This study explores how digital media plays a role in creating a sense of authenticity in museum exhibitions. Cultural-historical museums deal with artifacts, memories, and events from past eras. It is the curator’s task to create reliable connections to history by organizing resources to present credible narratives and bring the past to life. Digital technologies like virtual reality and immersive projections may offer new rhetorical tools to foster a sense of connection to history. Although earlier research has centered on notions of aura and authenticity (e.g., Benjamin, 2008; Aravantis and Zuanni, 2021; Bolter et al., 2021; Latour and Lowe, 2011), our study contributes to this literature by approaching these ideas through the framework of social semiotics. It does so by examining how authenticity is constructed digitally and rhetorically through the use of semiotic resources like color, contextualization, light, and depth (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021). These resources act as validity markers, indicating the represented level of authenticity. The study is part of a larger research project on the effects of digitization on exhibitions and visitor engagement, conducted in collaboration with staff from five museums in Sweden. Data includes photographs and video recordings of museum exhibits containing digital applications and transcripts from workshops with museum staff.

This special collection features articles from participants at the 8th International Designs for Learning Conference, “Conceptualizing Design in Research and Developmental Work”. The focus of the conference and the special collection is the versatility of the design concept, which extends from the theoretical and analytical level to the more practical level, where it can be used to shape concrete activities and tools for multimodal communication, teaching, and learning.

The conference was held in August 2024 at Stockholm University’s Department of Education. A total of 43 abstracts, workshops, and symposia were presented, and delegates were invited to submit a full paper to the Designs for Learning Journal. Eight articles were finally included in the special collection and are presented below.

The article traces and examines the history of some of the specimens used in teaching in Swedish secondary grammar schools from the mid-nineteenth century up until today. Previous research has focused on empirical analyses of teaching materials and school collections, while this paper adds new knowledge to the history of education using an object-biographic approach. Whilst focusing on the history of two distinct specimens, a bird and a small collection of butterflies, and how these were circulated and recontextualised, the paper raises wider questions about how different actors are involved as meanings and knowledge content change. Through the object-biographic approach, we show that the use of natural history objects was multifaceted and had several purposes at the same time, ranging from research to education to providing status or being a hobby. The use of natural history specimens changed with reforms of the Swedish educational system. New teaching materials and new educational ideals were developed, and from 1960 onwards the importance of these objects decreased. We show how the specimens have taken on new meanings today as selected and displayed museum objects.

This article examines the dynamic relationship between schools and museums during the 1930s. It investigates how elementary school teachers and students became a prioritized audience for Nordiska museet in Stockholm by analyzing the foundation of the museum’s teaching department (“undervisningsavdelningen”) and the work of the museum’s first lecturer Ernst Klein (1887–1937). Material from the museum’s archive reveals how a mutual beneficial relationship was established between the museum and local schools in the 1930s and how visits to the museum gradually was included in the elementary school curriculum. The study cast new light on the reciprocal development of the two institutions in the interwar years and stresses the importance of local circumstances and individual actors’ initiatives when analyzing past teaching practices.

Att bli lärare är en grundläggande och heltäckande bok som blivande lärare kan använda genom hela utbildningen. Den ger en aktuell bild av läraryrkets möjligheter och utmaningar men blickar också framåt.

Boken består av fem olika delar som var och en är kopplade till aktuell forskning:

DEL 1 På väg mot lärarrollen (ledarskap, bedömning och inkludering)DEL 2 Lärandeperspektivet (hur kan man organisera meningsfullt lärande?)DEL 3 Professionen (uppdrag, framväxt och kunskapsgrund)DEL 4 På väg mot framtiden (hur organiserar vi en skola för framtiden?)DEL 5 Tre internationella utblickar (Finland, Chile och Singapore)Sammantaget ger texterna hela den bredd av kunskaper som en lärare behöver tillägna sig under utbildningen. Boken är ett stöd i den utbildningsvetenskapliga kärnan (UVK) men fungerar också som en första introduktion till de ämnesdidaktiska frågorna. Mot bakgrund av covid-19-pandemin och en ny läroplan (Lgr22) finns i den tredje upplagan tillägg bland annat gällande datalitteracitet, normkritisk pedagogik, kunskapsområdet sexualitet, samtycke och relationer samt riktlinjer för betygssättning.

Boken kan användas som en ingång för att få översikt över ett område och som en uppslagsbok för olika centrala frågor som kan dyka upp under utbildningens gång. Till boken hör också digitala case som ger möjlighet att öva förmågan att samtala med en elev, en lärarkollega eller en förälder om olika dilemman som blivande lärare kan komma att möta i sin framtida yrkesutövning.

This special collection contains articles from participants in the 7th International Designs for Learning Conference – Remediation of Learning. The focus of the conference and the special collection is on current changes in the designs of information and knowledge representations and their consequences on how we understand and evaluate learning and communication.

The conference was held in May 2021 and due to the pandemic it was run digitally through Zoom. A total of 43 abstracts were submitted, and all delegates were invited to submit a full paper to the Designs for Learning Journal. Five articles were finally included in the special collection and are presented below, along with an acknowledgement of the abstracts presented during the conference.

Digitization has had a transformative impact on museum practices in recent years, including the work with exhibitions (cf. Arvantis & Zuanni, 2021). Digital media make it possible for more people to take part in cultural heritage, by making available objects and remains of a sensitive nature that could not otherwise be shown publicly. It opens up new forms of communication that can make it possible for groups of visitors with different needs to learn about the past (cf. Galani & Kidd, 2020). New questions can potentially be asked, when cultural heritage is made digital. In this presentation we introduce an on-going research project on digital materialities in museum exhibitions. The aim of the project is to produce knowledge about the effects of digitization in relation to the exhibition medium and to visitors’ meaning-making. It does so by investigating how digital technologies are employed and how specific applications may contribute to learning in a selection of museums, such as Vrak – The Museum of Wrecks and The Vasa Museum. Focusing on materiality, the project seeks to understand the affordances for meaning-making of digital media in relation to the epistemological commitments of modes, media and the material expression (cf. Bezemer & Kress, 2016; Lindstrand, 2022). The presentation will include examples from a series of case studies from different museums that are part of Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums. We will share some preliminary findings. The project is funded by The Swedish National Heritage Board and will run for three years, 2023-2025. The project aims to contribute to research by bringing the fields of digital humanities and education together, by investigating how analogue and digital technologies intersect when representing cultural-historical objects, and how specific applications create conditions (and perhaps even limitations) for learning and meaning making. 

This paper aims to introduce educational history to multimodal studies by combining a source-oriented approach with multimodal social semiotics. We trace the role of objects and collections in teaching and learning, and focus on Strängnäs Secondary Grammar School in Sweden 1830-1960 as a case example. Closely examining original documents, remaining physical objects, and examples of their situated use as represented in photographs and drawings, the paper provides a nuanced perspective on how object-based pedagogy was applied. It traces how objects and artefacts were incorporated into the school’s collections, by the actions of different actors, in processes of recontextualisation and framing. The activity types that we use as examples, include: drawing lessons in art, weapons practice in physical education, plant collecting in botany, and map exercises in history. These examples show how objects and their meaning potential were used in teaching and learning, and how they realized certain discourses of schooling. Based on our examples, we can see how educational discourses such as progressivism came to have different impact in different subjects. While an authoritarian and national discourse prevailed in art and physical education, a scientific and progressive discourse seem to have been established in botany and history. By combining multimodality with historical research, we can understand meaning-making within a larger context of sociocultural practices and sociopolitical forces.