18. Malardalen university (MDU)
Mälardalen University is a state university college established in 1977. There are 15,000 students enrolled. There are 1080 employees of which 750 academic staff, with 42 professors (of whom 6 are women). Didactic research is one of the research subjects in focus in the research strategy together with Real Time systems, Process & Resource Optimization, Innovation & Design, Health, Working life & Welfare, and Environmental & Energy Technology. The teaching program is linked to science education research and didactics in the School of Education, Culture and Communication. Educational research is performed by 6 professors and 15 senior lecturers. All research performed at Mälardalen University is under sustainability control, and MDU was the first university in Europe to be certified according to ISO 14001 standards, and still holds this certificate. The University participates in some ten national research schools and conducts graduate studies within the technological branch of scholarship. A Master program in Didactics starts in 2010. Task allocation The main tasks attributed to MDU in WP6 are work with teacher collaboration groups in a sustainable way, bridging the gap between science teachers and science education research. By giving seminars and training packages for teachers in schools, MDU will disseminate research informed knowledge from dialogic teaching and teaching for education for sustainable development. MDU will produce video-films from teaching sequences when teachers collaborate in learning studies, and produce teaching materials providing dialogic teaching and teaching for sustainable development. MDU will, within WP6, focus on collaboration with the University of Leeds, University of Aarhus, the Hacettepe University and Technion (Israel) and will disseminate and interchange teaching sequences whilst comparing experiences. We will contribute to papers about dialogic teaching and education for sustainable development. We are able to start teacher collaboration groups in primary, secondary and upper secondary school, and between pre-service and in-service teachers. Staff members who will be undertaking the work: Margareta Enghag, Dr., is Senior Lecturer and researcher in the field of communication in the classroom. She studies discourse patterns during small group works and laboratory work. She has special interest in student ownership of learning, seen as actions of choice and control, both in groups and as individuals, and in student-generated questions. She has on-going research with teacher collaboration in learning studies for physics in schools with dialogic teaching. She has been a visiting academic at the University of Leeds. She works with new physics courses aiming to include education for sustainable development and dialogic teaching into the classroom. Per Sund PhD gives courses in the teacher programme about the education for sustainable development approach (ESDA). Susanne Engström teaches technology didactics in the teacher program, and her PhD studies are in approaching sustainable energy into school science courses. Birgitta Brorsson, Dr., is Senior Lecturer and an expert on teacher evaluation of students' written texts. Her focus is making teachers become more aware of the importance of writing discursive texts and the specific genre features of different subjects as well as of the learning potential that writing represents. She works with teacher focus groups in schools.
Indicative Allocation of Person-Months: MDU name role PM (total 18) Margareta Enghag MDU leader, dissemination and collaborative activity with UNIVLEEDS, JyU, AU 6 Per Sund Production of 6.5, 6.6, dissemination 4 Susanne Engström Production of 6.5, 6.6, dissemination 4 Birgitta Brorsson Production of 6.5, 6.6, dissemination 4