Interactional Ethnographic Potentials to Uncover Moment-by-Moment and Over-Time Interactions in Invention Education

• In Event: Research Methodologies for Studying Problem-Based and Project-Based Learning

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Interactional Ethnography (IE) offers empirical and systematic ways for uncovering in-time and over time complex processes and practices of inquiry-based learning. To demonstrate the methodological potentials of IE, we draw on a telling case in invention education (IvE) and examine adult expert mentors’ facilitation of the work of high school students engaged in the invention process.

Perspectives
Like problem- and project-based learning (PBL and PjBL), invention education focuses on learners actively engaged in solving ill-defined problems, usually with the facilitation and guidance of more experienced others. A central scaffold in the learning process is that of the instructor-as-facilitator/mentor. The instructor-as-mentor seeks to facilitate student-driven design processes through a variety of interactions, including listening and dialogue, modeling of reasoning processes, use of physical scaffolds, and sharing of information students have not yet learned in school. The balancing between assisting learners to articulate their thinking and direct instruction is important to IvE in which students work on developing prototypes to solve a real-world problem (Couch et al., 2019).

Methods
The paper demonstrates the methodological perspectives and analytic processes of Interactional Ethnography as an epistemology and systematic methodology. In analyzing classrooms as developing cultures, IE researchers examine learning as a longitudinal, active process enacted by teachers and students through their situated interactions and activities (Skukauskaitė & Green, 2023). IE pays particular attention to the languaging/discourse processes through which members co-create their languacultures (Agar, 2006).

Data Sources
We draw on archived video and audio recordings and artifacts from two sets of ethnographic records constructed over two years. The first set was generated by an InvenTeam of high school students and their teacher and consists of the team ethnographer’s notebook, video records, photographs, and publicly available records of the team’s activities. The second set of records includes six months of Zoom video recordings of weekly interviews with the teacher and the student ethnographer.

Results
Drawing on the two archives, we constructed a telling case focusing on an interaction between an InvenTeam student and two adult technical mentors. We drew on IE principles to demonstrate analytic steps and processes through which we developed an understanding of how in-time interactions between the student and the mentors were situated in the larger languaculture of the InvenTeam.

The telling case illustrates how IE develop systematic and nuanced insights through in-depth analyses of learning moment-by-moment and over time. The microethnographic discourse analysis within IE supports in-time analysis of how people construct meanings in groups through language-in-use.

Scholarly significance
With the telling case we illustrate how an in-depth, ethnographic over time and a micro-ethnographic discourse analyses of interactions can make visible the complexities of facilitation processes to address the often-mistaken perception of passivity of facilitators in inquiry- and problem-based environments. We offer IE as little known yet well developed and grounded empirical approach for studying complex in-time and over time processes of learning interactions and their consequential progressions.

Authors

• Audra Skukauskaite, University of Central Florida

• Michelle Sullivan, Wellesley College

• Susan M. Bridges, University of Queensland