Doctoral research project
Talking about everything and nothing? What lifeworld-related statements and themes mean in teaching and learning interactions (working title)
This doctoral research project seeks to examine how CPD (continuing professional development) courses and events for education and pedagogical professionals relate to their participants’ lifeworlds. The subject of issues related to individuals’ lifeworlds and their occurrence in teaching and learning situations has appeared repeatedly on the agenda of educational conceptualisations and theoretical considerations in this area since the 1970s; the debate, however, has tended substantially in a prescriptive direction. This study, on the methodological basis of conversation analysis, intends to expose the ways in which CPD for education and pedagogical professionals may become an arena for ‘doing’ lifeworld orientation; it will proceed by reconstructing the practices, structural exigencies and communicative tasks concomitant to the real-world situation of talking about lifeworld matters in educational and pedagogical CPD.
The data corpus underlying the analysis comprises detailed CA transcriptions of audio-recorded CPD seminars for professionals in the fields of education and pedagogy (teachers, early years educators, youth/community workers), collected in three phases (2010, 2012, 2013). The data stem from seven one-day events variously lasting three to seven hours and one two-day course. I will conduct ethnomethodological conversation analysis on the data; proceeding first from the formal structures determining the interaction in each case, I will identify the interactional tasks underlying the communicative patterns in evidence and their contribution to the generation of knowledge.
The project’s central areas of interest are the ways in which CPD participants’ experiences and positionings become the subject of interaction and communication in the courses and events; the treatment of lifeworld-related experiences in these settings; and the consequences for conversational structures, the communicative tasks and problems that arise where interlocutors reference lifeworld-oriented themes.