| As demonstrated by Mehan (1979), lessons are often organized in a sequence of Initiation-Reply-Evaluation (IRE): teachers begin by asking a question to the class, one student is selected and responds to the question, and the teacher evaluates the reply. Now, thirty years later, much of the Swedish education has another organization. It is, for instance, common for students to explore issues such as climate change by using the Internet and other resources. Here, it is mostly the students that initiate interaction with teachers. Building on previous studies of classroom-interaction, as well as talk-in-interaction more generally, this study focuses on episodes where students call teachers for help and guidance. The episodes, which are taken from 50 hours of video recordings of educational project work, share a similar organization. First, the students’ call the teachers attention. After the teacher has acknowledged this call, it is common for the students to produce something like: ”we have a question about gas”. Like a story preface, this guides the teacher to listen for a dilemma in the ensuing talk, which “will take more than an utterance to produce” (Sacks, 1992, p. 223). The preface is followed by a description of what they have done, providing a necessary context for the formulation of the dilemma. During the description, the teacher actively listen for an issue, and when found it is used as ground for instruction, conducted in a way similar to the IRE sequence. Although initiated by a request, the sequence is often closed by the teacher’s positive reappraisal, which further displays the asymmetrical nature of the interaction. In relation to the analysis of the episodes, issues of local educational organizations and ”owning knowledge” are further discussed. |
