Presentation

Balli Lelinge has a PhD in pedagogy, particularly interested in special didactic against teaching, content inclusion and classroom methods. He is a university lecturer at Malmö University in Sweden. His thesis is titled "Collaborative professional development for content inclusive education."

His current research field is collaborative professional development (CPD) for content-inclusive education, which takes practice-based professional development (PBPD) as its point of departure. He is interested in how the community of practice can be understood as an essential aspect of developing an inclusive and accessible learning environment from the teachers’ perspective regarding the school’s social context and the treatment of the content knowledge. Within the framework of the dissertation's studies, the results show that the cyclical classroom models, Lesson and Learning study, have contributed to the teachers gaining an in-depth understanding of which aspects have been particularly successful in developing their teaching design. Another factor is that teachers are given the opportunity to develop their ability to analyse how teaching can be planned and implemented to identify what contributes to inclusive teaching, where the content and learning situation is in the foreground. This change has meant a higher focus on the availability of teaching content to all students, compared to a previous focus on individual students’ need for special support. The present dissertation results can be seen as a contribution to practice-based professional development research where researchers’ and teachers’ joint competence is the basis for systematically and structurally approaching the object of learning, thereby reducing the gap between theory and practice. Variation theory and community of practice are of particular interest.

He is a co-author of three peer-review articles: 1. Lelinge, B. & Alwall, J. (2022). School improvement and teachers’ collaborative professional development for inclusive education: A Swedish case. International Journal of Whole Schooling, 18(2), 28–54. 2. Holmqvist, M. & Lelinge, B. (2021). Teachers’ collaborative professional development for inclusive education. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 36(5), 819–833 3. Lelinge, B. & Svensson, C. (2020). Teachers’ awareness and understanding of students’ content knowledge of geometric shapes. Problem of Education in the 21st Century, 78(5), 777–798.

And author of the peer-review article: Lelinge, B. (2022). Predicting challenges to student learning in a learning study: Analysing the intended object of learning. International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print.

The Swedish school Journal Skolporten teachers' panel designated my thesis as particularly important (Skolporten magazine no. 6/2022), published on 14 December 2022. Their justification reads: "In social media, critical voices are often heard about the unreasonableness of being able to meet all students' needs for special support and adaptations. The teaching panel sees this classroom research as an excellent example of a way out of this dilemma; a community of practice where we instead talk concretely about what is our professional object – the students' learning.” (Link to article https://www.skolporten.se/fou/okat-fokus-pa-undervisningens-innehall/).

He have a licentiate degree in pedagogy in 2010 at Malmö University titled Class Council - a social space for democracy and education (Lelinge, 2011). This study problematises how a democratic form of teaching can become exclusive and thus counteract the intentions of inclusion for those students who have difficulty integrating into the form of structured conversation.

Publications