Public Defence: Line Ingulfsen

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Trial lecture - time and place

“Visual representations, knowledge domains, and interdisciplinary teaching-learning: imperatives for future research and practice"

Adjudication committee

• 1^st Opponent Professor Karen Littleton, Open University, United Kingdom 
• 2^nd Opponent Senior Lecturer Mona Lundin, University of Gothenburg
• Committee Chair Professor Alfredo Jornet Gil, University of Oslo

Chair of defence

Professor Doris Jorde, University of Oslo

Supervisors

• Professor Anniken Larsen Furberg, University of Oslo
• Professor Andreas Lund, University of Oslo

Summary

This article-based thesis examines students’ and teachers’ shared sensemaking with visual representations in the context of classroom-based activities. The aim of the thesis is to contribute to the understanding of how visual representations become sensemaking resources in the context of student-teacher interactions and how teachers facilitate and guide students’ engagement with visual representations towards specific ends. Taking a sociocultural and process-oriented approach, the thesis contributes to existing research on students’ engagement with visual representations in the fields of science and history education, which is dominated by studies that focus on the outcomes of rather than the very processes through which students and teachers engage with visual representations.

The thesis consists of three empirical studies, each scrutinizing teachers’ and students’ engagement in a specific type of collaborative activity designed around visual representations: generating and analyzing real-time graphs during lab work in science (Study I), constructing visual representations based on analyses of expert representations in science (Study II), interpreting historical images in history (Study III). Transcribed video-recordings of student-teacher and student-student interactions constitute the main data material. Employing the analytical procedures of interaction analysis, each study examines in depth how teachers and students talk and interact around visual representations, and how their talk and interaction develops, moment-to-moment and over time in the course of instructional trajectories.

The thesis contributes to existing research on teaching and learning with visual representations in three ways. Firstly, by demonstrating the significance of the support provided by the teacher at the intersection of available resources in the setting. Secondly, the thesis provides insight into the different functions that visual representations serve in student-teacher interactions. Third, the thesis also documents the strategies deployed by the teacher when facilitating and guiding students sensemaking processes in activities designed around visual representations. The thesis work was carried out at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo.