Att introducera, befästa och använda nya begrepp i samhällsorienterande ämnen : En fallstudie

Syftet med detta arbete är att studera vilka olika arbetssätt läraren använder för att introducera, befästa och använda nya begrepp i undervisningen i samhällsorienterande ämnen (SO) samt hur undervisningen uppfattas av elever med språkstörningsdiagnos i en klass i årskurs 4. Utifrån ett specialpedagogiskt perspektiv är fokus att hitta arbetssätt som stöder lärandet för elever med språkstörningsdiagnos. I min studie ingår lärarintervju, lektionsobservationer samt två elevintervjuer. Jag analyserade data utifrån Grundad teori. Analysprocessen var uppbyggd av flera steg och mynnade ut i en egen grundad teoretisk modell med utgångspunkt i mitt syfte och mina frågeställningar. Den teoretiska modellen representeras av sex trappsteg, tydlighet, varierade arbetssätt, repetition, progression, förståelse och förmåga att använda ord och begrepp där det personliga stödet utgör förutsättningen - grunden - för att eleverna med språkstörningsdiagnos ska kunna tillgodogöra sig den klassgemensamma undervisningen. Läraren hade samtalet i helklass som stomme i sin undervisning. Hen använde arbetssätt baserade på forskning: tydliga instruktioner uppdelade i steg, visuellt stöd, elevernas tidigare kunskaper och erfarenheter samt vardagsspråk är utgångspunkt, många tillfällen för repetitioner och uppgifter där eleverna får använda de nya orden och begreppen. Eleverna beskrev att de behövde många repetitioner för att ta till sig nya ord och begrepp. De upplevde de största svårigheterna när många nya begrepp presenterades samtidigt och om de själva skulle söka förklaringar i skriven text. Det bästa sättet att ta till sig ny kunskap var att lyssna, gärna i kombination med bilder av olika slag. De var överens om att Ipad var ett bra verktyg som gav möjlighet att lyssna och tala istället för att läsa och skriva. Studien visar på nödvändigheten av funktionella metoder och uppgifter i klassrummet i kombination med extra anpassningar och personligt stöd utifrån elevens individuella behov.

On an ordinary suburban street: a brief history of Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre

The Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC) in Melbourne Australia, set well away from the sites of European atrocity, became one of the first permanent museums dedicated to the Holocaust in the Jewish Diaspora when it opened in March 1984. It was the response to the imminent passing of the survivor generation. You can enter this past from the present through an ordinary, nondescript door, opening from a suburban street. You walk up a short flight of carpeted stairs, as you might in your own house, but there waiting for you is something other than the faces of your children or parents. (Harry Redner).Upstairs in Leo Fink House, the original location for Melbourne's first permanent Holocaust exhibition, where thousands of school students now listen each year to the testimonies of Melbourne's dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, an unremarkable white door shows the original entrance. Before the changes to the location of the exhibition, and the building of the Hadasa and Szymon Rosenbaum Research Centre, the first visitors to the museum would have entered Leo Fink House from the street through Redner's 'nondescript door', past a brass plaque with words in English, Yiddish and Hebrew, and would have climbed the stairs to enter through a white door to view the intimate exhibition.These traces of the former configuration of the JHC reveal changes to the institution as it responded to different priorities, opportunities and a growth in visitor numbers during its 30-year history. The concept of biography helps us think through these changes, but also points to a longer historical focus.

The Museum of Doubt

Is there a God? Does my bum look big in this? Why doesn’t my house cost only the materials used to build it? Is Video Art dead? When Peter Hill curated his first Museum of Doubt exhibition at Zeppelin Projects in Brunswick, these were some of the questions his artist friends wrote on one wall of the gallery. Those artists included Jon Cattapan, Phil Edwards, Julian Goddard, Ceri Hahn, and Peter Ellis. Others, who are also in this second outing of The Museum of Doubt, include Louise Weaver, Patrick Pound, Josh Foley and Michael Vale. How do we know what is true or false in any given visual statement? How willing are we to suspend our disbelief? And does that even matter if the artworks can be enjoyed for their own formal beauty, angst, or inquisitiveness?“I have a great sympathy with both doubt and faith as beacons for navigating this sublime universe,” says Peter Hill. “Remembering that the sublime in art, as in life and death, hovers between beauty and terror. Doubt and faith are both on the same side of the same coin – a coin that has “certainty” on the reverse. Most of the problems we face today are caused by individuals and nations being “certain” that they have the answer. Don’t listen to them. Be skeptical. The truth can be approached, as Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science tells us, but it can rarely be found. It can only be falsified.”So bring your doubt and your faith to this Wunderkammer of Super Fictions and enjoy the lightness, the darkness, and the strangeness in the works of: Glen Clarke, Josh Foley, Tony Garifalakis, Grant Hill, Peter Hill, Patrick Pound, Michael Vale, Louise Weaver and Robert Zhao.

Re-imagining the theology of human sexuality in the Methodist Church: the use of narrative in theological methodology

This thesis proposes the development of a narrative methodology in the British Methodist Church. Such a methodology embraces and communicates both felt experience and critical theological thinking, thus producing and presenting a theology that might have a constructive transformative impact on wider society. In chapter one I explore the ways in which the Church speaks in public, identify some of the challenges it faces, and consider four models of engagement. If the Church is to engage in public discourses then I argue that its words need to be relevant and connect with people’s experiences. To ground the thinking I focus on the context of the British Methodist Church and explore how the Church engages in theological reflection through the lens of its thinking on issues of human sexuality. Chapter two reviews how theological reflection is undertaken in the British Methodist Church. I describe how the Methodist Quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience remains a foundational framework for theological reflection within the Methodist Church and consider the impact of institutional processes and the ways in which the Methodist people actually engage with theological thinking. The third and fourth chapters focus on how the British Methodist Church has produced its theology of human sexuality, giving particular attention to the use of personal and sexual stories in this process. I find that whilst there has been a desire to listen to the stories of the Methodist people, there has not been a corresponding interrogation or analysis of their stories so as to enable robust and constructive theological reflection on these experiences. Using resources from Foucauldian approaches to discourse analysis, I critique key statements and the processes involved in their production, offering an analysis of this body of theological thinking and indicating where possibilities for alternative ways of thinking and acting arise. The proposed methodology draws upon resources from social science methodologies, and in chapter five I look at the use of personal experience and relevant strategies of inquiry that prompt reflection on the hermeneutical process and employ narrative approaches in undertaking, analysing and presenting research. The exploration shows that qualitative research methodologies offer resources and methods of inquiry that could help the Church to engage with personal stories in its theological thinking in a robust, interrogative and imaginative way. In chapter six an examination of story and narrative is undertaken, to show how they have been understood as ways of knowing and how they relate to theological inquiry. Whilst acknowledging some of the limitations of narrative, I indicate how it offers constructive possibilities for theological reflection and could be a means for the British Methodist Church to engage in public discourse. This is explored further in chapter seven, which looks in more detail at how the British Methodist Church has used narrative in its theological thinking, and outlines areas requiring further attention in order for a narrative theological methodology to be developed, namely: attention to the question ‘whose experience?’; investigation of issues of power and the dynamics involved in the process of the production of theological thought; how personal stories and experiences are interrogated and how narrative is constructed; and how narrative might be employed within the Methodist Quadrilateral. The final chapter considers the advantages and limitations of such an approach, whether the development of such a method is possible in the Methodist Church today and its potential for helping the Church to engage in public discourse more effectively. I argue that this methodology can provoke new theological insights and enable new ways of being in the world