Lea Eldstål-Ahrens
Doctoral Student
Department of Education, Communication andAbout Lea Eldstål-Ahrens
Lea Eldstål-Ahrens has earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Education as part of her primary school teacher education at Osnabrueck University in Germany. After that she has worked in schools with children of different ages both in Germany and in Sweden. She has also taught Bachelor-level courses at Osnabrueck University. Her primary teaching subjects are English and a combination of natural science and social sciences called "Sachunterricht". Since September 2019, she has worked as a doctoral student at IPKL (Department of Education, Communication and Learning). Her supervisors are Niklas Pramling and Malin Nilsen.
Lea's research interests comprise children's argumentation and communicative framings of school tasks. For her PhD thesis, she explores primary school children's learning of argumentation in small-group discussions and with group tasks. Theoretically framed by a sociocultural perspective on learning, the research uses video observations to capture in-detail the social interactions unfolding between the children. As a compilation thesis, each of the three studies focuses on specific aspects within children's argumentation and group tasks: children's handling of task premises, micro-genetic development of argumentation within a discussion, and the consequences of different communicative framings of group tasks.
In November 2021, she visited the University of Basel, Switzerland, where she worked in the project KompAS - Kompetenzniveaus mündlichen Argumentierens unter Schulkindern (competence levels of oral argumentation amongst school children). In May 2023, Lea visited Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Università della svizzera italiana (Lugano), Switzerland, where she met researchers of the ArgImp project (Analyzing children’s implicit argumentation: Reconstruction of procedural and material premises).
(Picture credit: Eva Urbanovics)