Video analysis of contextual layers in teaching-learning interactions

Abstract

Anchoring analyses in video records of a methodology-focused seminar, in this article we present a systematic analytic approach for uncovering contextual layers enacted in teaching-learning interactions in a higher education setting. The interactional ethnographic epistemology guided our analyses at four levels of scale: 1) reviewing video records and transcribing to identify rich points and explore the over-time construction of the seminar; 2) constructing a timeline and structuration maps to situate the seminar in larger sequences of events; 3) developing domains to identify what contextual layers participants marked as socially significant; and 4) engaging microethnographic discourse analysis of select contextual layers to demonstrate how contextualizing was enacted. Contextual layers signaled from the beginning of the seminar as relevant for co-constructing the teaching-learning interactions included Academic content, Time, People, Places, Languages and Materials. The contextual layers of People and Time provided a connecting thread through which the teacher, with the participants, discursively and physically enacted opportunities for teaching, learning, and understanding the academic content and practices being developed in the seminar. The four levels of analysis provide a systematic and transparent methodological pathway for uncovering the complex and often indiscernable contexts enacting teaching and learning opportunities.