All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952680
ISBN 978–0–19–886931–3
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198869313.001.0001
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgements
This book reflects many of the conversations that have occurred at different times and places, in different classrooms, at research conferences, and with colleagues. I am indebted to all the teachers who opened up their classrooms and allowed me to video them teaching, or who offered up videos of their teaching. I am also grateful for the financial support from the John Fell Fund, which partly funded the collection of videos for one of the projects that the data and the analysis arose from. Many colleagues have made me stop and think; in particular, I would like to thank Nick Andrews, who helped me tease out what it was I wanted to say in my writing but has also done more to make me think about my practice as both a teacher educator and a researcher than anyone else. I would also like to thank Ann Childs, Katharine Burn, and Velda Elliott, who commented on drafts of my writing, prompted some of the insights I share in this book, and have continued to support me.
I would also like to thank my family, who gave me the space and time to write, and who inspired me to think more about mathematics teaching and learning. Through conversations with my husband, Jon, about mathematics and the teaching of mathematics, and the disagreements about how to teach quadratic equations to our son James during the pandemic, in which most of this book was written, I was able to see my data from different perspectives. Thanks also need to go to my children James, Daniel, and Lissie, who each gave me time to think and write, but also kept me grounded in the everyday. James, I am particularly glad that you were learning how to bake whilst I wrote this book.
List of Extracts
4-9 Working to avoid giving a negative evaluation.
4-10 Withholding an evaluation.
4-11 Correcting students’ language.
4-12 Deliberately initiating a repair.
4-13 Students mitigating their responses with accounts.
4-14 Point of contention does not arise.
4-15 Disagreeing with another student.
4-16 Adding an explanation when speaking out of turn.
5-1 Tristin in a K+ position.
5-2 Tanya in a K position.
5-3 Epistemic rights of the teacher.
5-4 Tyler introduces the objective as being about understanding.
5-5 Trish introduces the focus as being about understanding.
5-6 Tanya explains the aim of the task is to understand it.
5-7 Theresa introduces new task with a focus on understanding.
5-8 Todd asks students to check their understanding.
5-9 Thelma states that you understand if you can explain it. 83
5-10 Understanding check in Tyler’s lesson.
5-11 Understanding check in Toby’s lesson.
5-12 An understanding check with no opportunity for a response.
5-13 Does an understanding check require a response?
5-14 Understanding the meaning of isosceles.
5-15 Understanding the meaning of a procedure.
5-16 Explain so that we understand.
5-17 The point of doing this is to get you to understand.
5-18 I don’t understand your explanation.
5-19 Student unsolicited claim of understanding.
5-20 Student demonstration of understanding.
5-21 A student claim of not understanding.
5-22 Response to a demonstration of not understanding.
5-23 Trish pursuing an answer following ‘I don’t know’.
5-24 Tyler pursues an explanation.
5-25 Tom pursues an answer by re-explaining.
5-26 Trish responds to a student claim of not remembering.
5-27 Thea redirects the question following ‘I can’t remember’.
5-28 Reframing ‘I don’t know’ as ‘I don’t remember’.
5-29 Tim orienting to the role of expert.
5-30 Tyler models a problem-solving process.
5-31 Tim connecting problem to an image.
5-32 Todd models what it means to be convinced in mathematics.
5-33 Todd asks students what they understand by the word proof.
5-34 Tim revoices Steven’s answers.
6-1 Teresa prompting the use of multiples.
6-2 Teresa prompting further use of the word ‘multiple’.
6-3 Teresa encourages students to use mathematical words.
6-4 Tanya asks students to think about the problem differently.
6-5 Tyler asks students to think about the question as a problem.
6-6 Tara contrasts between two types of problem.
6-7 Solving a linear programming problem.
6-8 Tyler solving the problem with his class.
6-9 Tyler introducing the task.
6-10 Tyler continues by focusing on the second part of the task.
6-11 Tyler asking if the sequence stops.
6-12 Tim introducing a frequency table task.
6-13 Continuation of the introduction to the frequency table task.
6-14 Interpreting the values in a frequency table.
6-15 Is a parallelogram a trapezium?
List of Figures
2-1
5-1
1 Introduction
Learning mathematics is a social and interactional endeavour and is the raison d’être of mathematics classrooms. Learning happens through interaction, not only between students and the mathematics, but necessarily between the teacher and the students, and between students. By looking at interactions we are looking not just for evidence of what students have learnt, but for the process of learning itself.
Learning mathematics is complex. It is not a linear or stable process that is the same for all. Learning happens over time, and we are continually building and developing what some would call our ‘repertoires of meaning-making resources’ (Hall 2018, 34). Some of these repertoires will be enduring across contexts, whether that is across our everyday lives and the mathematics classroom, across the different mathematics classrooms we experience in school, or across the different interactional contexts within a particular mathematics classroom environment. Our interactions, however, are context-specific and vary depending not only on who we are interacting with, but also on the practices and purposes that underlie our interaction. The learning of mathematics is intersubjectively negotiated and happens through the interactional structures and practices examined in this book.
A great deal of educational research focuses on intervening to identify ‘what works’, yet many of these interventions have been less successful when they have been ‘scaled up’ into ordinary classrooms. There is a great deal of mathematics learning taking place in classrooms, but teachers, curriculum designers, and school leaders continually seek to find ways in which students can learn more and learn better. Mathematics education research that focuses on classrooms has undergone enormous interdisciplinary growth over recent years. However, classroom interaction, whilst structured and patterned, is essentially unpredictable and rarely stable, which poses a challenge to researchers concerned with the processes of learning through interaction that are contingent upon the actions of teachers and students. Researchers who are interested in students’ learning of mathematics come from a wide range of intellectual traditions and disciplinary roots, and the concepts, theories, and methodologies informing the research are drawn from fields as diverse as
anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, and psychology, to name but a few.
This book takes a Conversation Analytic (CA) approach, with its roots in sociology but also drawing from linguistics and psychology, to focus on mathematics learning as it happens in the mathematics classroom. It also makes use of other perspectives, bringing these perspectives into dialogue with one another, integrating what is already known within mathematics education research about the process of learning mathematics to contribute more than the sum of the perspective-specific findings. CA is data-driven and analytically inductive, and findings using this approach are often descriptive, with claims substantiated through the sharing of transcripts that make visible the teachers’ and students’ actions. Learning mathematics can be considered at three interrelated levels of social activity. CA focuses on the micro level of interaction within classrooms but can also reveal the influences of the meso level of the sociocultural contexts of schools and classrooms and the macro level of ideological structures on the site of learning itself. With CA the analysis is grounded on how teachers and students themselves experience mathematics classroom interactions, particularly their choices and actions within these interactions (Lee 2010).
The classroom context is dynamic and complex, and is shaped by the teachers and students interacting within it. It is also goal and task oriented in that interactions and activities are planned for and designed to enable students to learn or develop. These goal orientations combine with interactional patterns and structures, creating specific interactional contexts (Seedhouse 2019). This mathematics classroom context can also be examined at different levels. Whilst most research into the learning and teaching of mathematics within the classroom focuses on the context of the classroom itself, there are also sub-varieties of interactional contexts within every classroom. It is these interactional contexts where pedagogy and interaction come together. The pedagogical focus influences the structure and organization of the interaction, and the structure of the interaction constrains and affords the pedagogical actions. The goal of a mathematics lesson is likely to be to learn some mathematics, but there are likely to also be other goals in play, such as developing students’ social interaction skills, involving students in their own learning, or managing behaviour. The teacher and the students may or may not share these goals. These goals are achieved through teachers and students interacting with each other. Opportunities to learn mathematics vary between and within classrooms, and researching interactions enables us to better understand this process of learning. From a CA perspective, the nature of this
interaction is key, both in terms of what is said and how it is said. By analysing these interactions in detail, we can see how teachers and students achieve different things through these interactions and consequently how the learning of mathematics is co-constructed.
Conversation analysis largely focuses on identifying structures and patterns within these interactions. These patterns are often unmarked and considered by many to be common sense, yet by paying attention to these structures and patterns we can see how students treat aspects of classroom interaction such as what it means to know, learn, or listen. By explicating these structures or rules as many researchers describe them, we can see how teachers can use them to be more effective. These structures are not prescriptive rules, they are instead interpretive resources which both teachers and students can make use of.
‘Can you sit down please?’ is (usually) interpreted by students as a request to sit down, not a question requiring a yes or no response. There are lots of choices that teachers make when choosing both what to say and how to say it, and these choices are made both consciously and unconsciously. Skilful teachers can use these choices to their advantage. Consider the following requests: ‘open your book please’, ‘open your book thank you’, and ‘open your book’. The differences may seem purely semantic, or to relate solely to politeness, but saying ‘thank you’ usually follows the completion of a request and thus implies that the request will be granted. The ‘please’ also changes the imperative to a request. Conversation Analysis is interested in not only what is said in interaction but also how it is said and consequently what is being done with an interaction.
This book brings together a wide range of findings about mathematics classroom interaction that have resulted from studies using a CA approach. The research is based on three projects, all focused on mathematics classroom interaction over a period of ten years. Building on Mehan’s (1979a) and later Cazden’s (2001) detailed examination of common lesson structures and discourse patterns, I explore the structures and patterns that pervade mathematics classrooms and influence how students treat mathematics, the learning of mathematics, and the teaching of mathematics.
Conversation analysis focuses on talk-in-interaction, but this talk is not just considered to be about exchanging information; it is how we collaborate and mutually orient to each other in order to achieve meaningful communication (Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998). Teachers and students actively construct the mathematics classroom in which they interact. The analytic goal of CA research is to describe and make explicit the norms and procedures we use
that help us to make sense of each other when we interact. It is interested in how we achieve intersubjectivity.
At times, the analysis can raise more questions than answers. Some events, situations, or cases are very rare, or particular to just one mathematics classroom. Yet illustrating these situations can help us to ask those questions, seek the right data, notice the implicit, which can support our understanding of the interactions between the teaching and learning of mathematics. The same can be true of deviant cases. One of the challenges that arises from using naturally occurring data is that you do not necessarily get sufficient examples to be able to notice a theme or pattern, let alone be able to make any kind of generalisation.
Where the Data Comes From
The data used in the analysis that has led to this book, and that is used to illustrate the different patterns and structures of mathematics classroom comes from projects that I have led over the past ten years. The projects all include data that come from video recordings of mathematics lessons from a wide range of schools and classrooms in England, with students aged somewhere between eleven and eighteen. This resulted in forty-two videos of mathematics lessons or parts of mathematics lessons. In half these videos I was present, sitting in the back of the classroom with a video camera. In the other half the teachers themselves recorded their lessons or asked a colleague to record the lesson. Some teachers recorded just one lesson; others recorded five or six lessons. The teachers chose which class to video, which lesson to video and how to teach the lesson, and to this extent the data is naturally occurring. BERA ethical guidelines for educational research (BERA 2004) were followed, with all teachers and students consenting to the video recordings. At the time of the video recordings I was not working with any of the teachers in my capacity as a teacher educator, though in some cases I worked with the teachers before or after the video recordings were made.
The way that these videos are shared with you, the reader, is through transcription. Conversation Analysis has a long tradition and specific approach to transcription that I describe in more detail in Chapter 2, but there is a balance between precision and detail, and readability. Transcription is an analytic process (Ingram & Elliott 2019) and the analysis of the videos involved
transcribing and then watching and re-watching the videos alongside these transcripts. Whilst the examination of the patterns and structures I describe in this book resulted from detailed transcripts using the Jefferson transcription system (Hepburn & Bolden 2013) as illustrated in Extract 1-1, many of the details included in these transcriptions can make them difficult to read.
Since one of the main audiences for this book is researchers in mathematics education, perhaps with no experience of reading transcripts from CA research, I have in many places limited the transcription details included in the examples and illustrations to those details that are most relevant to the discussion at the time. So, for example, where pausing and hesitation are features of the analysis in focus, hesitation markers are included and pauses are measured to the nearest 0.1 s (using Audacity® version 2.2.2 and 2.3.2 (Audacity team 2018)). At other times, a simple verbatim transcript has been shared, as in Extract 1-2.
I have also used the convention of all teachers’ names beginning with T and all student names beginning with S. Teacher names are consistent across extracts and uniquely refer to one of the teachers who kindly recorded their lesson(s). Student names are only consistent within an extract, and as gender is not a focus of the analysis (that is, the teachers and students are not making the gender of students relevant to the interaction) in most cases the gender of the student pseudonym may not necessarily match the gender of the student in the video. There are two exceptions to this, where gender is oriented to by
Extract 1-1 Jefferson transcript of classroom interaction.
Extract 1-2 Verbatim transcript of interaction from Extract 1-1.
the teacher and the student, and in these two situations the gender of the student has been preserved.
Structure of the Book
Chapter 2 outlines the origins, principles, and tools of Conversation Analysis, as well as summarizing some of the key structures and patterns on interaction that are the building blocks of any CA analysis. There are several books available that outline CA in more depth for the interested reader, and I have been necessarily brief, focusing only on those aspects that are drawn upon in the rest of the book. More thorough recent introductions can be found in Sidnell (2010) or ten Have (2007), and for more detail and examples of CA in a range of disciplines and fields the Handbook of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell & Stivers 2012) provides a comprehensive overview.
The remainder of the book is split into two main parts. In the first part I focus on structural regularities and patterns, such as turn-taking and repair, that are used by CA researchers to examine interaction in a range of contexts, including classrooms (Gardner 2019; Macbeth 2004; McHoul 1978, 1990). Chapter 3 focuses on turn-taking and Chapter 4 focuses on repair and trouble in interactions. In each of these chapters I begin by examining the patterns of turntaking and repair within mathematics classroom interaction, highlighting structures that are consistent across interactional contexts, as well as exploring variations and the influence these have on the learning and teaching of mathematics. At the start of each chapter I have tried to stay faithful to the CA descriptive principles by describing the interactional and learning process as they are oriented to by mathematics teachers and students. Yet description can only take us so far. Towards the end of these chapters I also draw on research within mathematics education to consider how these structures influence learning, whilst still treating learning as a social accomplishment that takes place over time.
In Chapters 5 and 6, the focus shifts to the processes associated with learning mathematics and draws upon the tools of CA in order to contribute a more nuanced understanding of what it means to learn mathematics. The emphasis continues to be on how teachers and students themselves treat these processes as they interact in the mathematics classroom, but with a focus on the mathematical tasks, activities, and behaviours that students and teachers engage in. However, this in itself deviates from ethnomethodological principles, as teachers and students often do not make distinctions between
activities or actions being mathematical or not. The distinction between what is a mathematical explanation and what is an explanation is often not made in classroom interactions. My own experiences as a mathematics teacher, mathematics education researcher, and teacher educator are often drawn upon in the analyses in these two chapters.
Throughout I have treated learning mathematics as a way of acting: mathematics is something that you do, not just something you know.
2 Conversation Analysis
The analyses of mathematics classroom interaction explored in the following chapters all use Conversation Analysis (CA). In this chapter I will first describe the context in which CA developed as an approach to analysing interaction, which leads to some key basic principles that underpin any research using CA. Conversation Analysis is both a theoretical perspective on interactions and a method for researching these interactions. As a theoretical perspective it views each turn in interactions as social actions: it looks at what we are doing with what we say. In contrast to other popular approaches to studying interaction, it is not about what people mean in terms of what is going on inside of their head, but what they mean through what they do. Conversation Analysis focuses on the unfolding of the interaction. This includes what is said or done, but also how it is said or done. The questions driving the analysis are ‘Why that now?’ (Bilmes 1985; Schegloff 2007): why did a particular person say that, in this particular way, and at this point in the interaction. Furthermore, what is being done by how things are said, and how are the other people in the interaction treating what has been said? At the core of CA is a concern with how participants in interaction engage in intersubjectivity through the interactional work they do in producing their own turns at talk, which also makes visible their understanding of the turns of others (Heritage 1984). It is not a linguistic or cognitive analysis of what is being said, though CA can be combined with linguistic and sociological approaches, as I illustrate in Chapters 5 and 6.
This focus on how things are said leads to a focus on the structure or interactional architecture (Seedhouse 2004) of interactions. There are some wellestablished interactional structures of ordinary conversation that are also relevant to classroom interaction, and I will illustrate these below with data from mathematics classrooms. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on the structure of turn-taking, how different turn-taking structures exist within classrooms and the effects these have on mathematics classroom interactions. Conversation Analysis in particular distinguishes between ordinary conversation and institutional discourse, and these interactional structures demonstrate some fundamental differences in structure between ordinary
conversation and mathematics classroom interaction. The differences between ordinary conversation and classroom interaction reveal the underlying purpose of classroom interactions: learning. These differences include how turns at talk are allocated, how repair is conducted, how turns are constructed and sequentially organized, as well as the structure of instructions and explanations.
These interactional structures are often implicit and unnoticed by the people interacting, but they are what we use in our interactions to help us make sense of what is going on. It is also these structures that make the institutional contexts in which we are interacting, such as in classrooms, relevant to our analysis. Whilst this may seem a little odd, how context is treated within CA is markedly different from other discursive approaches, as I discuss below. In particular, we cannot claim that the fact that the interaction takes place in a classroom is relevant to our analysis unless the participants (usually teachers and students) show that it is relevant. One way in which they do this is by using the interactional structures found in classrooms that differ from other contexts, such as the structure of classroom turn-taking.
I often use the word ‘structure’ instead of ‘rules’. This is because, for many, the word ‘rule’ conjures up feelings of constraint and restriction. Rules are there to be followed. Some school rules are intended to help activities in school run smoothly, and others, such as those dealing with uniform, may be more about developing a sense of community and a school identity; they are expected to be held in respect and venerated, not broken. Those who break the rules can expect to be sanctioned. In a similar way, if you break the rules of turn-taking described below, you can also expect to be sanctioned. These rules also enable classroom interactions to run smoothly and accomplish a range of actions. Yet these turn-taking rules do not only constrain what can be done. They can also be resources that teachers and students can use. Whilst they act to constrain liberties, they serve as liberating constraints. There is no rulebook to be learnt. Instead these rules are often implicit and acquired over time through the interactions that they govern. In this respect, I prefer the terms ‘structures’ or ‘norms’. These terms convey the idea of patterns and routines that might be labelled as rules, but instead of breaking them, we deviate, adapt, and reconstruct them. Yet these terms can also be problematic. The word ‘norms’ is often used at a higher or macro level where we are referring to social or cultural norms, and has been used widely in the mathematics education literature, particularly since Yackel’s and Cobb’s (1996) demarcation of sociomathematical norms, but often without definition or consistency.
Structure describes an organization, configuration, and arrangement of different elements. In mathematics, structure is about relationships between mathematical objects, parts, or elements (Dörfler 2016). In the case of turntaking, it is the organization of who can take turns and what these turns can contain that is structured. Mason talks about structure having an ‘architectural quality’ (in Venkat et al. 2019), yet the metaphorical use of architectural here, or the idea of ‘interactional architecture’ as described by Seedhouse (2004), implies some kind of conscious design. Yet the rules described below and in later chapters have evolved over time. They have been established, negotiated, and re-negotiated, both consciously and deliberately and unconsciously without intention. Whilst these rules or norms are fluid, adaptable, and dynamic, there is also an underlying structure that enables classroom interactions to flow unhindered. It is this structure that is of most interest to CA researchers.
Conversation Analysis is often treated by many researchers as a set of methods for data analysis, but it is far more than this. It is embedded within a strong theoretical background and has a distinctive methodology. There are key principles that underpin all true CA research which drive the decisions around the research questions that can be addressed, what data will be collected, and how data will be collected, as well as how any analysis is conducted and reported. It is not just the analysis of conversation or a type of discourse analysis. Whilst there are particular structures that are often of interest to CA researchers, such as turn-taking and repair, there are also principles which guide study design, data collection, and the presentation of findings, which leads to many researchers using the term EMCA (ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis) to emphasize that their theoretical and methodological approach is underpinned by these principles. In the rest of this chapter I will outline these principles and their effect on research methodology. I will also outline the interactional structures widely used in CA research that are particularly relevant to the analysis of classroom interactions. Each of these are outlined in this chapter with illustrations from my own data collected from a range of mathematics classrooms. There are several interactional structures that I do not describe as they are not drawn upon in the analysis presented in the later chapters, but the interested reader will find many others in Schegloff’s primer (2007) and in The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell & Stivers 2012).
Origins of Conversation Analysis
Conversation Analysis was developed by Harvey Sacks and his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson at the University of California. Sacks was heavily influenced by the work of Harold Garfinkel (1967), a leading figure in ethnomethodology, and the sociologist Erving Goffman (1981), who studied symbolic interactionism. Goffman and Garfinkel developed a new approach to studying interaction by studying how participants themselves make sense of each other in interaction itself. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson then developed a method for systematically studying interaction using this approach (Enfield & Sidnell 2014). The influence of Goffman and Garfinkel is evident in the principles that guide CA research and its approach to data analysis. The development of CA also coincided with developments in technology which made audio recordings of interactional data far easier to collect. Garfinkel promoted the idea of collecting and analysing naturally occurring data in contrast to the prevalent use of laboratory settings and experiments in both sociology and the study of language at that time. This idea of collecting naturally occurring data continues to be a key feature of CA research, though the meaning of ‘naturally occurring’ varies depending upon the interactional contexts being researched. Central to CA and ethnomethodology is this focus on naturally occurring data, but also a ‘naturalistic’ approach to this data (Macbeth 2003). This is similar to the idea of ‘accounts of’ before ‘accounting for’ within mathematics education (e.g. Coles 2013; Mason 2002, 2012), where the researcher (or teacher) refrains from making any inference or judgement of what is happening within an interaction and thus imposing external categories or values upon the interaction. Instead the analysis examines those categories or values that the participants themselves are orienting to in the interaction itself.
Conversation Analysis is a ‘naturalistic observational discipline that could deal with the details of social action rigorously, empirically and formally’ (Schegloff & Sacks 1973, 289–90). Sacks, building on the work of Garfinkel, argued that interaction is systematically organized and ordered, and challenged the idea that ordinary conversation was too chaotic to be studied. He investigated normative patterns of interaction and how participants design their turns for others in the interaction, making use of these patterns or structures. Whilst there are differences in these normative patterns depending upon the context within which they occur, i.e. classroom talk is different to conversations around the dinner table, these normative patterns and how
people orient to them often tells us a great deal about the interactional context in which they occur.
A more detailed history of the development of CA can be found in Heritage (1984). Here, I emphasize those aspects that influence how researchers use CA to analyse mathematics classroom interactions. Mathematics classrooms are an institutional context, and whilst Sack’s early research focused on the analysis of calls to a suicide helpline, the development of many of the interactional structures described below arose from the study of ordinary conversations. Whilst there is some debate around the use of CA in institutional contexts, particularly in the early stages of its use as a research approach, recently CA is being used in a wide variety of institutional contexts; this book builds on and makes use of this more recent research. Readers interested in these debates are invited to read Paul Drew and John Heritage’s book Talk at Work (1992).
Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is a sociological approach which studies the principles on which we base our social actions. It is the study of ‘the body of common-sense knowledge and the range of procedures and considerations by means of which the ordinary members of society make sense of, find their way about in, and act on the circumstances in which they find themselves’ (Heritage 1984, 4). When we interact, we select only certain pieces of information and we try to organize this information into some sort of underlying pattern that enables both us and other participants to make sense of the interaction. Within this, CA focuses more narrowly on studying interactions between people rather than in texts. Originally it exclusively concentrated on interaction through language, but more recently the analysis has included gestures and body positioning, including eye gaze within the interaction.
Garfinkel argued that we use normative principles when we interact with the world that enable us to both display our actions and allow others to make sense of them. These principles are seen-but-unnoticed, and one role of the researcher is to uncover and describe these principles. Garfinkel used breaching experiments to uncover these principles in his own research. However, in his attempts to breach the norms of interaction he found that people adjusted their interactions to try to make sense of the interaction as if everyone was following the same norms, but they also felt upset and hostile towards the people they were interacting with because of their failure to cooperate, which
‘threatens the very possibility of mutual understanding’ (Heritage 1984, 43). Today these norms of interaction are studied by examining how people react when these norms are deviated from naturally in conversations, rather than through an experimental design. This is often referred to as deviant case analysis; these cases are of particular interest, as it is when things deviate from the norms that the norm itself becomes explicit. Deviant cases ‘often serve to demonstrate the normativity of practices’ (Heritage 1995 cited in Seedhouse 2019).
One key principle of all ethnomethodological approaches is the focus on the perspective of the participants, rather than the perspective of the researcher. What is relevant to any analysis is what is made relevant by the participants in how they interact. As Macbeth (2003, 241) states, the participants themselves are ‘the first analysts on the scene’. Interactions contain ‘everything relevant for analysis’ (Cameron 2001, 88), and we do not necessarily draw upon other contextual aspects such as the gender or status of the participants unless these are evident in the interaction itself. There is a commitment to investigating how, through interaction, we establish, sustain, and change what it means to participate (Sahlström 2009).
In the study of classroom interaction, we need to consider both the teacher and the students as it is concerned with how we coordinate action and meaning (Abrahamson, Flood, Miele, & Siu 2019) visibly in interaction. This is a key difference between ethnomethodological approaches and others in educational research that depend upon researchers’ codes or participants’ selfreports. In the study of classroom interaction we need to consider both the teacher and the students, as interactions are co-constructed by both. This focus on the perspective of participants means that coding data from a developed framework is avoided, as this displays the researcher’s interpretation of the interaction rather than the participants’. This interpretation or understanding of the interaction is often revealed through participants’ actions, including what they say and how they say it. So, for example, teachers often give instructions, ask questions, and evaluate or assess when they interact in classrooms, whereas students generally answer questions and follow instructions. When a teacher asks a question and this is followed by a student answering the question without any complaints or resistance, both the teacher and student are showing that it is normative for a teacher to ask a question and for a student to answer a question. There is no challenging of these actions. It is the observation of this in classroom interactions that tells us as researchers that teachers and students have these roles as question askers and question answerers, not our pre-determined categories of teacher and
