Medieteknik och historieundervisning : diskurser om teknik i klassrummet under 1980-talet och åren kring 2010

• Main Author: Westerberg, Andreas
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Umeå universitet, Institutionen för idé- och samhällsstudier 2014
• Subjects: educational history; history education; history of technology; media technology; discourse theory; utbildningshistoria; historiedidaktik; teknikhistoria; medieteknik; History; Historia; Educational Sciences; Utbildningsvetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-88522; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:978-91-7601-075-4

The present study analyzes attitudes made manifest when media technology is used in teaching at Swedish upper secondary schools. It examines discourses related to the subject of history by comparing contemporary circumstances with those of the mid-1980s, making research in both educational history and history education indispensible to its execution. The study considers the impact of technology on human interaction as an essentially social construction. Furthermore, it addresses questions about the role media technology plays in current discourses, about the actors that are manifested in these discourses and about their didactic implications. Since the investigation focuses on discourse, it is an interpretive work. Analytical tools have been borrowed from the field of discourse theory to facilitate a broad understanding of discourse and communication. The analysis is conducted in order to reconstruct chains of analogy and nodal points of communication in media technology and teaching, with specific attention paid to matters related to the subject of history. Secondary school policy documents, curricula relevant to each period, teacher´s periodicals and interviews with history teachers are combined to reconstruct discourses on technology in education. Interviews were conducted with six history teachers, three of whom taught in the 1980s, while the remainder began teaching in the past fifteen years. The periodicals studied are Lärarnas tiding and Skolvärlden, including every issue published in the years 1983, 1985, 1987, 2008, 2010 and 2012. Four discourses on media technology in education have been reconstructed from this material. Two of the discourses are relevant to the mid-eighties, and have been called the discourse on the school of the future and the discourse on film, junk culture and education, respectively. The discourses reconstructed from the years around 2010 are named the discourse on the contemporary school and the discourse on good teaching. These discourses generally nurture an optimistic belief in what media technology can mean to school and teaching. The reasons for using technology in the classroom are based on notions of what is required from society or what is relevant to the students. The roles of media technology in education are affected by several groups of actors, including government officials, marketers, school leadership and teachers. The process was however never significantly affected by formal policy. One aspect central to a positive view of media technology in education was that it would improve the quality of teaching, especially in the case of history, characterized by storytelling and lecturing. Certain didactic considerations became visible in the study of these discourses, which risked being shallow and trend sensitive, insofar as it might be difficult for teachers to find suitable forums for peer-to-peer subject specific reflections on media technology.