digitalization

In Need of Development, Learning and Research? : On the Possibilities of a Common Point of Departure for Digital and Educational Development

Abstract

A growing body of initiatives aims to connect school improvement with external actors, such as universities, by means of networks and collaborative partnerships of different kinds. Simultaneously, many schools have difficulties in assessing or predicting their needs associated with the digitalization of a specific local school practice given their lack of existing tools to articulate those needs. This has made it difficult to study digitalization in a complementary and symmetrical way between academia and practice. In this study, we used a quantitative instrument to generate findings and development needs relevant to both research and school development. The instrument, which we distributed to all school leaders in one municipality, measures perceptions of three overall areas: (a) levels of digitalization, (b) organizational digital maturity, and (c) notions of leadership. The data shows, for example, that digitalization, in this municipality, was a concern or issue on an individual level. Achieving a more complex view of digitalization as school development—a collegial approach and mindset together with leadership and organization that focuses on strategy and common goals—appears to be a high priority for research and practice. To conclude, the results generated from the instrument used in this study can contribute to a shared understanding of the findings and the needs relevant to both research and school development.

Through the Lens of Situated Learning and Levels of Scale: Theorizing Development of Remote Teaching and the Role of On-Site Facilitators

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to theoretical development within a field otherwise mostly characterized by empirical contributions, with a primary focus on the practice and perspectives of on-site facilitators. To theoretically understand the development and use of remote teaching, we focus on the interaction between systems of human activity in education and the relationships enacted in practice through their interaction, with a focus on on-site facilitators’ work. In doing so, we use the concept levels of scale in situated learning. Through levels of scale, we conceptualize the historical development of remote teaching as the large scale and the remote learning environment as the small scale. Integrating the levels of scale and tracing the historical development of remote teaching in Sweden into the enactments taking place in a classroom of modern language teaching is the concrete theoretical development that our aim entails.