EVALUATION COMMITTEE

The Faculty Council has appointed the following adjudication committee to evaluate the thesis and the associated lecture: 

• Dr. Karen Gravett, Surrey Institute of Education; University of Surrey, England.
• Prof. Bosse Bergstedt, Department of Education, ICT and Learning; Østfold University College, Norway.
• Dr. Tatiana Chemi ,Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University, Denmark (Chairman).

Moderator:
Prof. Sine Agergaard, Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University.

ABSTRACT

Based on a posthumanist and performative account that questions the humanist assumptions undergirding many contemporary understandings of learning, teaching, pedagogy, and education, the main aim of this project has been to explore what thinking with agential realism about problem-based learning (PBL) might do to the theory, practice, and research on this approach to learning. As a nonrepresentationalist approach, agential realism radically reconfigures many, if not most, of the ontological, epistemological, and ethical premises on which modern western ideas about space, time, matter, agency, structure, subjectivity, objectivity, causality, relationality, aliveness, discursivity, and ethics, among others rest. To explore and address the issues raised by thinking with agential realism about PBL, three rounds of fieldwork with three groups of undergraduate students from three different study programs were conducted. While the fieldwork involved a combination of conversation and observation in addition to experimentation and speculation, the field notes that resulted were subsequently used to produce impressionist tales in an attempt to produce uncomfortable and unconventional writing to be used as a foundation for creating the kind of cartography that is able to critically confront taken-for-granted notions by disrupting the conventions of representation, interpretation, and subjectivity that usually inform qualitative inquiry thereby creating room for maneuver so that newness might emerge both in terms of the thinking and doing of PBL. In this way, thinking with agential realism about PBL contributes to providing possibilities for thinking and doing PBL differently. In that sense, this project has sought to build a platform for thinking anew about PBL in higher education so that perceptions and practices, theories and research on PBL may be re-cast and re-imagined, thereby opening possibilities for rendering those involved in PBL capable and response-able.