Closing seminars and lectures: The work that lecturers and students do

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Discourse Studies and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617701992Based on an analysis of naturally occurring interactions between lecturers and students, this article investigates how university lectures and seminars are brought to a close through the collaborative work of lecturers and students. The analysis focuses on: firstly, the resources that lecturers and students have to accomplish this (which do not just include speech, but also embodied conduct, as well as references to clock time and lesson phases); secondly, the active role that students play, who may engage in closing activities in ways that attempt to preserve the classroom order (e.g., by packing up silently while continuing to demonstrably listen) or in ways that are disruptive of it (e.g., by packing up noisily); thirdly, the occasional subversive role that students may adopt, who may attempt to initiate closings in order to cut the lecture or seminar short (e.g., by suggesting to the lecturer that he or she is going over time or by engaging in ‘premature’ closing activities)

Making rounds: The routine work of the teacher during collaborative learning with computers

This article was published in the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning [Springer Verlag © International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc.] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11412-011-9134-8This paper provides a detailed analysis of the work of the teacher during collaborative-learning activities. Whilst the importance of the teacher for the success of collaborative learning has frequently been recognized in the CSCL literature, there is nevertheless a curious absence of detailed studies that describe how the teacher intervenes in pupils' collaborative-learning activities, which may be a reflection of the ambivalent status of teachers within a field that has tried to transfer authority from teachers to pupils. Through a close analysis of different types of teacher interventions into pupils working in pairs with a storyboarding tool, this paper argues, firstly, that concerns of classroom management and pedagogy are typically intertwined and, secondly, that although there may be tensions between the perspectives of teachers and pupils these do not take the form of antagonistic struggles. The paper concludes that it may be time to renew our interest in the work of teachers in the analysis of collaborative-learning activities