Conference Agenda

The symposium is interested in the empirically observable tensions between the interaction order (Goffman 1983) necessary for the accomplishment of teaching practice and demanding subject-related tasks that potentially challenge an established order. Although the classroom interaction order is aligned with the organisational purpose of enabling (subject-related) learning, it also seems to function independently and even potentially in tension with challenging tasks: “it has a life on its own and makes demands on its own behalf” (Vanderstraeten 2001, p. 273). This tension is also noticeable if we look at teaching and learning practices from different research traditions and perspectives. Looking at a classroom from the perspective of the classroom order or either with a viewpoint of the generic quality of instruction (e.g., Praetorius et al. 2018), one may assess a particular lesson as efficient and well-managed. In contrast, the same lesson might appear profoundly deficient and inefficient from a didactical, content-based point of view (Breidenstein & Tyagunova 2020; Schlesinger et al. 2018). Findings from research on classroom management show that demanding and challenging tasks also pose greater difficulties for classroom management: “In response to these threats to order, teachers often simplify task demands or lower the risk for mistakes” (Doyle 2006, p. 111). Practices of classroom management and practices of learning operate thus in different logics and may be in tension with each other.

As a fundamental theoretical and methodological perspective, the symposium suggests to link classroom research to the international ‘practice turn’ (Schatzki et al. 2001). Theories of practice conceptualize social practices as an independent object of study and draw attention to the inherent logic, momentum, and stability of social practices. Furthermore, theories of practice are situated beyond structural or action theory and understand human actors more as participants than originators of practices. Practice theories are used in a variety of ways, particularly in qualitative teaching research, to examine school teaching as a context of related practices (Breidenstein 2021). However, standardized professionalization research also examines “core practices” of teaching (Grossman 2018). Taking the idea of specific logics and alignments of teaching and learning practices that may ‘interfere’ in various ways as a starting point, the symposium will discuss the relationship between the interaction order and subject-related teaching and learning. This may also be fruitful for the comparison of different subject related subject-specific didactic perspectives (Ligozat et al. 2015). The following questions can be addressed:

- How do different organisational frameworks of teaching influence subject-related learning processes?

- Which modes of dealing with the subject matter can be distinguished in the observed classroom interaction?

- How is subject-related school knowledge constituted in the ongoing interaction, considering various social and material dimensions of teaching and learning?

- How can we identify specific and general conditions and qualities of subject-related learning in the (video-based) observation of classroom interaction?

- How can we recognise processes of understanding or comprehension within classroom interaction?

In the part I of the symposium, we will discuss different theoretical and methodological frameworks for the comparison of teaching and learning practices between different subjects and educational contexts. The two projects from the Scandinavian QUINT context and the German INTERFACH project have in common that they aim at exploring the quality of teaching and learning by video recording and analysing the classroom interaction itself (see https://www.uv.uio.no/quint/; www.interfach.de). Research questions and methods differ in detail but may be brought into a productive dialogue.

This presentation explores dialogical, phenomenological, and post-human approaches to the study of teaching practices, asking 1) how the three approaches offer theoretical work that could inform the understanding of subject-specific teaching practices, 2) what the implications of the three approaches are for subject-specific research methodology (data generation and analysis), and 3) what the complementary potentials and limitations of the three approaches are for research and practice. So, a dialogical approach to teaching practices is indebted to the work of Bakhtin; it would emphasize a communicative, or semiotic, understanding of teaching that establishes the ‘utterance’s content-form-function triad’ as the minimum unit of analysis for understanding how subjects operate as dynamic ‘genres’ (Bakhtin, 1986; Ongstad, 2004). An indicative research example from subject-specific writing research is offered for illustration (Jakobsen & Krogh, 2019). While a phenomenological approach to practice acknowledges the communicative nature of teaching, it would also highlight experienced non-semiotic and non-cognitive aspects of teaching practices, which students and teachers are initiated to ‘do’ and ‘relate to’ in subject-specific practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014; Schatzki, 2017). Data from an intervention study focusing on the teaching of literature from a phenomenological perspective are used as an indicative research example (Elf, 2021). Finally, a posthuman approach to practices would also expect teaching practices to occur in communicative ways, however claiming that intentionality is limited, and that it is relatively unpredictable how practices will (un)fold (Deleuze, 2004). As recent video-based classroom research from L1/Language arts classrooms illustrate (eg. Jusslin, 2020), new methods for grasping the agentive role of non-human actors, such as technology and artefacts, may illuminate hitherto unknown affective aspects of subject-specific teaching practices. For discussion, I argue that all three approaches basically acknowledge that an interaction order of teaching and more specifically subject-specific teaching exists. However, the analysis of the three approaches’ illuminate that they rely on different onto-epistemologies that allow for different ways of exploring ‘the order’. This includes differences in assumptions on the way disciplinary communication works, how subject-specific practices are constructed, and the way the human subject or, more broadly, actors are looked upon as part and parcel of the practice of subject-specific teaching practices. As such, they may reveal quite different, yet equally valid, qualities of a subject that could guide teachers and teaching.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). The Problem of Speech Genres. In (pp. 60-103). Austin University Press. Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and repetition. Continuum. Elf, N. (2021). The surplus of quality: How to study quality in teaching in three QUINT projects. In M. Blikstad-Balas, K. Klette, & M. Tengberg (Eds.), Ways of Analysing Teaching Quality: Potentials and Pitfalls (pp. 53-88). Scandinavian University Press. Jakobsen, K. S., & Krogh, E. (2019). Writing and writer development - a theoretical framework for longitudinal study. In E. Krogh & K. S. Jakobsen (Eds.), Understanding Young People's Writing Development: Identity, Disciplinarity, and Education. Routledge. Jusslin, S. (2020). Dancing/Reading/Writing: Performative Potentials of Intra-Active Teaching Pedagogies Expanding Literacy Education Vasa. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Teaching: Initiation into practices. In Changing practices, changing education (pp. 93-126). Springer. Ongstad, S. (2004). Bakhtin’s Triadic Epistemology and Ideologies of Dialogism. In F. Bostad, C. Brandist, L. S. Evensen, & H. C. Faber (Eds.), Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture (pp. 65-88). Palgrave Macmillan. Schatzki, T. (2017). Pas de deux: Practice theory and Phenomenology. Phaenomenologische Forschungen, 2 24-39.

In classrooms of today, as teachers and students have become equipped with laptops, tablets and phones, social interaction no longer depends on face-to-face interaction alone but has become dependent upon communication mediated by screens of various sizes and shapes (Nilsberth et al., 2022). The constant connectedness and access to digital devices means that classrooms become hybrid spaces for social interaction where students participate in communications on a continuum between being on- and offline. From the perspective of interaction order, this has been shown to increase student participation in classroom interaction and release some of the general constraints related to traditional IRE-patterns in teaching (Sahlström et al., 2019). However, there could potentially be tensions between the teacher’s talk and the students focus with regard to subject content in the connected classroom. This presentation departs from ethnomethodological understandings of the classroom interaction order (Mehan, 1979), and address questions about how the conditions for creating shared focus towards subject content in screen-mediated plenary teaching can be investigated and understood. It is part of the larger video-ethnographic project Connected Classroom Nordic (CCN), where digitalisation of education is understood from a media-ecologic perspective in terms of changed environments and infrastructures where different media, analogue as well as digital, mutually relate to, remediate and affect each other (Strate, 2017). The analysis draws on video-recordings with multiple cameras from a Swedish lower secondary school, where the same class of students have been followed during three years in subjects of English, Swedish (L1), mathematics and social studies. The three cameras simultaneously followed the teachers, a focus student’s desk interactions and the focus students’ screens. Drawing on notions of creating shared epistemic stance in interaction, two examples of teaching instances, one in L1 and one in social science, were selected for multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, 2007). A specific focus was on how shared epistemic stance towards subject content were managed in interactions between teacher, student and different semiotic structures in the hybrid social environment of the connected classroom. Preliminary findings show how teachers’ use of pre-made presentations through for example Powerpoints or learning platforms might constrain possibilities to bring in students’ previous knowledge and questions in the shared classroom dialogue. On the other hand, students’ engagement with subject content sometimes increased on an individual basis as they could search for information or try out solutions on their own laptops, in parallel to the teacher’s talk.

Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, Stance, and Affect in the Organization of Activities. Discourse and Society, 18, 53-73. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Harvard University Press. Nilsberth, M., Olin-Scheller, C. & Kristiansson, M. (2022). "Transformation and literacy engagement through digitalized teaching practices in Social studies". In: Gericke, N., Hudson, B., Olin-Scheller, C. & Stolare, M. (2022). Researching Powerful Knowledge and Epistemic Quality across School Subjects, pp. 117-136. London: Bloomsbury. Sahlström, F., Tanner, M. & Valasmo, V. (2019). Connected youth, connected classrooms. Smartphone use and student and teacher participation during plenary teaching. Learning, culture and social interaction, 21, 311-331. Strate, L. (2017). Media ecology. An approach to understanding the human condition. Peter Lang.

Based on practice theory, the Graduate School "Subject-Specific Learning and Interaction in Elementary School" (Fachlichkeit und Interaktionspraxis im Grundschulunterricht, INTERFACH) understands classroom activities as "nexus of doings and sayings” (Schatzki, 1996, p. 89). This brings into view the empirically observable connection of interrelated behaviors (Breidenstein, 2021, p. 936), which is not limited to verbal language references. Instead, the bodies, material things, and spatial arrangement can also be studied as elements of the social enactment reality of teaching and learning (Schmidt, 2018). In this way, we consider school learning as an interplay of practices of interaction organization, structuring, and task processing. With the practices of interaction organization, not only the difference of the interaction roles 'teacher' and 'student' is constituted, but also 'teaching' as mediation and acquisition. At the same time, the general features of interactional order among participants characterize the performance and direct it towards the stabilization, and maintenance of interaction (Vanderstraeten, 2001). Practices of structuring, with which the teacher selects and tailors a topic or problem for teaching, contour the subject matter. Usually, the content of the lesson is presented to the students in the form of tasks. Task processing practices are characterized by routine and lean towards pragmatics and efficiency (Breidenstein & Rademacher, 2017; Lipowsky & Lotz, 2015). With regard to subject-specific learning, two central questions arise. First, it must be clarified how different practices relate to each other on the micro level and which tensions, overlaps, and alterations emerge in the situational interplay. If learning is thought of as complex integrative practices that are linked by a teleoaffective structure, the single practices might be the matter of transformation (Schatzki, 1996, p. 98). If one assumes that each practice has an inherent logic of its own, the interplay of practices can also be described with the metaphor 'interference' (Breidenstein, 2021, p. 934). Thus, the proficiency level associated with the way content is presented in the textbook or by the teacher could e.g., be 'superposed' by the pragmatics and efficiency of task processing (Martens & Asbrand, 2021). Therefore, secondly, it is necessary to ask about the consequences that the interplay of practices has for subject-specific learning. In the presentation, we explore these two questions and relate our reflections to a videotaped classroom scene from elementary school, which was collected as part of the INTERFACH video study. In terms of subject-specific learning, we refer to mathematics and to language learning.

Breidenstein, G. (2021). “Interferierende Praktiken. Zum heuristischen Potenzial praxeologischer Unterrichtsforschung.” Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 24(4), 933–953. Breidenstein, G., & Rademacher, S. (2017). Individualisierung und Kontrolle. Empirische Studien zum geöffneten Unterricht in der Grundschule. Springer VS. Lipowsky, F. & Lotz, M. (2015). Ist Individualisierung der Königsweg zum Lernen? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Theorien, Konzepten und empirischen Befunden. In G. Mehlhorn, F. Schulz & K. Schöppe (Eds.), Begabungen entwickeln & Kreativität fördern (pp. 155-219). Kopaed. Schatzki, T. (1996). Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, R. (2018). Praxeologisieren. In J. Budde, J.M. Bittner, A. Bossen & G. Rißler (Eds.), Konturen praxisttheoretischer Erziehungswissenschaft (pp. 20–31). Beltz Juventa. Martens, M., & Asbrand, B. (2021). "Schülerjob" revisited: Zur Passung von Lehr- und Lernhabitus im Unterricht. Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung, 11(1), 55-73. Vanderstraeten, R. (2001). “The School Class as an Interaction Order.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22(2), 267–277.