Dutkanjoavkkus lei ovdanbuktin álgoálbmogiid oahpahuskonferánssas (World Indigenous People's Conference on Education) Adelaides, Australias 28.9.2022. Dás vuollelis lea ovdanbuktima čoahkkáigeassu.
Evaluations expressed in children’s use of the Sámi language The presentation is based on a research project dealing with how Sámi-speaking children’s ethical judgments are expressed in their language use, and how their relation to moral reality is expressed verbally in terms of modality. This project is interdisciplinary, including fields of research such as Sámi linguistics, philosophy, education and literature, and its aim is to provide new knowledge about how language learning and moral reasoning take place in Sámi-speaking children aged five to seven.
Student teachers training to teach grades 1-10 have been included in the research to ensure a research focus in master’s degree programmes, and research has been conducted in collaboration with the practice schools and kindergartens. Student teachers have been active in planning and implementing data collection.
The data has been collected from interviews and conversations between children and student teachers in Sámi kindergartens and schools. The interviews and conversations have used stories that contain ethical dilemmas that offer different solutions and justifications for the solutions. The stories have been dramatized and practised by the student teachers, and then presented to the kindergarten and school children. The presentation and the discussions have been audio recorded.
Priváhta govva
Govven: Máren Palismaa
In order to elucidate the range of choices for interpretation and presentation of the stories, artistic research has been conducted in the preparation of storytelling and yoiking (traditional Sámi way of singing). Examples of the articulation of different interpretations will be performed and demonstrated during the presentation of the paper.
Preliminary assumptions about Sámi children’s moral and ethical reasoning are presented on the basis of their answers and responses to stories containing dilemmas presented in dramatized narratives by student teachers. The children in this study are expected to have acquired most of the important grammatical structures in their first language. They have both linguistic and cognitive skills to express different degrees of possibility, probability and certainty. In the presentation, we will examine whether the children choose inflectional means, lexical elements and/or different syntactic structures to express epistemic modality.