This thesis examines how vocational education can gradually develop towards a dyslexia-friendly education. We have been concerned with how assistant technologies to a greater extent can be included as a resource and a support for the individual student in a dyslexia-friendly learning environment.
This has led us to the following research questions:
How can a dyslexia-friendly learning environment be designed for dyslexic students in vocational education based on the assumption that what benefits the student with special needs will benefit all students?
The object of this research is to develop a dyslexia-friendly learning environment where each student can compose his or hers personal digital learning environment with assistant technologies and where teaching supports the student in developing academic strategies. Academic strategies that can benefit everyone.
The project has been constructed as a case study, where we have collected data through observations interviews and thereby created insight into the digital learning environments of 4 dyslexic students. Based on the model of Rosemary Luckin's Ecology of Resources, an analytical model that can outline a student's available resources in the learning space, we have analyzed data and gained insight into how they use technology in their work as well as their digital skills.
We draw on theories and knowledge about dyslexia and dyslexic-friendly school development that focus on how assistant technologies can be implemented in the classroom practices. But technology is also considered from an organizational perspective where sociomateriality influences people's use of technologies at work.
Based on the case study design principles are developed that can be used as interventions for the next phase in a 4 years Educational Design Research project of the development of dyslexia-friendly vocational education. It translates into an important awareness and learning in this project that technologies must never become the student's sole project and that in a learning context, everything outside of technologies must also be designed for, as they cannot stand alone in the student's learning.