Lärarens väg genom klassrummet – lärande och skriftspråkande i bänkinteraktioner på mellanstadiet

This dissertation takes an interest in learning and literacy in everyday interaction in the middle year classroom. It is based on a view of learning as emically construed in social interaction. Conversation Analysis (CA) and the concept of epistemic stance are used as a theoretical framing for describing in what way, and with what verbal and non-verbal resources, learning is achieved in desk interaction, i.e. when students work individually at their desks while the teacher moves around to support them. Almost without exceptions, these interactions involve the use of texts. Hence, they are viewed as situated literacy events that are part of the institutionally shaped literacy practices as described in the field of New Literacy Studies.

The empirical data for this study comes from a video-ethnographic study in two middle year classrooms in grade four and five. Out of a total of 70 hours of video documentation, a selection of interrelated desk interactions was made. These were analyzed as learning trajectories and compared from two perspectives. Firstly, learning trajectories when a teacher repeatedly interacts with the same student about the same learning content were analyzed. Secondly, the changes in the teacher’s epistemic stance when interacting with different students about the same learning content in repeated desk interactions were studied.

The analysis shows that the teacher’s trajectories through the classroom build infrastructures for learning, enabling differentiation between students within the constraints and possibilities of evolving routines. Learning in desk interaction mainly relies on the use of text references to index previously shared knowledge. Epistemic topicalizations and recurring semiotic fields are shown to be crucial resources for both maintaining and changing the epistemic stance of the participants towards the learning content constituted in interaction. A conclusion is that the shared experiences of teachers and students in collective literacy events serve as important resources for learning in individual desk interaction.