Seminars & Activities

1. The CCD international seminars of relevance for communication, culture and diversity (always in English)
2. The CCD working papers seminars (in English or Swedish)
3. Humanities Forum seminars (Humanistiskt forum - in Swedish)
4. The DoIT seminars (DoIT - Delaktighet och Inkludering Tankesmedja [the Participation and Inclusion Think Tank], most often in Swedish)

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Universal Design for Learning

Summary
This talk will look at one type of diversity that can be found in every classroom: Neurodiversity, i.e. the diversity in cognitive processing.
Using the neurodiversity paradigm, we start from a perspective that values this diversity, and that acknowledges the challenges that arise when people of a minority neurotype have to deal with environments and activities that were tailored to the needs of neurotypical people.

I will discuss how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can help make classrooms and classroom tasks more accessible for learners of different neurotypes, focusing especially on providing options for sustaining effort and persistence, for self-regulation and for executive function.

Throughout, I will draw on the voices of neurodivergent learners, former learners, and educational experts, including interviews from the ELLeN project, to illustrate the points made and also to show the breadth of experiences and opinions within the neurodiversity community.

Dr. Jules Buedgens-Kosten is a teacher educator and researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany) and a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at UMBC. Their primary research focuses on inclusive education in the EFL context, including with a focus on technology, and on computer-assisted language learning, especially from a multilingual lens. They are part of the ELLeN project, which uses inquiry-based learning in teacher education focusing on neurodiversity. and language learning.

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The French Revolution and religious change through the lens of social emergence theory

Manuel Stadler is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Religious Studies, Leipzig University (Germany). During his presentation, he will delve into the French Revolution through the lens of social emergence theory. The French Revolution is often interpreted as the founding event of the modern secular nation-state, built up upon the guiding principle of laïcité, a strict form of separation between the church and the state, which is generally misunderstood as a categoric split between religion and politics. The religious politics during the French Revolution had a significant impact on the perception of history as the unfolding of reason and rationality, leading to the construction of a perfect society based on natural laws. In this talk Stadler wants to challenge the classical narrative of the French Revolution as a process of secularization and instead use a Durkheimian emergence theory approach to interpret the empirical sources. Emergence theory presupposes that society is more than the sum of rational acting individuals but can be described through concepts of collective psychology. To operationalize emergence theory, he will focus on empirical sources stemming from the period of the French Revolution, uncovering changes in power relations and social structures. The aim of his presentation is to use religion as a heuristic concept to explain how the change of power relations is connected to the emergence of new forms of collective memory.
Discussant: Peter Karlsson

Högstadielevers upplevelser av att öva muntlig språkfärdighet på målspråket med konversationsagenter

Elin Ericsson, fil. doktor i tillämpad informationsteknologi med inriktning mot utbildningsvetenskap, presenterar sin nyligen försvarade avhandling. Den handlar om AI-baserade dialogsystem som möjliggör muntliga konversationsövningar i verklighetsnära situationer för elever att öva på det språk de studerar. De genomförda praktiknära studierna har en utgångspunkt i etablerade andraspråkinlärningsprinciper såsom att lärande sker i social interaktion med möjlighet till att använda språket i en trygg miljö och att få feedback. Resultaten visar att elevernas självrapporterade upplevelser varierade mycket kring hur de socialt relaterade till konversationsagenterna, med allt från ingen relation alls till att uppleva dem som mänskliga och aktivt deltagande i social interaktion. Denna sociala dimensionen visade sig vara viktig för den sammanlagda utbildningsupplevelsen. Lärare behöver därför ha kännedom om de olika faktorerna bakom de stora individuella skillnaderna i elevernas upplevelser som påverkar den sammanlagda utbildningsupplevelsen i dialogsystemet med konversationsagenterna. Överlag upplevdes lärandeaktiviteten som lätt, rolig och trygg för att på ett meningsfullt sätt öva på att hålla igång en dialog och öva uttal på målspråket, som komplement till andra metoder.
Chair: Ylva Lindberg