Background to my analysis methods

In approaching my data, I used sociocultural discourse analysis (SCDA) and multimodal analysis as complementary methods to address the use of talk and other tools to understand the teaching- and-learning around a topic over a series of lessons. Through this combination I could focus in detail on the use of talk, but also pan more widely to address how communication was achieved across modes and over time, incorporating an important temporal approach in my analysis. In this and the following two sections I offer the theoretical background of these methods, and how I applied them in my research.

Starting with discourse analysis in general, Kleine Staarman (2009) proposed that when using such methods of analysis the ‘phenomena of interest’ are often identified once the process of analysis has started, rather than set out beforehand. This is certainly relevant with regard to my analysis. Adopting SCDA, as I outline in section 4.4, enabled me to guide my approach to the data around my theoretical concerns and research questions, but also to address these concerns in the context of the data I collected, which in turn led me to explore some previously unanticipated patterns in the data. For instance, in the context of my data collection, I was particularly interested in the educational use of talk in conjunction with technologies such as the IWB to resource co-

construction and cumulation of knowledge over time. Through analysis of my data I was able to address this, but in more detail than I had anticipated. As the analysis progressed it became clear how the IWB could be considered a ‘digital hub’ (Betcher & Lee, 2009), in being used alongside other digital tools, thus analysis needed to take account of all tools in use, how they were used, and by whom. In approaching my analysis I also became increasingly aware of how

communicative modes other than talk, such as movement, can be used in an integral way, not to replace but to support the development and reinforce the importance of talk in making meaning.

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Thus my analysis needed to accommodate these multiple aspects of communication. For instance I wanted to see how teachers and pupils ‘choose from, engage with, and in the process transform, the representational and communicational affordances... of all the modes available to them in the classroom’ (Bourne & Jewitt, 2003, p. 71). I wanted to explore how modes were used together to convey complementary and different information, where a variety of modes offered a variety of means of working with ideas.

As a guiding principle I viewed talk as the central mode in meaning-making activity, as a ‘social mode of thinking’ (Mercer, 2004), but aimed to explore also the use of other modes in the development and cumulation of conceptual understanding. This required me to observe a

consecutive series of lessons in order to monitor any progressive development as it occurred, and to attend to any resources or objects used in the making and re-making of meaning. In focusing not just on the illustrating but also the re-working of resources and meanings, it was important to gather pupil as well as teacher contributions and perspectives, in action and in reflection. I was also keen to observe and analyse the process of working with objects or activities, rather than simply to analyse the resources in isolation, in line with a sociocultural interpretation that objects and activities can serve different purposes on different occasions or for different users (Gillen, et al., 2007; Roth, 2006). My aim was to consider ‘objects’ in various modes in terms of how they were ‘improved’ (drawing on Wells, 1999) through use and re-use, and how a temporal analysis of ongoing interactions on a topic could be used to explore ‘meaning-making trajectories’ (extending Baldry & Thibault’s (2006) concept) through the activities and contributions shared. I therefore used my analysis to show how knowledge building could be considered as cumulative and progressive by analysis of the use and re-working of objects, as they were employed in a form of ‘dynamic orchestration’ (Beauchamp, et al., 2010), or ‘disciplined improvisation’ (Sawyer, 2004), where a teacher builds on the issues at stake in response to pupils’ contributions which

potentially involves some deviation from the lesson plan, to support and expose the movement from ‘flux’ to ‘stability’ of meaning (Ludvigsen, et al., 2011) within developing meaning-making

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trajectories. To achieve this I aligned SCDA with multimodal analysis, to foreground the central importance of language in communication, but within the context of other modes being drawn on in interactions. Through this alignment I was able to provide a rich picture of unfolding

interaction, through the combination of verbal, annotated and multimodal transcription for analysis. This also enabled me to utilise the benefits of the different approaches:

 to scrutinise the development of patterns of verbal interactions across a prolonged period of time;

 to add detail to verbal interactions to view use of tools and modes other than talk;

 and to address in detail the mediation of activities carried out largely non-verbally, but with verbal input evidenced where it integrates information conveyed in other modes.

Thus I recorded teacher talk to the whole class, any pupil responses, and pupil talk in group work, as well as any non-verbal contributions and use of resources across series of topic lessons. This was complemented by interviews with teachers and dance specialists before and after the series of lessons, discussions with practitioners around some video of their lessons, again after the series of the lessons, and pupil focus groups after the series of lessons. (See table 4.1 for an outline of the lesson data collected and analysed within the different analysis methods. As the data presented in this thesis focuses around one case, details are only included in the table for this case. See chapter 3 for topics and data collected in the other cases). The different methods of analysis that I describe below focused to some extent on different aspects of the data, but

ultimately the process of working within each method and subsequent findings was informed by the others, in an iterative cycle of analysis, to offer a more rounded and valid interpretation of the data as a whole.

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Table 4.1: Data collected and selected for analysis and presentation

Data collection Quantitative SCDA Qualitative SCDA Multimodal analysis Year 2

class

Weeks 5-8: history topic on the Great Fire of London = eight lessons (for data collected from other classes and topics see section 3.2)

Transcripts of verbal exchange from all eight topic lessons

(Total word count = 52 522)

(See chapters 5 and 7)

Video, audio and detailed transcribed extracts from lessons (See chapters 5 and 7

Video, audio and multimodal transcribed extracts from lessons (See chapter 6)

In the following sections I describe how and why I adopted certain methods of analysis to address the above research questions, starting with SCDA.