The Research School |
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The Institute of Education, Stockholm |
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| The Institute of Education, with professor Staffan Selander as motor, in 1999 took care of ten teachers that were studying and doing research halftime at the same time as they teached at their respective schools in the other halftime. The Research School was organised at the Institute of Education, the ten teachers met in seminars on a regular basis and developed their research areas and their research plans. After a couple of years they were united with other research students. In June 2003 the group was formally terminated in a conference in Budapest where several of the supervisors also attended. | |
| 1999 the City of Stockholm
advertised ten research positions for teachers at the upper secondary
level. Ten teachers should, during four years, have the possibility to
do halftime research with the purpose of presenting a licentiate thesis.
This was part of a strategi where teachers' status should be improved.
The "carrot" for individual teachers was a promise of a
position as assistant professor after the period was finalised. Since I
was having thoughts about developing teacher's work I applied for such a
position and was lucky to get it competing with around seventy
applicants. Ten teachers gathered at the Institute of Education in Stockholm. There the Research School was formed and during the first year we stuck together and went through the process to change from being actively working teachers to become more reflective researchers. Through courses and seminars where we discussed literature, a disparate and rather individual group developed into researchers. It wasn't always easy, but this was an exiting period. It was always easy to devote plenty of time to the teaching in the remaining 50 percent, it was more difficult to understand and accept the different thinking as a researcher. If a teacher finds out a way to to teach in a better way she or he is used to test it in practice at once. A researcher thinks more about if you can do a controled experiment so that you can evaluate if the method really is better. Combining these two perspectives in the same person sometimes is schizophrenic! Several persons in the group also hade problems to take the step from Science and the rather straight conception of the world we had to a more humanistic perspective of the world's condition - that everything is socially constructed, even the child, was difficult to accept. After spending some more time with the humanistics we were able to find a more distansed way of relating to all the new theories. The aim of the Research School was that its ten members should write a licentiate thesis during the four years the project lasted. In May-June 2003 eight out of ten participants completed their papers and presented them in seminars at the Institute of Education in Stockholm. Use the link below to see some pictures from my seminar. In the picture above you see all except one of the participants in the Research School together with most of their supervisors at the concluding conference in Budapest 2003. Read more about the Budapest tour here: Budapest 2003 |
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| More links... | |
| Licentiate
seminar 2003 Budapest 2003 |
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