Documenting Change across Time: Challenges for CA in longitudinal learning and development data
| Number: | P60 |
| Organizer: | Pekarek Doehler, Simona |
| Co-Organizer: | Johannes Wagner |
| Abstract: | |
| EM/CA is interested in how participants create social order in and through their interactional practices in everyday life. CA describes the sequential organization of those practices on the basis of collections of cases across different speakers and environments. Collection based descriptions presuppose that practices show stability across time and local environments, despite interactional variability. They are “context free” and “context sensitive” (Sacks et al. 1974: 699). On this methodological backdrop, the panel explores how the ontogenetic evolution of practices can be addressed in CA terms. Change of behavior is often referred to as \'learning\'. However CA needs to distinguish between learning as a social practice (where participants recognizably do \'learning\') and changes of behavior over time (which are not necessarily an outcome of \'doing learning\'). The papers in this panel focus on the latter: they explore, within the areas of first- and second language acquisition as well as professional development, how participants ‘get there’, how they embark on specific social practices in specific ways and do things differently from what they did at earlier moments in time. The papers address the following methodological challenges: - Historicity: How can change across time be accounted for in CA terms? - Consistency: What is the appropriate unit of analysis and how can its consistency be maintained across time? - Interaction of components: How can we account for the interplay between different components in development: sequential organization, language, gesture, etc.? - Norm: what norms are used as bottom-lines to measure change? In how far do these norms stand in need of explanation? - Exogenous theory: is there need to invoke exogenous theories for explaining change across time? At what moment can this most fruitfully be done? - Feeding back into CA: How does work on change across time feed back into basic assumptions and analytic principles in CA? |
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