Doing co-constructing the learnable: how do cross-aged children co-construct the learnable in a joint activity

From an ethnomethodologically/CA inspired view learning can be conceived as “a jointly produced and publicly inspectable activity of the participants, both in everyday environments and in educational settings” (Wagner/Pekarek Doehler 2011). Participants display that they are doing learning, i.e. they make learning intersubjectively recognizable and accountable to each other (see Wagner 2011).
In this paper we shall focus on the multimodally organised negotiation of what the participants take to be the learnable (see Zemel/Koschmann 2014, Koschmann et al. 2014). By tackling two video- recorded empirical cases , we show how two pairs of cross-aged children situatedly co-construct a learnable while being engaged in an open-ended cooking/baking activity. Our previously designed methodological tool (Arend et al. 2014) allows us to grasp and to visualise the co-construction of joint comitment and mutual understanding within joint activity. Our analyses will show how the children take on different epistemic roles establishing one of them as more knowledgeable with regard to the matter in question (e.g. the ongoing elaboration of dough), and how they jointly produce the learnables as instantiated in the material world in a way that could not be specified a priori.
Thus this paper attempts to make a contribution to recent discussions about an emic approach on learning and provides an opportunity to present and to discuss the multimodally embodied co- construction of a learnable in its deepened around view visualisation.
References
- Arend, B., Sunnen, P., Fixmer, P., Sujbert, M. (2014). Perspectives do matter: ‘Joint Screen’ a promising methodology for multimodal interaction analysis. Classroom Discourse 5 (1), 38-50.
- Koschmann, T., Zemel, A., & Neumeister, M. (2014). “Case n’ Point”: Discovering Learning in
the Nonce. In Joseph L. Polman et al. (eds.), Learning and Becoming in Practice: The International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2014 (pp. 551-557), Vol. 1, 551-557.
- Wagner, J./Pekarek Doehler S. (2011). Unpacking learning in interaction [Panel Abstract]. Program Book of Abstracts of the 10th IEMCA Conference, p. 96.
- Wagner, J. (2011). Proceeding from process to product: “Doing learning” and having learned” while exploring material objects [Abstract]. Program Book of Abstracts of the 10th IEMCA Conference, p. 98.
- Zemel, A., & Koschmann, T. (2014). ‘Put your fingers right in here’: Learnability and instructed experience. Discourse Studies, Vol 16(2), 163-183.