Fritjof Sahlström

The Price of Participation: Teacher control versus student participation in classroom interaction

The aim of this article is to further the understanding of how content is learned in classrooms, using conversation analysis (CA) and variation theory for the analysis. Classroom video materials from two mathematics classrooms in Sweden and the USA are analysed. A result of the study is the empirical explication of the tension between the need for teacher content control and the simultaneous contradictory need for student participation in educational interaction. The article also develops variation theory toward a more sensitive understanding of the sequential implications of interaction and suggests CA can benefit from more systematic understandings of content orientation in interaction. In doing so, the presumed gulf between acquisitionist and participation understandings of learning is challenged.

Learning to Fly--The Progressive Development of Situation Awareness.

The aim of this article is to argue learning as interaction, and how processes of learning a content as constituted in interaction, can be approached analytically and theoretically. Within aviation, the concept of situation awareness (SA) is used to describe a pilots capability of correctly perceiving and interpreting a situation, and of understanding what the implications are. We investigate how SA is constituted in interaction, through the theoretical and methodological perspective of conversation analysis. In the analysis, we focus how a student develops SA as an intrinsic part of learning how to fly an airplane.

Learning as Longitudinal Interactional Change : From Other-Repair to Self-Repair in Physiotherapy Treatment

The aims of this article are to address how learning is constituted and can be studied as a phenomenon in interaction and to discuss how teaching and learning are related. Theoretically, the article argues for and discusses constraints and affordances for relating sociocultural understandings of learning as changing participation to conversation analysis understandings of participation. The data material consists of longitudinal video recordings of authentic physiotherapist–patient encounters. This study traces the progressional change in the formation of movement behavior through detailed analysis of repair and correction practices. The results show a change in participation over time through capturing changes in the repair and correction organization participants use to resolve troubles with understanding and movement performance. In sum, there is a successive change for the patient from other- to self-initiated repair and correction, and from other- to self-repair and correction. The findings relate to the notion of educational scaffolding and have implications for teaching professions.

Conversation Analysis as a Way of Studying Learning—An Introduction to a Special Issue of SJER

Underlying all the work in this special issue of Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research is the assumption that learning is constituted in interaction between people, and between people and the environment in which they are situated. In accordance with this general argument, it is in principle of interest to study interaction when interested in human development (cf. Enfield and Levinson [2006] for an extended argument for this position). The five articles (Hellermann; Martin; Melander and Sahlström; PiirainenMarsh and Tainio; Vehviläinen) contain empirical work showing how learning, proved to be both conceptually and empirically elusive, can be conceptualised and subsequently studied as an empirical phenomenon, as something material found and constituted in interaction between people. The findings and the position argued for by the papers is further developed in two commentary articles (Carlgren, Marton). A basic, initial position is that if learning is understood as situated or constituted in interaction, research on interaction will provide for better understandings of learning. This is not news, as indicated by a large number of recent scholarly texts, not least in the Scandinavian countries, where a sweeping breakthrough of social constructionist understandings have paved the way for various ways of studying the ‘‘social’’ part of ‘‘social constructionism’’ (for examples in English, cf. Cekaite, 2006; Evaldsson, 2005; Sahlström, 1999, 2002; Tholander, 2002). Although by no means a coherent body of research, what the above studies share is a commitment to detailed and careful analysis of how the social fabric in educational settings is organized, and a commitment to analysis of what constraints and affordances there are for participation in the studied contexts. Studies such as these certainly have added to understandings of how interaction in learning situations is organized, but at times the precise relationship between ‘‘what’’ is constructed (be that learning, identity, or gender) and how this is accomplished has been uncomfortably vague (cf. Sahlström [1999] for a vivid example). The authors of the articles in this issue have committed themselves to moving beyond these principal relationships between interaction and learning, instead demonstrating how learning is constituted, both moment-by-moment in interaction (Melander & Sahlström; PiirainenMarsh & Tainio; Vehviläinen) and over time (Hellermann; Martin; Melander & Sahlström) Adding to the articles, the aim of this introduction is to briefly describe and situate Conversation Analysis (CA) in relation to educational research for readers with more prior exposure to learning research than to CA, and to sketch, also in a brief way, the relationship of CA to research on learning. In this way, the introduction will also provide a framework for reading the individual articles, in which, because of constraints on space and because of the many shared points of departure for the articles, the authors have been Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research Vol. 53, No. 2, April 2009, 103–111

Learning how to be a tähti: A case study of language development in everyday situations of a 7-year-old multilingual Finnish child

The aim is to study how a multilingual girl develops her understanding and use of the Finnish word tähti “star” and, in so doing, to contribute to the understanding of children’s language learning in multilingual settings. In recent understandings of learning and development, interaction is considered as constitutive of learning. Learning is not restricted to educational settings but occurs in different contexts. The multilingual setting in this article is a Swedish-language preschool class in a Finnish-dominated area in Finland. The analytic work is done within conversation analysis. The empirical material used consists of weeklong longitudinal video recordings of a 7-year-old multilingual child’s, Sara’s, everyday interaction at preschool, at postschool programs, and for large parts of the day at home. Through an analysis of 14 consecutive situations in which the word tähti is used, the article shows how Sara is being taught, how she learns, and how she uses a new concept. Furthermore, the analysis shows how her understanding of tähti is local and situated and does not extend beyond the contexts of use in the peer group. Through demonstrating how a close analysis of interaction can empirically substantiate claims of language learning, the article also contributes to the general understanding of language learning in multilingual settings.

“I Don't Know What You're Looking for”: Professional Vision in Swedish Agricultural Extension on Nature Conservation Management

Abstract The article addresses how farmers learn to appropriate the gaze of the ‘new farmer’, by describing how farmers and advisers in the field discursively construct farmland under scrutiny for inclusion in government support schemes. Based on the findings, recommendations for successful agricultural extension are presented. The methodological perspective is an interaction analysis based on video recordings of advisory encounters. The analysis is focused on the professional vision of the participants. The results show how the participants manifest different professional visions when they walk through the same piece of land. Despite an interest in contributing to the encounter, insufficient access to relevant resources is an obstacle for the farmer. Due to asymmetries between the participants, the professional vision of the adviser becomes the dominating and acknowledged one, but the prerequisites are insufficient to afford learning by the farmer. To overcome this dilemma, we encourage reflection on the role of the adviser by challenging the frames for participation in extension encounters.

The Truth Lies in the Detail

“In my view, the truth lies in the detail,” Graham Nuthall argued in an article published in 2005 (p. 926), after he had passed away. In the article, Graham sharply criticises myths of teaching and learning. He argues, on the basis of the shift from learning as something induced by teaching to learning as something induced by student activities, that there is a need to closely examine the content and concepts to be learned and how they occur sequentially in a student’s experience.

Reviews : Eder, Donna, Catherine Colleen Evans & Stephen Parker: School talk. Gender and adolescent culture New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995

Eder, Donna, Catherine Colleen Evans & Stephen Parker: School talk. Gender and adolescent culture