Didactic Classroom Studies
Short description
Didactic Classroom Studies (DCS) promotes research with a simultaneous focus on teaching, learning and content dimensions, offering a critical understanding of how these interrelated processes flow towards specific educational goals.
More information about Didactic Classroom Studies
Didactic Classroom Studies focuses on teaching and learning in relation to didactical consequences these processes may offer. DCS promotes the concepts of “didactic” and “classroom studies” together through empirical research to offer an understanding of issues and challenges in classrooms as well as problematizing the complex relations between teacher, learner and content.
The research context of DCS is not limited to classrooms in schools; rather the term “classroom” here represents an integrated context for organized and intentional teaching and learning. Generally, the research in this environment is practice oriented and conducted through various platforms and collaboration projects with schools and other educational communities. DCS also places an emphasis on teacher education research both at pre-service and in-service levels.
About 50 members are involved in DCS including professors, docents and lecturers as well as doctoral students.
About the research
Didactic Classroom Studies (DCS) promotes research on teaching and learning with specific content. A simultaneous focus on teaching, learning and content dimensions offers a critical understanding of how these interrelated processes flow towards specific educational goals. Content orientation in didactic classroom studies means that many research projects can be described as subject didactic research [ämnesdidaktiska] focusing on teaching and learning related to content areas in for instance Mathematics, Sciences, Social Sciences, and Languages.
By bringing scholars with different subject interests, the research environment promotes the study of teaching, learning and content from a comparative and collaborative perspectives. In addition, DCS gathers researchers who put general aspects of teaching and learning in the foreground such as assessments, literacies and relationships.
Theories and methods
Various didactical, social-cultural, cognitive and humanistic education theories provide perspectives for research carried out in DCS including (but not limited to) learning communities, hermeneutics and phenomenology, elaboration theory, teacher cognition, socio-semiotics and literacies and cognitive theory of multimedia learning.
The researchers in DCS use both qualitative and quantitative research methods as well as mixed designs including, but not limited to, intervention and design-based research, survey, case study, phenomenology, ethnography, discourse analysis and post-qualitative research.
Activities
The activities in this research environment involve invited presentations, text seminars and development of new research projects around the common interests of the participants.
