Anna-Lena KempeSenior lecturer

About me

I am an associate professor of education doing analyses of learning from societal and discourse perspectives as well as detailed breakdowns of how learning content is represented in various learning situations/artefacts. I focus on how the interactional patterns and power relations shape learning. I study how the use of different modes of communication affect learning and interaction. I have a particular interest in the integration of different disciplines and strands of research that in various ways describe, explain, and interpret the conditions where people can thrive and learn but sometimes do not learn what was intended. My background is in music and I used to be a professor at the Royal College of Music. I am a leader of the research group DaC, Didactics as Communication.

I teach philosophy of social science with a particular focus on how educational phenomena are delimited philosophically as well as being studied empirically in different research traditions. The traditions conceptualize "knowledge", "skills", "communication", "learner", "teacher" etc. in quite different ways which will shape the research process and how new educational knowledge is being developed.

I have a particular interest in the continuous movement in our culture(s) between how we come to declare something as “knowledge”, "skills", "“previously held knowledge”, "miss conceptions", “prejudice” or even “fake news”.  I often think about how and why we so often interact in particular ways rather than others:  we seem to be captured by the implicit historical norms and fairly seldom reflect on their social consequences in terms of the conditions for learning and meaning making.  How can we question what is taken for granted and explore the space of potential actions open to us? How can this process inform school development?