On the notion of agency in studies of interaction and learning

Abstract

This study explores teachers' reflections on the competences that come into play in technology-mediated teaching activities. Underpinned by educational design research, the collaboration between researchers and teachers followed a methodological design involving three iterative phases: (1) workshops in which teachers and researchers collaborated to develop instructional scenarios involving digital technologies, (2) lessons enacting instructional scenarios, and (3) reflective discussions based on video sequences from the instructional scenarios. The researchers selected video clips of instructional sequences involving so-called critical incidents where the teachers encountered some kind of challenge in the technology-mediated teaching activities. The unit of analysis comprised transitional episodes identified in the reflective discussions, where temporal shifts took place as the teachers elaborated on challenges and oriented towards future actions. Theoretically, the study is based on sociocultural perspectives, acknowledging social interaction as collective thinking. To analytically scrutinise temporal shifts in the interaction, interaction analysis was employed. The findings show that while the elicited video clips supported retrospective reflections, the collaborative context with colleagues and researchers interacting supported prospective reflections. These findings are discussed in terms of how the temporal shifts in the reflections can analytically be understood as teachers' envisioned or enacted transformative agency.