Seminar open to the public
ABSTRACT
In their ordinary professional practices, early childhood educators are not only carrying out distinct educational activities with children. They are also accomplishing "transitions" between these activities, bringing children to move from one space to another and from one activity frame to another one. The conditions under which these transitions are performed in an educational way are highly complex and are often experienced as challenging situations for novices learning the occupation. These transitions can be seen as demanding participatory configurations (Filliettaz, Rémery & Trébert, 2014), which require specific interactional competences. In our talk, we wish to investigate how students engaged in a vocational training program specialised in early childhood education experience and learn the interactional competences required to perform consistent transitions between activities at work. By using audio-video material and audio-recorded pedagogical interviews involving students and their workplace supervisor, we propose to observe how students face difficulties in managing successful micro-transitions from one activity to the other, and how workplace supervisors assist these students to overcome these difficulties. To address this topic, we adopt a cultural perspective on workplace learning and vocational education (Billett, 2001; Tynjälä, 2008) and combine it with theoretical categories and methodological tools borrowed from the fields of discourse and interaction analysis (Filliettaz, 2010, 2011; Ten Have, 2007; Wodak & Meyer, 2011; Wooffitt, 2005). Our results show that a wide range of multimodal resources are used and combined by students in the process of accomplishing transitions between activities in the workplace. These resources are not only used in context as tools for action; they are also being reflected upon in pedagogical interviews accomplished before and after situated activities. More generally, our results also indicate that micro-transitions between activities can be seen as challenging professional situations, perceived as such not only by students, but also by workplace supervisors. These results finally stress the idea that students are not the only participants who may learn in and from "transitions", but that broader communities of practices, including qualified educators and trainers, also encounter opportunities to develop interactional competencies when assisting students in their early days at work.
Lecturer: Laurent Filliettaz, University of Geneva
Date: 3/11/2015
Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Categories: Education and Didactics
Organizer: LinCS Collegium
Location:
Pedagogen, Västra hamngatan 25
Building B, room B1 133
Contact person: Oskar Lindwall