Brandvägg. Ord och handling i en yrkesutbildning

Brandvägg describes how a group of firefighters, who consistently maintain that they are “practitioners and not theorists”, relate to various forms of language based knowledge and language based “knowledging” in their vocational training, which is based on problem based learning. From a sociocultural perspective to learning, and within the parameters of a didactic perspective with the focus on the students as learning language users, understanding is searched for what happens in the educational setting. The actions of the students and teachers are discussed in relation to external contexts as the students’ vocational background as firefighters and national curricular directives. Data was gathered during 10 weeks on scene and consists of classroom- and training field observations, 14 qualitative interviews and several informal discussions with the students. The firefighters felt that theory took up too much time in relation to the practical exercises and they saw much of the library and classroom work as a waste of time. A lot of knowledging became instrumental and would come to consist of strategic and ritual actions. The study shows that the learning method, in spite of its intentions, did not stimulate reading or writ-ing, formal classroom interaction, abstract thinking and generalization. It implies the need for teachers to be able to cope with the linguistic difficulties that might occur in the classrooms when it comes to increase students repertoires with learning from written and abstract texts and to motivate this kind of learning and to scaffold the students by acting as good models for developing language use. The study also shows that different verbal actions are learned within different verbal practices, which implies the importance of school as a creative breeding ground for a multitude of verbal actions. It indicates the importance of building on the students’ own verbal repertoires, in this case e.g. their experiences from work in narrative form, examples and work-place stories.

Grantor dc:publisher

Lärarutbildningen, Malmö högskola

Year dc:date

2004

Author dc:creator

• Göransson, Anna-Lena

• Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering
• Vocational training
• Vygotskij
• Student-teacher interaction
• Student interaction
• Sociocultural perspective of learning
• Problem based learning (PBL)
• Practice and theory
• Patterns of language use
• Patterns of participation
• Learning environment
• Languaging
• Language use
• Language and learning
• Ethnography of speaking
• Firefighters
• Didactics
• Class-room literacy
• Dialogicity
• Work-place literacy
• Pedagogy and didactics
• Pedagogik
• didaktik

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

swe

Identifier

urn:isbn:91-85042-13-7

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:lup.lub.lu.se:3f3330b2-ea81-4232-a2ab-e3945daf6213