Speaker: Dr. Susan Bridges, Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Faculty of Education

Abstract

The Routledge Handbook on the Learning Sciences (Fischer et al forthcoming) has a central focus on “the mechanisms, processes, and constructs central to learning and interaction”. Our invited chapter on Interactional Ethnography (IE) (Bridges & Green) sees alignment both with this overarching focus and the Learning Sciences’ central interests in interdisciplinary and systemic research. In this presentation, I will draw upon current GRF-funded research on Educational Technologies in Medical and Health Sciences Education to illustrate these intersections. Specifically, I will share how this interdisciplinary study is drawing upon IE as an orienting theoretical framing and approach to systematic data collection and analysis. Key IE analytic constructs will examine the a) historical and over-time relationship between and among texts and contexts; b) whole-part, part-whole relationships within and across intertextually tied events; and c) socially and academically consequential progressions (Putney et al., 2000). Cross-disciplinary analysis of one recorded problem-based learning (PBL) cycle over 3 sessions (~6 hours) illustrates how an IE approach can generate transdisciplinary understandings. Specifically, analysis illustrates how visual texts are adopted, refined and regenerated in an iterative process of medical disciplinary knowledge co-construction over time and across learning contexts.