Every classroom is affected by institutional conditions as well as curriculums and guidelines that steer and set standards for education, which are connected to and affected by ideas created and negotiated at the national level and within the EU and the OECD. Pedagogy within classrooms, including that of the two Swedish classrooms discussed in this paper, consolidates these levels. Drawing on a larger classroom study[1] the paper focuses on teachers and students use of textual resources offline and online over one year in two Grade six classrooms. It is within the practices of classrooms that students’ participation, and abilities to understand, question and draw conclusions from text content can be supported and developed. ‘Mainstream’ classrooms of today are characterized of standardized curriculums and of diversity in relation to student’s multilingual and cultural backgrounds as well as of a plurality of texts offline and online. Students with different backgrounds, needs and resources, are in the middle school years facing demands of coping with more compact texts of subjects’ content, including more of specific academic language (Gibbons, 2009). Basic and functional literacy cannot be dismissed, but needs to be integrated with meaning-making and critical analysis of text content (Cummins 2001; Luke & Freebody 1997; Janks, 2010; Langer 2011; Schmidt & Skoog, 2017; Schmidt & Skoog, 2018). This study draws on Alexander's (2001) methodological framework regarding teaching talk and learning talk together with Cummins (2001) framework for successful academic learning. Cummins (2001) and Alexander (2008) shed light on the need for students to learn about subject content while at the same time having access to subject-specific ways of understanding, talking, reading and writing where critical approaches are embedded. Reading texts in active and critically reflective ways relates to critical literacy and to the research drawing on this concept (e.g. Janks, 2010; Comber, 2013, 2016). In Sweden, new knowledge demands regarding digital competence are to be implemented 2018/19. The reasons for these changes in the national Curriculum Standards for Compulsory School are, in short, to enhance the student’s abilities to use and understand digital systems and to relate to media and information in critical and responsible ways[2]. These changes create increased challenges for teachers and students to sift, interpret, evaluate, question, compare and judge the trustworthiness of media. To understand who has produced a text and with what purpose, and how to evaluate this information, are part of fundamental critical approaches (Janks, 2010). This paper focuses on teachers’ and students’ use of textual resources offline and online during 24 lessons over one year in two Grade six classrooms in the subject areas of Information and Commercials and Laws and Rights. Our focus is on in what ways these textual resources and their content are introduced and drawn upon, and which approaches of criticality, including source criticism, that are integrated. Since digital resources, compared with printed resources, bring about other ways of producing and using texts in terms of multimodality and hybridity across time and space, this challenge the conditions for in what ways teaching and learning is carried out in classroom practices (Kress & Selander, 2011; Walsh, 2008). We ask:
- What textual resources are included?
- In what ways are these resources introduced and used?
- What approaches of criticality emerge?
- Do any differences emerge when comparing digital and printed resources?
[1] This paper is part of the larger project 'Understanding Curriculum Reforms - A Theory-Oriented Evaluation of the Swedish Curriculum Reform Lgr 11', funded by the Swedish Research Council.
[2] https://www.skolverket.se/skolutveckling/resurser-for-larande/itiskolan/styrdokument