Project description

[Funding]  [Aims]  [Background]  [Status of knowledge]  [Research questions]  [Project plan]

Funding

The Learning Resources and Writing i Educational Textual Cultures project is funded by The Research Council of Norway through the long term progamme Utdanning2020. Vestfold University College contributes by giving the reseachers time to work on the project, and by employing two research fellows.

Aims

Primary aim:

• To research textual cultures in upper secondary school and in teacher training through an examination of the design and the use of learning resources.

Partial aims:

• To locate characteristics of learning resources that function as support for students’ writing
• To study strategies for information collection and use of learning resources by writers in selected subjects in upper secondary school, and in teacher training
• To explore the relationship between use of learning resources and students’ own texts

Background

Research of writing has produced important work concerning portfolio evaluation and supervision/guidance. At the same time, little attention is given to learning resources and other mediating artefacts, despite the large role they have in the learning process that takes place in school.

Both oral, printed and digital learning resources appear as complex webs of meaning, which is particularly evident in the learning resources of natural sciences. In earlier research on vocational education writing has been given relatively little attention. This also applies to the use of multimodality in writing.

Status of knowledge

The theoretical foundation of this project will be a sociocultural view of learning in which knowledge is primarily constructed and developed in social communities where language plays a wholly central role.This means that there is a close connection between learning and language and between reading and writing.  The project will therefore shed light on how writing can be used in a learning context in which tasks are completed using subject-specific means.

Learning a subject also means learning the particular way that language is used in that subject. The textual culture of a given subject develops over an extended time-period, and it is often thought that one learns it only by working directly with that subject’s texts. Therefore learning resources, in our view, play a highly central role as textual models for both reading and writing, and the tasks initiated by learning resources become especially important in relation to the study of subject-oriented and reflective writing in the subjects we have selected.  Learning resources and student texts will be examined particularly for spontaneous and scientific terms, metaphors, text patterns, intertextuality and multimodality.

Research questions

Primary questions:

How can learning resources be designed and employed in order to have a support function for students’ writing?

Partial questions:

• What are the characteristics of learning resources that are supportive for students’ writing in selected subjects in upper secondary school and teacher training?
• How do different subject-oriented writers solve problems at the levels of word, sentence and text when they use learning resources as sources?
• How are subject-oriented writing and log- and journal-writing used in selected subjects in upper secondary school and in teacher training?

Project plan

Relevance to society

Through an analysis of learning resources and student texts and case studies of students’ writing, the project will increase knowledge of the problems that students face when using learning resources for writing. Through case based research the project will contribute to create knowledge of how learning resources are used and their impact on writing. It will also contribute to knowledge about the difference between inspiration and plagiarism.