Tablets in classrooms (TabC): Socio-medial organization of instructional knowledge production in group work settings

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Matthias Herrle; Professor Dr. Matthias Proske, since 2/2024
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528534827

In order to prepare children for digitized life in society, educational policy, and public perspectives call for the pedagogically sustainable integration of digital technologies in the classroom. Group-based settings for tablet-supported learning are considered particularly relevant in this context. They are expected to promote independent work and cooperation among students. While evidence exists for competence gains, it is largely unknown how interactions between students, teachers, and digital technologies are organized and constituted by socio-medial practices. Based on multi-perspective video and audio data of classroom events and their microethnographic analysis, our study aims to examine how knowledge products are created in group work settings. To this end, we first examine (1) the structuring of group work into patterns of socio-medial arrangements between teachers, students, and digital materialities. In great detail, we then reconstruct (2) multimodal practices realized by students and teachers, dealing with digital materialities in order to generate knowledge products. Finally, we determine (3) how tablet-supported group work is embedded in the overall instructional process in classrooms - in preceding phases of enabling group work and in subsequent phases of distributing and evaluating knowledge products. With the results of our study, we contribute to the advancement of interaction- and materiality-based theories of instruction by conceptually elucidating how digital technologies participate in group work and are embedded in processes of knowledge production in classrooms. We also extend empirical findings on computer-supported collaborative learning to include aspects of interactional contextualization and multimodal constitution of tablet-supported group work. Furthermore, we contribute to the innovation of established approaches of video-based research on classroom interaction by systematically including screen recordings as a new kind of data. By investigating the socio-medial organization of classroom interaction between students, teachers, and digital technologies our project extends the empirical foundation for discussing persistence and change of school teaching in contexts of digital transformation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Markus Hoffmann, until 1/2024