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 learning and assessment, and video data of classroom interaction are subjected to detailed analysis. The findings document the consequences of decoupling production and assessment practices. The analysis show that written texts and multimodal texts have different statuses in the project because of how they are assessed and that this has consequences for students' participation as learners. In addition, the analysis shows how students position themselves differently towards resources that are intended to help them in summative assessment situations. We discuss issues that teachers may reflect upon when planning and executing multimodal composition in schools.
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 of central concepts in dialogical theory, we outline three analytical resources to examine and identify cultural constructions of learning selves. The first is narratives, the second categories, and the last inscriptions. By working through an episode of interaction, where a teacher and his students discuss and negotiate the use of a particular learning resource in school, we demonstrate how the analytical resources enable us to study the process through which particular versions of learning selves are put together and contrasted. Finally, we discuss the implications for educational research on learning and identity.
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 about what types of resources teachers view as relevant in this type of instructional work. In this article, we analyze video data of student-teacher interaction in 43 lessons, which was collected when following 4 lower secondary teachers over one academic year. The analysis is based on a sociocultural perspective of learning and teaching in which the focus of analysis is on what kind of everyday experiences teachers orient to when supporting student's reasoning about academic matter. The findings show that the resources that teachers orient to can be grouped into five categories, which represent different resources as part of the students' everyday life: (1) Teachers orienting to characteristics of the local community, (2) Teachers orienting to examples from everyday practices, (3) Teachers orienting to personal issue, (4) Teachers orienting to concrete objects and (5) Teachers orienting to knowledge from traveling abroad. These categories show variation and multiplicity of resources that teachers use when contextualizing instruction, and the implications of this multiplicity are discussed in the article.
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