University of Gothenburg
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Silwa Claesson

Professor Emerita

Unit for General Didactics and Pedagogic Work
Mail
silwa.claesson@ped.gu.se
Visiting address
Läroverksgatan 15
41120 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 300
40530 Göteborg

About Silwa Claesson

Research interests The background for my research is my profession as a teacher and a teacher educator and deals with the relationship between theory and practice. I want to know whether theories about student learning have had any impact on schools. My doctoral dissertation dealt with teachers who claimed that this type of research was significant in their everyday teaching. The findings showed that this link is at the same time vague and complex. Teachers hardly speak of their teaching in terms of theory. A popularly pitched book, Spår av teorier i praktiken (Traces of Theory in Practice), implies in its title something about the nature of the practice-theory link. In Lärares levda kunskap (Teachers’ Lived Knowledge), I have selected teachers who maintain that research on learning is not of importance to their teaching, but it is nevertheless possible to find some traces of theories. I have mainly attempted to understand, describe, and thematize these teachers’ positions in the classroom. Studies of teaching in prison settings also focus on teachers’ positions. The life-world described by Merleau-Ponty, for instance, opens the door to studies of the diversity and complexity of teaching and that my research work aims to describe. Teaching interests My interests coincide to a great extent with regard to research and my teaching, which primarily comprises didactics and teacher education. General didactics primarily focuses on teaching. Learning has long been the focus, and it is therefore important not to ignore the teaching dimension. As regards teacher education, my natural interest lies in the relationship between research and practice, that is, more concretely in the relationship between site-based and campus-based components. On top of this, I am involved in postgraduate education through my supervision of doctoral students and my postdoctoral courses. Keywords theory-practice relationship, general didactics, life-world phenomenology