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This article examines the dynamic relationship between schools and museums during the 1930s. It investigates how elementary school teachers and students became a prioritized audience for Nordiska museet in Stockholm by analyzing the foundation of the museum’s teaching department (“undervisningsavdelningen”) and the work of the museum’s first lecturer Ernst Klein (1887–1937). Material from the museum’s archive reveals how a mutual beneficial relationship was established between the museum and local schools in the 1930s and how visits to the museum gradually was included in the elementary school curriculum. The study cast new light on the reciprocal development of the two institutions in the interwar years and stresses the importance of local circumstances and individual actors’ initiatives when analyzing past teaching practices.

This special collection contains articles from participants in the 7th International Designs for Learning Conference – Remediation of Learning. The focus of the conference and the special collection is on current changes in the designs of information and knowledge representations and their consequences on how we understand and evaluate learning and communication. The conference was held in May 2021 and due to the pandemic it was run digitally through Zoom. A total of 43 abstracts were submitted, and all delegates were invited to submit a full paper to the Designs for Learning Journal. Five articles were finally included in the special collection and are presented below, along with an acknowledgement of the abstracts presented during the conference.

Digitization has had a transformative impact on museum practices in recent years, including the work with exhibitions (cf. Arvantis & Zuanni, 2021). Digital media make it possible for more people to take part in cultural heritage, by making available objects and remains of a sensitive nature that could not otherwise be shown publicly. It opens up new forms of communication that can make it possible for groups of visitors with different needs to learn about the past (cf. Galani & Kidd, 2020). New questions can potentially be asked, when cultural heritage is made digital. In this presentation we introduce an on-going research project on digital materialities in museum exhibitions. The aim of the project is to produce knowledge about the effects of digitization in relation to the exhibition medium and to visitors’ meaning-making. It does so by investigating how digital technologies are employed and how specific applications may contribute to learning in a selection of museums, such as Vrak – The Museum of Wrecks and The Vasa Museum. Focusing on materiality, the project seeks to understand the affordances for meaning-making of digital media in relation to the epistemological commitments of modes, media and the material expression (cf. Bezemer & Kress, 2016; Lindstrand, 2022). The presentation will include examples from a series of case studies from different museums that are part of Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums. We will share some preliminary findings. The project is funded by The Swedish National Heritage Board and will run for three years, 2023-2025. The project aims to contribute to research by bringing the fields of digital humanities and education together, by investigating how analogue and digital technologies intersect when representing cultural-historical objects, and how specific applications create conditions (and perhaps even limitations) for learning and meaning making.

This paper aims to introduce educational history to multimodal studies by combining a source-oriented approach with multimodal social semiotics. We trace the role of objects and collections in teaching and learning, and focus on Strängnäs Secondary Grammar School in Sweden 1830-1960 as a case example. Closely examining original documents, remaining physical objects, and examples of their situated use as represented in photographs and drawings, the paper provides a nuanced perspective on how object-based pedagogy was applied. It traces how objects and artefacts were incorporated into the school’s collections, by the actions of different actors, in processes of recontextualisation and framing. The activity types that we use as examples, include: drawing lessons in art, weapons practice in physical education, plant collecting in botany, and map exercises in history. These examples show how objects and their meaning potential were used in teaching and learning, and how they realized certain discourses of schooling. Based on our examples, we can see how educational discourses such as progressivism came to have different impact in different subjects. While an authoritarian and national discourse prevailed in art and physical education, a scientific and progressive discourse seem to have been established in botany and history. By combining multimodality with historical research, we can understand meaning-making within a larger context of sociocultural practices and sociopolitical forces.

Att bli lärare är en grundläggande och heltäckande bok som blivande lärare kan använda genom hela utbildningen. Den ger en aktuell bild av läraryrkets möjligheter och utmaningar men blickar också framåt. Boken består av fem olika delar som var och en är kopplade till aktuell forskning: DEL 1 På väg mot lärarrollen (ledarskap, bedömning och inkludering)DEL 2 Lärandeperspektivet (hur kan man organisera meningsfullt lärande?)DEL 3 Professionen (uppdrag, framväxt och kunskapsgrund)DEL 4 På väg mot framtiden (hur organiserar vi en skola för framtiden?)DEL 5 Tre internationella utblickar (Finland, Chile och Singapore)Sammantaget ger texterna hela den bredd av kunskaper som en lärare behöver tillägna sig under utbildningen. Boken är ett stöd i den utbildningsvetenskapliga kärnan (UVK) men fungerar också som en första introduktion till de ämnesdidaktiska frågorna. Mot bakgrund av covid-19-pandemin och en ny läroplan (Lgr22) finns i den tredje upplagan tillägg bland annat gällande datalitteracitet, normkritisk pedagogik, kunskapsområdet sexualitet, samtycke och relationer samt riktlinjer för betygssättning. Boken kan användas som en ingång för att få översikt över ett område och som en uppslagsbok för olika centrala frågor som kan dyka upp under utbildningens gång. Till boken hör också digitala case som ger möjlighet att öva förmågan att samtala med en elev, en lärarkollega eller en förälder om olika dilemman som blivande lärare kan komma att möta i sin framtida yrkesutövning.

This chapter sheds light on a cross-institutional collaborative design process between museum professionals and university researchers. It draws upon a study of a series of design workshops at a large natural history museum in Sweden, where professionals at the museum and educational researchers from the university interacted and reflected upon critical incidents in the exhibition development process.

Museums have a long history of partnering with schools through field trips, outreach programs and curriculum support. While schools turn to museums for expert knowledge, unique learning resources, and out-of-school experiences, museums wish to attract new groups of visitors to engage in their exhibitions and activities. Both the museum and the school are central knowledge institutions, each however guided by a distinct institutional logic. They have different roles to play in society, which may facilitate or hinder collaboration between them. While the museum’s collections form the basis of its activities, the curriculum and educational tasks are at the centre of the school. This study is based on the analysis of documentation of science-centred activities focused on programming with teachers and pupils in grades 4–6, in a context of cultural diversity.

Using data from focus group interviews, this study aims to analyze the perceived opportunities and challenges encountered by groups of secondary school teachers regarding the assessment of multimodal texts. Previous research has shown that digital technologies introduce new kinds of texts in the classroom. The possibility of combining verbal text with image, sound, and movement has an impact on students’ text production. However, the changing role of writing on the screen has left teachers uncertain of how to assess these new forms of texts. Apart from attending to digital competence, assessing multimodal texts may involve following writing conventions and organizing text using different resources and components. Quality in multimodal texts may concern using multimodal components to communicate complex ideas effectively, which may or may not be noticed by teachers. The data is based on group interviews with 11 secondary school teachers at two different schools. The study conducted a thematic content analysis using the analytical concepts of transformation, recognition, design, and form and meaning. Findings show that teachers find it challenging to acknowledge certain qualities in students’ multimodal texts without support from the steering documents. On the other hand, they notice opportunities to follow students’ learning processes. In addition, they stress an increased opportunity and need for shared assessment across school subjects. The article concludes with a discussion of tensions regarding opportunities and challenges when assessing students’ multimodal texts in relation to the different subject syllabuses.

In this chapter, the focus is on knowledge representations in different sites of learning. We will give some examples of formal, semi-formal, and non-formal institutional framings, as well as of choices of representational resources—both in terms of designs for learning and play, and designs in learning. The knowledge area is the Middle Ages, a period which reappears in books, music, films, and games in late-modern contexts. This chapter is thereby also an example of learning outside and inside schools, and of how different institutional logics and choices of material resources affect which type of knowledge that is valued, and what is seen as signs of learning.

Den här boken ger en introduktion till multimodal analys av klassrumsinteraktion, och vägledning i socialsemiotik respektive etnometodologisk samtalsanalys. De två utgångspunkterna kan antas för att studera interaktion och skapa underlag för analys och tolkning av fenomen som undervisning, lärande och bedömning samt sociala relationer (fenomen som uppmärksammas inom UVK-kurser). Boken redogör för forskningsprocessens olika steg såsom problemformulering, metoder för datainsamling och analys och erbjuder särskilt verktyg för att genomföra praktiknära studier på vetenskaplig grund. I boken presenteras hur två skilda teoretiska och metodologiska utgångspunkter resulterar i olika undersökningsbara frågor, begreppsanvändning och analysmodeller för studier av interaktion. Här uppmärksammas vikten av ett multimodalt perspektiv på interaktion då språkliga, kroppsliga och materiella aspekter får betydelser för analys och tolkning av olika fenomen.

In the modern era during the twentieth century, much has been written about teaching and learning. However, much of this seems obsolete in our contemporary hybrid society. Interaction design focuses on theory-informed, collaborative work between researchers and the users, as in the example of museums below or, as in a school context, between teachers and learners. Learning Design Sequences is a theoretical map for the purpose of analyzing significant incidents in learning process, in a process of meaning-making. The chivalrous reward chart is designed as a printable sheet presenting the 12 “rules” of the chivalrous code multimodally, in writing and images. Pelf was navigating through space making selections from the modes and media available in the exhibition, in a process of meaning-making. Language, mathematic symbols and musical notation are examples of sign systems often regarded as objective knowledge representations enabling us to communicate our understanding of specific aspects of the world.

Many museums and galleries today address migration stories in their exhibitions. In this article, a methodological framework based on a multimodal social semiotic approach is used for the analysis of the meaning potentials of exhibitions. A particular focus is directed towards how the conceptions of migration, borders and memory represent themselves multimodally, in terms of general structure, orchestration of semiotic resources, the use of figurative language and explicit/ implicit values. This methodological framework helped uncover hidden messages of interests and ideologies in different exhibitions. The study contributes to research on multimodal texts and exhibitions, as well as educational research.

This article presents a meta-interpretative synthesis of contrasting research studies about methodological and theoretical challenges for Swedish preschool teachers in systematic quality development work. The first challenge involves an awareness of producing documentation from different levels of preschool work. The second challenge concerns critical reflection of multi-documentation. The third challenge focuses on an awareness of theoretical approaches which can allow a deeper understanding of quality within preschool work. This article proposes that, even if there are tensions and epistemologically different interests in many of the methods of evaluation used in preschools today, there is a need for comprehensive methods and recurring reflections that places preschools’ pedagogical work in an ongoing process of developing quality.

Vänbok till Staffan Selander. Språk på svenska och engelska.

As a consequence of the international movement of school accountability, the Swedish school system has gone through comprehensive changes over the last two decades. New curricula, a new grading scale, earlier use of grades, and more explicit assessment standards show this. The purpose of the research was to investigate how teachers of two different school subjects - music and history - deal with the emphasized insistence on evaluations. How do teachers balance between assessment of learning for administrative purposes, and assessment for learning for development purposes? The question also raises issues of recognition of learning and the teachers’ chances of adhering to the learner’s interests. What is recognizeds as signs of learning? Observational and interview data was obtained from a series of lessons in Year 6. Besides the differences between the two subjects, the research implications are that summative assessment dominates and multimodal signs of learning tend to be neglected, when increased assessment is demanded.

Contemporary teaching and learning imply that pupils encounter curricular content in the form of multimodal representations such as films, museum visits, power point presentations, role play and digital games etc. Verbal language is no more the only mode for knowledge representation and meaning-making. This means a new demand for teaching (and assessment), since the school tradition is heavily based on verbal language and assessments of verbal representations. In this article, we will present an analysis of the use of resources and different media in classroom work about the Middle Ages, and discuss the need for the development of assessment tools.

This article poses questions regarding learning and representation in relation to young children's popular culture. Focusing on gender, the article builds on multimodal, social semiotic analyses of two different media texts related to a specific brand and shows how gender and gender differences are represented multimodally in separate media contexts and in the interplay between different media. The results show that most of the semiotic resources employed in the different texts contribute in congruent ways to the representation of girls as either different from or inferior to boys. At the same time, however, excerpts from an encounter with a young girl who engages with characters from the brand in her role play are used as an example of how children actively make meaning and find strategies that subvert the repressive ideologies manifested in their everyday popular culture.

Goal-oriented learning seems to be a ubiquitous demand for almost all kind of play activities today. This demand, the article argues, is related to a specific neo-liberal discourse about the “superchild”. The article shows how this discourse is articulated multimodally in a number of media texts aimed at young children based around a trans-medial brand; Mike the Knight.

This article poses questions regarding learning and representation in relation to young children's popular culture. Focusing on gender, the article builds on multimodal, social semiotic analyses of two different media texts related to a specific brand and shows how gender and gender differences are represented multimodally in separate media contexts and in the interplay between different media. The results show that most of the semiotic resources employed in the different texts contribute in congruent ways to the representation of girls as either different from or inferior to boys. At the same time, however, excerpts from an encounter with a young girl who engages with characters from the brand in her role play are used as an example of how children actively make meaning and find strategies that subvert the repressive ideologies manifested in their everyday popular culture.