Kenneth Silseth

University of Oslo · Department of Educational Research

Previous studies have shown both benefits and challenges of group work and whole-class activities in educational settings. One overall finding in the existing literature is that it is challenging for teachers to facilitate whole-class conversations that realise the rich potential of student discussions and undertakings during group work. This artic...

This special issue provides the reader with both theoretical explorations and empirical studies from different countries around the world and brings together a unique collection of contributions that address the topic of boundaries in relation to recent developments in the intersection between digital technologies, education, and learning in formal...

New sociomaterial and performative directions in literacy research on digital technologies and play in early childhoods may complicate the established concept of digital play. This study contributes to this line of research by empirically expanding on the concept of the postdigital. In the study, postdigital refers to how both “digital” and “non-di...

Background While much literature has argued for the value of carefully designed instructional units building on student resources, less work details how students’ own invocation of experiences and ideas from their everyday lives plays out in naturalistic classroom dialogues. Employing a sociocultural and interactional approach, this article illumin...

In sociocultural research, many scholars have studied the relationship between students’ everyday lives outside of school and classroom learning. This article contributes to this area by focusing explicitly on the timespace dimensions of meaning making in science education. We draw on Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope to examine how students can b...

Temanotat med oppsummering av hovedfunn i EVA2020 Rapport 6, Læreres planlegging og gjennomføring av undervisning om tverrfaglig tema DETTE SIER EVA2020

This research paper draws on a teacher-led innovation project to create digitally mediated learning experiences targeting the theme of “Health and Wellbeing”. Over a year, high school teachers, students and researchers co-designed three interdisciplinary learning activities involving immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented...

Denne rapporten er basert på forskning utført i delprosjektet EVA2020: Fagfornyelsen i møte med klasseromspraksiser. Delprosjektet handler om hvordan læreplanverket erfares og iverksettes i klasseromssituasjoner av lærere og elever, med særskilt vekt på læring og undervisning i tilknytning til de tre tverrfaglige temaene folkehelse og livsmestring,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex relationships between educational policy and classroom practice. By employing a sociocultural perspective, we examine formulations inscribed in socio-material artifacts about what students should learn and how they should engage with knowledge. We explore how these formulations are mobilized in in...

This paper presents a case study of process-oriented assessment in a Norwegian secondary school. We investigate the teachers' design of a process-oriented and video-based assessment, shedding light on how student collaboration and competence was displayed and made assessable in video-recorded group assessments. The results reveal that, although thi...

As childhoods in the Nordic countries now take place in unprecedented material conditions with increasingly digital technology-rich environments, we use sociomaterial theories as analytical tools for studying the boundary-making practices of young children’s play.

This paper aims to critically explore the opportunities, complexities, and tensions of invoking students' everyday experiences as resources in educational activities. We analyze data from teacher interviews, instructional work in classrooms, and parent–teacher conferences taking place at a lower secondary school. The analysis shows how teachers ref...

Several studies of game-based learning in classrooms show that the role of dialogue is crucial in order to ensure valuable learning outcomes. This both pertains to dialogue between students and the game, dialogues between students playing games, as well as dialogues between teachers and students in game-based learning contexts. Moreover, the dialog...

This paper reports on a study of Teacher Support Teams (TSTs) established to generate peer support and collaboration among teacher and nurse educators at a Norwegian university. In TST groups, educators share experiences from their own teaching practices and support one another in solving work-related problems. By the use of interaction analysis, t...

I dette kapittelet tar jeg for meg forholdet mellom dialogisme og læring på tre litt ulike, men likevel overlappende måter. Jeg tar for meg et dialogisk perspektiv på meningsskaping og hvordan mennesker som lærende skaper mening i de praksisene de deltar i. Jeg ser også på det man kaller dialogisk læring og undervisning, og diskuterer hvordan denne...

Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt digs deep into the question of what it means to be oneself. An upcoming computer game version invites players to take on the role of Peer and thereby raises new questions about identity and identification. By recording dyads of students who play an early version of the game and analysing their interaction during gamepl...

An important aspect of what constitutes beginning gamers' learning trajectories is guidance from experienced players. However, there is little educational research on these processes within a competitive gaming scene. In this chapter, the authors analyse the mentor-apprentice relationship in a team in the multiplayer FPS CS:GO within an esports and...

Becoming a competent player of online games involves complex processes and networks of online and offline life where the player is socialized into social norms and expectations. An important aspect of what constitutes gamers learning trajectories is guidance from experienced players. Games are public spheres where learning is social and distributed...

Studies of education practices in science centers have found variation in how conceptual learning is supported, or scaffolded, on school field trips. This paper investigates the implications of scaffolding variations for how students make sense of a game-based exhibit that was designed to trigger interest and develop knowledge of scientific phenome...

In this article, we explore and discuss how educational trajectories relate to the overall learning lives of students. Sociocultural studies have examined the use of artifacts, cultural resources, and literacy practices as part of human development over time. Our interest is in how digital technologies create new possibilities for futuremaking in t...

----- FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://rdcu.be/byw1j ----- This study contributes to our understanding of meaning making in CSCL environments by examining a specific aspect of collaborative problem solving in which students improvise, introduce, and make meaning with representations in disciplinary domains. These situations include the embodied and imagi...

The focus of this article is on digital literacy and students’ use of digital sources. We are examining how students choose digital video sources when doing group work with tablets in a social studies project. The analysis centers on how students collaboratively negotiate and reason around their choice of video sources during an assignment about en...

In this article, we use a model for games and literacy to explore how one FIFA gamer worked across contexts. Previously, this model has been used to address the role of computer and video games in the teaching of literacy in the subject of English. In the current article, we combine this model with a learning lives perspective, which builds on the...

In this chapter, we draw together some of the recent findings from our research; we explicate some of the core dialogic concepts and relate them to digital games; and we try to formulate a set of principles or guidelines for a dialogic pedagogy with digital games, what we term “the GTDT model” (Games as Tools for Dialogic Teaching).

This paper reports on a study of whole-class conversations in science education, with a specific focus on how students' everyday experiences can be used as resources for exploring scientific concepts. The empirical basis is a genetics project involving secondary school students and their teacher. A combination of quantitative methods, in the form o...

The aim of this article is to examine what resources teachers mobilize when contextualizing instruction. In this instructional method, teachers use students’ everyday experiences as tools for teaching subject matter at school. Research has documented that contextualizing instruction can support classroom learning. However, we do not know very much...

In this article, I analyze teachers’ use of students’ everyday knowledge and experiences as resources for learning in educational dialogues. By analyzing video data of teachers’ attempts to contextualize instruction in naturalistic settings in a lower secondary school, I examine how teachers use such resources to support and guide student learning....

In this article, we examine how assessment is enacted and negotiated in a school project that involves multimodal composition. The case is a project on advertisement in which lower secondary students collaboratively composed multimodal commercials about various products and topics. The theoretical framework is based on sociocultural perspectives on...

This article explores how opportunities and limitations in creating intercontextualtiy between everyday and scientific ideas emerge in teacher–student interactions, with a particular focus on the teacher's role. The article draws on data from an empirical, longitudinal, study in a lower secondary school in Norway to analyze student-teacher interact...

In this article, we examine teachers’ efforts to negotiate criteria for assessing digital stories. A discussion among six teachers who teach Norwegian at the upper secondary level shows that these teachers tend to focus on the verbal messages of digital stories. Further, the teachers tend to expect digital stories to have similar content as traditi...

Elever kommer ikke til skolen som «tabula rasa» – tomme tavler. De kommer til skolen med interesser og erfaringer fra blant annet fritidsaktiviteter, digitale medier og familieliv. Noen av disse hverdagserfaringene, som vi har valgt å kalle dem, er felles for elevene, andre er svært ulike. Klasserommet er et sted der elevenes hverdagserfaringer møt...

Skole–hjem-samarbeid er sterkt vektlagt i norsk skole. At godt samarbeid mellom skole og hjem har betydning for elevers skoleprestasjoner og trivsel, er et velkjent funn fra forskningen. Hva elevers skoleprestasjoner får å si for hvordan skole og hjem samarbeider, har vært mindre belyst i forskning. I dette kapitlet er det denne siste sammenhengen...

De siste ti årene har mobiltelefonen blitt svært viktig i norske ungdommers liv, og en rekke studier viser at den er blitt hverdagens viktigste skjerm for aldersgruppen 9–16 år. Samtidig har mange ungdomskoler innført mobilforbud i undervisningen og i friminuttene, og denne mobilfrie delen i ungdommers hverdag har blitt heftig debattert i det offen...

In this article, we examine the relationship between how students are positioned in social encounters and how this influences learning in a technology-supported science project. We pursue this topic by focusing on the participation trajectory of one particular learner. The analysis shows that the student cannot be interpreted as one type of student...

In this paper, we will present and discuss data from a research project called MIRACLE, in which high school students learned about energy and energy transformation in a technology-rich learning environment. This learning environment spanned across a classroom, a science center, and an online platform specially designed to support coherence across...

The aim of this article is to gain knowledge about what it means to be a learner using social media in an educational setting. The article presents an ethnographic study of students in a multiethnic community in Oslo who participate in a social networking site called Space2cre8 (S28). In this article, we set out to explore the kind of space for lea...

The article reports on a case study detailing a school project at a lower secondary school in Norway, for which students created personal digital stories on the topic of World War II. In contrast to previous research, this study provides a detailed account of how digital storytelling is enacted in an educational practice. A sociocultural and dialog...

Tracing learning, learning across the different settings in which learners participate, has become an important research topic during the last couple of decades. Young people are involved in a whole range of different activities across sites and over time; they play computer games with friends, discuss topics, coordinate parties or map networks on...

Dataspillenes potensial som ressurser for læring har vært mye diskutert og forsket på de senere årene (Gee 2003, Egenfeldt-Nielsen 2006, Squire 2011). Dataspilling er en viktig del av fritiden til mange unge, og fremheves av flere som en sosial praksis som kan engasjere og motivere elever i skolearbeidet på nye måter (Kirriemuir mfl. 2004, Sefton-G...

Recent work on education, identity and community has expanded the intellectual boundaries of learning research. From home-based studies examining youth experiences with technology, to forms of entrepreneurial learning in informal settings, to communities of participation in the workplace, family, community, trade union and school, research has atte...

The purpose of this article is to gain knowledge about how interactions in a gaming context become constituted as effective resources for a student’s learning trajectory. In addition, this detailed study of a learning trajectory documents how a computer game becomes a learning resource for working on a specific topic in school. The article reports...

Hva sosiale medier kan tilby elever og lærere i læringsarbeidet på skolen, er et omdiskutert tema. I dette kapitlet presenterer vi data fra det internasjonale forskningsprosjektet Space2cre8, hvor ungdom fra ulike land får muligheten til å delta i et nettsamfunn for å lære om hverandres kultur. Vi har fulgt en multietnisk klasse på ungdomstrinnet s...

We introduce the notion of learning selves as a way of tracing learning across sites. Learning selves is a way of characterizing how people as learners are constituted in and between settings. Focusing on the concept of self represents an attempt to address what becomes of the person in sociocultural and dialogical theorizing. Through a discussion...