
International Journal of Educational Research
Abstract Goodwin’s notion of professional vision suggests that learning to see in professionally ... more Abstract Goodwin’s notion of professional vision suggests that learning to see in professionally relevant ways includes appropriating the visual practices within a domain. This observational study aimed to analyze how experts communicate these visual practices to novices to help them make meaning of domain-specific representations. Informed by a sociocultural perspective and founded on conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, video-recorded discourse and interaction between one expert in radiology and four laypeople were analyzed. The findings indicate three visual practices the medical expert uses to teach the novices how to see: highlighting, rotating, and zooming. The qualitative analyses suggest that learning to see professionally can be described as the mastering of expert practices in a focal domain. Implications for visual expertise research are discussed.
Encountering Algebra
The analyses in the chapters have taken us into a variety of classrooms at the particular point i... more The analyses in the chapters have taken us into a variety of classrooms at the particular point in time when students are introduced to algebra. There are similarities as well as differences between the classrooms documented in terms of the instructional practices that unfold and the cultures of learning they represent. The empirical results show how teachers, on the basis of their experiences and conceptions about what it means to learn algebra, design classroom activities that they consider conducive to introducing algebra. At the same time, it is obvious that students struggle with the new concepts and procedures and the requirements of modeling problems in the expected mathematical format. In these learning trajectories, there are signs that students are accustomed to arithmetic procedures and a focus on arriving at numerical answers; experiences and assumptions which seem to make it difficult for them to take on tasks that require algebraic forms of reasoning.
Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
Over the past decades, the proportion of children diagnosed with some kind of neuropsychiatric di... more Over the past decades, the proportion of children diagnosed with some kind of neuropsychiatric disorder, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), has increased dramatically. The consequences of such a diagnosis for children vary. For instance, increasing numbers of children are put on medication (te Meerman et al. 2017). In many countries, there is a strategy of taking children with diagnoses out of the mainstream classroom thus placing them in special classes or even special schools. Behind such segregating tendencies, there is an assumption that children's learning will improve when they are placed in a special class with few pupils, adapted teaching and continuous attention from one, sometimes even more than one, teacher. As has always been the case with special education, the idea is that by putting children in special environments, allegedly adapted to their capacities, and by providing individualised instruction, learning will improve and, as a consequence, children eventually will catch up and be able to return to a regular class. This compensatory idea rests on the assumption that the teaching that children are exposed to in such special educational settings will prepare them for a return to their regular classrooms and, in general, for a more successful educational career. The likelihood that children placed in such classrooms will 'catch up' with their classmates is debated, but it is clear that this is not always the case; rather they often will be 'educated special needs pupils' (Emanuelsson, 1986). But in practices of streaming, there is much at stake for society as well, whatever motives and arguments are used. Equity and equality of opportunity may be negatively affected. Children from lower socioeconomic strata tend to end up in the lower streams, where the quality of teaching is often lower. Parental and teacher expectations on children's capacities tend to be reduced when children are placed in special classes, as will the motivation for further education of the students themselves. Streaming may also have effects when it comes to gender (with boys being more likely to be taken out of mainstream classrooms), ethnicity and other factors (see Hallam and Parsons 2013). Also, international comparative research on educational performance tends to show that school systems that do not segregate students achieve better results.
Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
This study of institutional categorization reports an investigation of the practices, procedures ... more This study of institutional categorization reports an investigation of the practices, procedures and assumptions of psychiatric staff members when diagnosing ADHD. The main data upon which the study is based consist of transcribed audio recordings of meetings in the psychiatric clinic. Here children referred from primary schools on the suspicion of ADHD are attended to. The tools and procedures for gathering information are shown to produce decontextualized and individualizing representations of children's conduct. The evaluation against a number of norms is found to be central. Finally, the discussions at the central team conferences are shown to reveal the use of hypothesis testing structured around a number of dichotomies, where isolated aspects of the child's life are considered against each other as the source of the difficulties. Together, these practices have cumulative and profound consequences for how children's problems come to be understood as caused by a neurological condition.
Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
This article is based on an extensive study of teaching-learning processes in special educational... more This article is based on an extensive study of teaching-learning processes in special educational settings organised for children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). There is a general assumption that children's learning will be supported through placement in a special class with few students and one or more teachers present. The issues explored concern what educational practices unfold in these settings, i.e. what are the children learning, and how do they participate in the activities? The empirical study is based on videorecorded classroom interaction in eight ADHD-classes during a period of seven years, in total about 200 h. The results show that the interactional format dominating is characterised by one teacher instructing one child at a time. These situations usually seem to follow the well-known Initiative-Response-Feedback (I-R-F) structure. The contributions from the children are generally minimal, and there is no indication that the student's role in such dyads is more active. Thus, there is little evidence that children's learning will improve and that they become more focussed and assume a more participatory role in the interactional formats offered in special classes. Also, it is not obvious how experiences of this kind will prepare children for a return to regular classroom or develop towards becoming active citizens.
Children’s Transitions in Everyday Life and Institutions
Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory, 2009
I-OUTCOME AND PROCESS* SUMMARY. This paper describes an attempt to identify different levels of p... more I-OUTCOME AND PROCESS* SUMMARY. This paper describes an attempt to identify different levels of processing of information among groups of Swedish university students who were asked to read substantial passages of prose. Students were asked questions about the meaning of the passages and also about how they set about reading the passages. This approach allows processes and strategies of learning to be examined, as well as the outcomes in terms of what is understood and remembered. The starting point of this research was that learning has to be described in terms of its content. From this point differences in what is learned, rather than differences in how much is learned, are described. It was found that in each study a number of categories (levels of outcome) containing basically different conceptions of the content of the learning task could be identified. The corresponding differences in level of processing are described in terms of whether the learner is engaged in surfuce-level or deeplevel processing. * This article is based on a paper delivered at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
Mind, Culture, and Activity, Jan 1, 2002
Categories play a significant role in the coordination of human activities. Collective action wit... more Categories play a significant role in the coordination of human activities. Collective action within organizations presupposes shared category systems that make institutional priorities and relevancies visible. In this study, some features of the origin, use, and consequences of a categorization tool of modern employment agencies are analyzed. This category system is
complex and has come to serve a diverse set of functions (provision of financial and other kinds of assistance to the unemployed, production of a broad range of statistics, etc.). We argue that this multifunctionality of the tool implies that the employment agency officers reflexively attend to the consequences of their actions and monitor what their decisions will imply at different levels. This reflexivity plays a significant role in the services provided to citizens and in the manner in which their needs are visible to the public. We conclude that categorization practices are hidden, but highly significant, features in the production of social facts.