Högskolan i Skövde

This paper sheds light on how aesthetic judgments govern actions in education for design literacy and sustainability behaviours. Educational material is examined by asking: (1) What meanings regarding becoming a sustainable consumer are made available to students in the educational material? (2) How are these narratives communicated to change students’ behaviours? The material in question consists of 17 design projects intended to be used in the Swedish school subject, Educational Sloyd. Using a practical epistemological analysis, two ways of becoming a sustainable consumer are identified: to have fun and to feel clever. The paper also shows how social marketing is used as a strategy in communicating how to change student behaviours. In the discussion, we turn to design literacy research to discuss the results from an educational perspective.

The chapter suggests and illustrates a methodological approach for understanding movement learning in order to explore and clarify the relation between how people learn and the environment in which they learn. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and socio-cultural approaches, a practical epistemology analysis (PEA) with focus on aesthetic judgments is suggested as a way of developing a valuable approach for understanding learning in different social and cultural contexts. The approach is illustrated by an exploration of movement learning in educational settings such as skating as a child, playing exergames in school, playing international elite football, or running marathon as an aging man. As can be seen from these illustrations, the significance of aesthetic experience for learning is visible in the narratives. The fact that aesthetic judgments are used normatively to decide what is to be included and excluded in movement learning, and also that aesthetic judgements are used to make relation between the individual and his/her life as a whole, facilitates an understanding of the relation between the learner and the life situation in which learning is situated.

The development of a re-understanding or re-investigation of body pedagogy is currently prominent in the field of physical education (PE) and sport pedagogy. This goes for the learning of movement capability and health but also in relation to outdoor education (OE). The latter a criticized area for having a one-size-fits-all approach to curriculum, with less attention to what to learn in OE, including aspects of everyday practices of being outdoors. The aim of this study was to explore students aged 15 years, and their meaning making of being outdoors expressed in written stories about a favorite place. Two school year eight classes in a Swedish compulsory school situated in an area with high diversity participated. Through this theory-generated empirical study, written stories were explored as one way of evaluating students' meaning making of outdoor places. By using practical epistemology analysis (PEA) to examine experience operationalized through aesthetic judgements attention is paid to the relation between the student and the situation (their favorite place). The analysis make it possible to discern a sense and meaning making of “being” outdoors as an embodied experience, as a relational whole of the self, others and the environment. Descriptions of aesthetic experiences were analyzed leading to dimensions of environing described as “calm and privacy,” “community and togetherness” and “feelings and senses.” A favorite place was by all students described as a very local and nearby place accessible in everyday life. The analysis generated understandings of feelings of “fulfillment” and different embodied experiences of what an encounter with an outdoor place or being outdoors could mean. Furthermore, how personal and diverse the meaning making place tends to be and how experience and habits contribute to the students' creation of microenvironments. Dimensions of environing become part of an embodied process. The analysis of the written stories calls for an alternative understanding of what OE can or should consist of. The findings encourage teachers and researchers to consider alternative understandings and practices of OE that highlight and educate students' overall embodied (individual) experiences and learning in OE and PE.

The consumption of clothes is increasing every year, which is a huge challenge for sustainability. Educational Design research have shown that the challenge cannot be solved unless we have critical literate consumers. By making the question of sustainable clothing a matter for critical design literacy, the aim of this case study is to examine the meaning making of an educational material produced for teachers in design and craft education. The educational material, entitled Sustainable Fashion, consists of 17 design projects and the analysis is made with the aid of practical epistemological analysis with a specific focus on aesthetic experience. Two ways of becoming a sustainable consumer of fashion have been identified – to have fun and to feel clever – and these two meaning making activities incorporate certain actions of what it means to be a sustainable consumer. From a critical design literacy perspective, these ways of becoming a sustainable consumer are crucial to acknowledge, as they include (and exclude other) specific sustainability actions. 

Background

Previous research on inclusive physical education (PE) has often focused on pupils with visible physical disabilities and how best to facilitate and adapt PE so that they can play an active role in the educational situation. Many lessons about inclusion have emerged from this important field. However, less is known about more ‘invisible’ variations. In Sweden, many pupils who are diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), are integrated into mainstream classes. These pupils are often more sensitive to demands and stressful situations and struggle to decode social interactions. When it comes to lessons in PE, little is known about how pupils with NDD experience the educational situation and what they need to do to be successful in PE.

Purpose

The aim of this article is to explore what PE practices become in classes in which pupils with NDD are integrated in terms of inclusion or exclusion processes. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, we suggest a transactional perspective on inclusion. This facilitates a non-dualistic exploration of inclusive PE and makes it possible to take the experiences of pupils with NDD and their peers into account.

Methods

In the article we use a transactional framework with a focus on experience, meaning-making and habits using the following analytical questions: (i) What are the experiences of integrated PE? (ii) How do these events appear as inclusive? (iii) How do they appear as exclusive? The data generation consisted of 9 field observations and 13 individual interviews with pupils aged between 10 and 11 years in three classes in two different schools in one municipality. The municipality was awarded a grant by the Swedish authorities to work towards the creation of more favourable school situations for pupils with NDD. Three classes in which pupils with NDD diagnoses were integrated in PE were selected.

Findings

The study identified four PE practices in which inclusion and exclusion processes were prominent: (i) to organise, (ii) to cooperate, (iii) to sweat and (iv) to win. ‘To organise’ is a comprehensive practice that is transactionally identified and foregrounded by teachers’ actions. The other three are embedded in the practice ‘to organise’, which foregrounds pupils’ actions. The study shows that pupils are included in a certain kind of PE practice when it becomes an organised practice of sweating, competing and cooperating.

Conclusion

The study reveals that some of the inclusive practices that are designed to support pupils with NDD exclude other pupils with or without NDD. Accordingly, working in an integrated way can be both inclusive and exclusive. It would thus seem that successful inclusive education in PE is as much about group dynamics as about ‘individual pupils with problems’. In order to achieve inclusion, teachers need to focus on actively communicating with pupils, colleagues and parents, on how and what to teach and on what students are supposed to learn.

Research has pursued salutogenic and narrative approaches to deal with questions about how everyday settings are constitutive for different health practices. Healthy behavior is not a distinguishable action, but a chain of activities, often embedded in other social practices. In this article, we have endeavored to describe such a chain of activities guided by the salutogenic claim of exploring the good living argued by McCuaig and Quennerstedt. We use biographical material written by Karl Ove Knausgaard who has created a life story entitled My Struggle. The novel is selected upon an approach influenced by Brinkmann who stresses that literature can be seen as a qualitative social inquiry in which the novelist is an expert in transforming personal life experiences into common human expressions of life. The study illustrates how research with a broader notion of health can convey experiences of health, thereby complementing (and sometimes challenging) public health evidence.

Digitisation is an ongoing process in society as well as in physical education (PE) and research has identified digital technologies as a trend that influences the PE curriculum. A number of studies have explored the topic from different angles, although very few have empirically looked at the critical aspects of digitised PE in educational practice. This is particularly striking when it comes to issues of gender. Against this background, the aim of the paper is to explore gender habits in a digitised PE practice. A transactional approach, drawing on the work of the pragmatist feminist Shannon Sullivan, is used in the study. The data consists of video- and audio recordings of ongoing video gaming organised by the PE teacher. A practical epistemology analysis (PEA) is employed to explore the teenagers’ gender habits in depth. In the analysis, it is clear that the use of exergames in school reinforces traditional gender habits, rather than weakens them. This is particularly evident when the teenagers play in single sex groups. This is also the case when playing in mixed gender groups, although here some changes in gender habits can be identified. However, gender habits are not easily transformed and the findings support the argument that deliberate teaching is important when issues of gender are raised in practice.

This article explores learning during game-play of a snowboarding video game intrigued by questions raised in the wake of the increasing mediatisation and digitisation of learning. Correspondingly, we answer to calls for more suitable metaphors for learning to cater for the entangled learning processes that changes related to the increase of digital media may infer. Using a short term sensory ethnography approach, we elaborate on the idea of multisensory emplaced learning and propose an organic metaphor – mycorrhiza – to both methodology and learning. Mycorrhiza refers to a symbiotic relationship between fungi and roots of plants in its environment where fungi are the visible effects of the mycorrhiza. The metaphor provides a way to start to unpack sensory, visual and embodied aspects of learning in the complexities of the digital age. By elaborating on the mycorrhizaic concepts fungus, soil, growth, mycelia and symbiosis we show three interrelated ways of moving through this game: (i) a social and cultural route, (ii) a competitive route, and (iii) an experiential route. With help of the metaphor we discern the symbiotic relations between what appeared in our empirical material as visual and other human and non-human aspects of emplacement.