Clas Olander

PhD, Senior Lecturer 
                                        
Phone: 46 (0)31-786 2063    

E-mail

Research interests

My research interest concerns learning, teaching and interactions; mainly in science education. Learning (something) has conceptual, epistemological and ontological aspects and I am interested in how these aspects are constituted, externalised and interact in classroom settings. Then language have an important mediating role in students sense-making and I explore social languages, for example the ways that colloquial and scientific language may lead to a new hybrid language, an interlanguage. In short I am interested in scientific literacy.

Teaching

I teach in both the general education field and in subject didactics, for student teachers in biology, chemistry and general science.

Key words

Learning, teaching and interaction; science education; scientific literacy; social languages; professional development

Selected publications

Olander, C. (2010). Towards an interlanguage of biological evolution: Exploring students’ talk and writigs as an arena for sense-making. PhD-thesis. Göteborg studies in educational sciences 288. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. http://gupea.ub.gu.se/dspace/handle/2077/21558

Olander, C. & Ingerman, Å. (2010). Students’ language use when talking about the evolution of life – negotiating the meaning of key terms and their semantic relationships, Nordic Studies in Science Education, 6(1), 92-106.

Olander, C. & Ingerman, Å. (2010). Exploring interlanguage – Supporting students' talk as an arena for learning. Presentation at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) Annual International Conference: Research into Practice – Practice Informing Research. Philadelphia, US. Part of the invited symposium ESERA at NARST: Research into Practice: Practice Informing Research: European Dimensions

Olander, C. (2009). Teaching biological evolution: internal and external evaluation. Nordic Studies in Science Education, 5(2), 171-184.

Olander, C. (2008). The reasoning of students aged 11 -16 about biological evolution. In In M. Hammann, M. Reiss, C. Boulter & S. Tunnicliffe (Eds.), Biology in Context, Learning and teaching for the twenty-first century. (pp. 64-74). Institute of Education, London.