Teachers′ Demonstrations of Epistemic Access in Teacher-Student Interactions in a Digital Setting

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a Conversation Analytic (CA) study of teachers’ demonstrations of epistemic access to a student’s domain or territory of information in teacher-student interactions in a digital setting. It describes interactional practices analyzed in 12 excerpts with an explicit reference to information about students’ progress provided by the digital system. It will be shown that teachers initiate interactions about already fulfilled assignments that are shown to be problematic. In the opening of the interaction, teachers more or less explicitly refer to the digital programme as an information source and/or to the hitches in student’s progress. In the continuation of the interaction, teacher and student are concerned with a redoing of assignments. In this phase of the interaction, the teacher demonstrates epistemic access to possible causes for students’ mistakes. In all cases, students do not show resistance to teachers’ demonstrations of epistemic access to knowledge and experiences falling into their epistemic domain. The findings confirm teachers’ and students’ orientation to the educational context as being a specialized context where students’ problems are not treated as ‘theirs to know and describe’. The findings in this paper shed light on interactional practices in relation to epistemics, as well as on interactional practices in a digital setting.