Dialogkompetens i skolans vardag - Publikationer - LTU - Luleå ...

ENGLISH SUMMARY
The framework of the study
The research in the present study was made in the context of a national school
improvement project 42 . In this project I have cooperated with fifty teachers working
in schools where all the pupils are hard-of-hearing. The pupils use hearing
aids and they also need access to audio technical equipment in the classroom. The
initial problem area concerned the situation that the existing audio technical
equipment controlled the communication in the classroom. The technology contributed
to the conversations being largely directed at the teacher, which in turn
led to a more passive attitude to communication among the pupils. Sometimes this
problem is seen lying in the pupils (Atterström & Persson, 2000); hard-of-hearing
pupils cannot enter into a dialogue with their classmates. One of the intentions of
the thesis is to emphasise the opposite view. With suitable conditions in the environment,
all pupils can develop different ways of participating in a dialogue. Such
conditions vary, however, since there is no environment that is optimal for all
hard-of-hearing pupils.
In order to be able to combine research, development and change, I chose an action
research approach. Action research implies a dual purpose, finding new
knowledge and changing participants’ practice in order to improve conditions, in
this case the learning environment of the pupils. ‘New knowledge’ here refers
both to knowledge tested in scientific contexts and knowledge developed in practice.
To me the work has meant an opportunity to do research with teachers, close
to practice. In practice the research was done in parallel with the teachers’ improvement
work. We were dependent on one another and my research questions
arose from the questions that were central to the participants. This meant that a
participatory perspective developed as the work went on.
The aim of the thesis is to illuminate and describe dialogues among different actors
in a national school improvement project. The actors in this context are teachers
in hard-of-hearing classes, their pupils and myself as a researcher. In order to
elucidate the foci of the substudies, the aim was reformulated as questions. The
research questions investigated in the respective substudies are:
42 The “Dialogue Project” (Dialogprojektet) www.dialogprojektet.se
91