Collaborative Teacher-Researcher Interaction Analysis as Ethical, Practical, and Epistemological

• In Event: Expanding Participatory Video Analysis for Ecological and Ethical Validity

Abstract

Objectives.
In this methodological reflection, we focus on how findings derived from earlier interaction analyses (Author 1, 3, & Colleague, 2021) were later examined and extended by teachers reflecting on pedagogy in their classrooms. Building on a growing literature examining debugging discourse in computer-science education (e.g., Brady et al., 2020; Hennessy Elliott et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2021), we formed a learning community with middle school and elementary teachers that centered IA (e.g., Erickson, 1982), specifically around envisioning debugging pedagogy. We ask: How do teachers and learning scientists collaborate when using IA sessions as points of departure for developing new lenses on debugging pedagogy?

Theoretical framework.
In the spirit of participatory design-based research (e.g., Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we refrained from pre-defining problems of practice and techniques for teachers, instead centering their expertise. Like others, we move beyond assuming video analysis is the sole purview of researchers (e.g., Vossoughi & Escudé 2016; Hall, 2000). We made space in two ways for teachers to lead the analysis of video: (1) scrutinizing, validating, and/or pushing back on the prior IA findings, and (2) reflecting on the implications of IA findings for classroom practice.

Methods/data.
The learning community met 4 times over a 6-month period; 3 workshops centered IA and the 4th centered individual teachers’ pedagogical design conjectures (Sandoval, 2014). We identified 4 themes stretching across teachers’ conjecture maps, and a 5th theme was added during member checking. With these themes in mind, we then coded the video-recorded dialogue from each workshop to trace backwards (e.g., Morales-Doyle et al., 2022) and understand who introduced and shaped these themes. Authors 1, 3, and 5 designed and led the workshops and Authors 2 and 4 led the new data analysis described above.

Findings.
The learning scientists persistently foregrounded a theme central to their earlier IA work – that multiple debugging pathways are available to students and teachers – expecting this lens would be relevant across contexts. The teachers recognized this theme during the IA sessions, but resisted the cross-context assumption, conjecturing that students would be uninterested in alternative debugging pathways once they fixed their own code. Three teachers drew on existing values of community building in their classrooms, envisioning distinct debugging pedagogies but all sharing a vision in which student collaboration might provide a generative context to make multiplicity visible in the classroom.

Significance.
Interaction analyses move beyond making claims about discursive patterns in classrooms. IA further attends to what is relevant to participants in conversation (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). For this reason, teachers working with IA findings not only provide valuable expertise in bridging IA to classroom pedagogy, but they also sharpen the original IA findings, articulating when and why teachers and students might value the dynamics centered in IA research. We view collaborative IA as an ethical opportunity to level researcher-teacher power dynamics, a practical move to shape classroom teaching, and an epistemological opening to clarify the scope and substance of IA claims.

Authors

• David DeLiema, University of Minnesota

• Megan Goeke, University of Minnesota

• Jeffrey K. Bye, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Zack Carpenter, University of Minnesota

• Andrea Wilson Vasquez