Didactic Classroom Studies
Short description
Didactic Classroom Studies (DCS) promotes research with a simultaneous focus on teaching, learning and content dimensions, offering a critical understanding of how these interrelated processes flow towards specific educational goals.
Short summary
Didactic Classroom Studies focuses on teaching and learning in relation to didactical consequences these processes may offer. DCS promotes the concepts of “didactic” and “classroom studies” together through empirical research to offer an understanding of issues and challenges in classrooms as well as problematizing the complex relations between teacher, learner and content. The research context of DCS is not limited to classrooms in schools; rather the term “classroom” here represents an integrated context for organized and intentional teaching and learning.
Generally, the research is practice oriented and conducted through various platforms and collaboration projects with school and other educational communities. DCS also places an emphasis on teacher education research both at pre-service and in-service levels.
About 50 members of the staff at the department are involved.
More information about Didactic Classroom Studies
Didactic Classroom Studies (DCS) promotes research on teaching and learning with specific content. A simultaneous focus on teaching, learning and content dimensions offers a critical understanding of how these interrelated processes flow towards specific educational goals. Content orientation in didactic classroom studies means that many research projects can be described as subject didactic research [ämnesdidaktiska] focusing on teaching and learning related to content areas in for instance Mathematics, Sciences, Social Sciences, and Languages.
By bringing scholars with different subject interests, the research environment promotes the study of teaching, learning and content from a comparative and collaborative perspectives. In addition, DCS gathers researchers who put general aspects of teaching and learning in the foreground such as assessments, literacies and relationships.
Theories and methods
Various didactical, social-cultural, cognitive and humanistic education theories provide perspectives for research carried out in DCS including learning communities, hermeneutics and phenomenology, elaboration theory, teacher cognition, socio-semiotics and literacies and cognitive theory of multimedia learning.
The researchers in DCS use both qualitative and quantitative research methods as well as mixed designs including, but not limited to, intervention and design-based research, survey, case study, phenomenology, ethnography, discourse analysis and post-qualitative research.
Activities
The activities in this research environment are regular seminars and development of new research projects around the common interests of the participants. The writing retreat the department organizes every semester also serves as platforms where the researchers work on new research ideas, write individually and collaboratively, and engage in discussions on theories, methods and practice in line with DCS.
Research school hosted
Sustainable development and classroom teaching of Swedish, social studies, and science in compulsory middle school , Christina Osbeck (Swedish Research Council-VR)
