About Rose
Rose (Research on Subject-specific Education) is a multidisciplinary research environment with a special interest in subject-specific – learning and teaching in subjects. It includes how the content of teaching is selected and how different teaching methods affect and shape the subject content, from primary school to higher education. The focus is on what happens in the classroom, and on the interaction between teachers and students in the learning process. An important part of the research is to contribute to theory and practice development in schools and teacher education.
The starting point for the research within Rose is that questions about socially, economically and environmentally sustainable societal development need to be posed in relation to teaching and learning. The broad, multidisciplinary subject didactic approach creates opportunities to meet the education sector's need for broad, research-based models for today's global challenges. The research environment's composition of expertise from several fields also creates the conditions for developing an in-depth comparative subject didactic approach to systematically research differences and similarities between subjects. An important aspect of the research environment's work is to develop and contribute to establishing a common subject didactic language, by working with theoretical concepts such as powerful knowledge, transformation and epistemic quality.
Rose has a strong position in subject didactic research, both nationally and internationally, as well as a well-developed collaboration with leading research actors in the field. The research environment works closely with the university’s teacher education programmes and three subject-specific research centres at Karlstad University:
• CSD, (Centre for Social Science Didactics )
• CSL (Centre for Language and Literature Education) and
• Smeer (Centre of Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education Research).
The researchers who are active in Rose are also involved in the research centres.
Rose includes 9 professors, 11 associate professors, 28 senior lecturers, of which 5 are employed by school principals, and 5 postdocs, of which 3 are international. There are several educational initiatives underway within Rose, and the research environment has 42 doctoral students, of which 22 are in graduate schools with external funding.
Rose is central to building scientific excellence, developing the research environment and maintaining the infrastructure of subject didactic research at the university. Rose is also important for the connection to research in teacher education The applications for external research funding that Rose has been involved in have had a high approval rate. Currently, around 30 externelly funded research projects are underway within the research environment. So far, Rose has raised almost SEK 100 million in external research funding.