Abstract
This paper discusses how a new technology (designed to help pupils with learning about Shakespeare’s Macbeth) is introduced and integrated into existing classroom practices. It reports on the ways through which teachers and pupils figure out how to use the software as part of their classroom work. Since teaching and learning in classrooms are achieved in and through educational tasks (what teachers instruct pupils to do) the analysis explicates some notable features of a particular task (storyboarding one scene from the play). It is shown that both ‘setting the task’ and ‘following the task’ have to be locally and practically accomplished and that tasks can operate as a sense-making device for pupils’ activities. Furthermore, what the task ‘is’, is not entirely established through the teacher’s initial formulation, but progressively clarified through pupils’ subsequent work, and in turn ratified by the teacher.
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Notes
See Shapiro (1996) for another comparison of ‘task analysis’ with ‘ethnographic studies’ that anticipates some of the arguments developed here.
Elaborated reminders are not always necessary. The next lesson is introduced with a simple announcement:
Here the teacher can rely on the fact that coming to the computer suite (rather than staying in their normal classroom) pupils will remember that they have been working with the software to produce a storyboard. One may also note that such ‘whole-class announcements’ are often prefaced through special markers, in particular “right”, through which the group of pupils is established as a cohort (cf., Payne 1976).
Users can scroll through the available characters by pressing the ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrows below that box (see the interface of the software in the Appendix).
One might note that the “okay” (in lines 12 and 16) works as a kind of ‘formal marker’ (Turner 1972, p.369) that indicates the proposed start of the next step/phase.
The other teacher in our study once reminded the class: “In your SATs, you will lose marks if you are not spelling words correctly.”
This is not meant as a criticism, but as comment on the teacher’s ability to deal with problems as and when they arose in the following of the task.
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Acknowledgements
I am most indebted to the two teachers and their pupils who helped me with this project by allowing me to spend an extensive period of time with them. Without their generosity this study could not have been conducted. I would like to thank all the participants in the Oxford-Intel Education Initiative who agreed to be interviewed. I am very grateful to Rod Watson, Dave Randall, Wes Sharrock, Jac Eke, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this paper. The work on this paper was partly supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
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Greiffenhagen, C. Unpacking Tasks: The Fusion of New Technology with Instructional Work. Comput Supported Coop Work 17, 35–62 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-007-9068-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-007-9068-x