Spänning och motstånd: en studie av samtal i karaktärsämnet på ett elprogram

This study examines how teaching is interactionally accomplished within a vocational program for students studying to become electricians. The data is drawn from video recordings of classroom lectures as well as hands-on instructions at construction work sites. The analysis of the classroom explores how the students exploit poetics and sequential structures of language including especially the Initiative-Response-Evaluation sequence to support, challenge or undermine teaching and to build alliances with or against peers. The analysis of the construction work sites focusses on how the teacher and the students use multimodal resources to create situations for teaching and learning. The analysis of the classroom focusses on how students launch different initiatives that compete with the instructional activities in the classroom. These initiatives emerge from and reveal the broad meaning potential inherent in linguistic forms. The analysis shows how structures and roles that are constitutive of the classroom as well as the emergent professional identity of the electrician provide resources for maintaining, challenging or even dissolving instruction.

The analysis of the construction work site shows how artefacts, postures, talk, and spatial configurations are handled in relation to place, mobility, and action. In stark contrast with the classroom, students at the construction site compete for the teacher’s attention and assistance. The analysis includes descriptions of collaborative moments between the teacher and the students as well situations where the teacher is interrupted and challenged by the students.

Three frames are deployed to convey meaning a professional, a mundane, and an educational. The professional frame involves higher or lesser degrees of manifested professional visions on part of the teacher as well the students. The mundane frame is characterized by playfulness which in turn can jeopardize the professional agenda. Instructions provide a tool for re-establishing an instructional setting where workrelated tasks can be executed.