Teachers, tools and accountable practices. Engaging with a wiki blog as a learning resource

Abstract

article employ the dimensions of Michaels, O’Connor, and Resnick’s (2008) accountable talk and Engle’s (2006) framing to analyse teacher’s framing as well as students negotiations and co-construction of knowing in practice. The case study that we report on explores how a teacher and students in a Norwegian lower secondary school negotiate and co-construct accountable ways of engaging with a wiki blog as a learning resource by drawing on everyday and informal experiences of students. Videorecorded sequences of an 8-week science project of using a collaborative wiki blog in school were conducted to interaction analysis.We found that when framing learning activities introduced as part of formal science teaching, but contextualized in relation to students experience outside-of-school, the teacher and students struggle to negotiate and co-construct accountable ways of engaging with the wiki blog as a learning resource. The introduction of a technical tool like wiki blog creates opportunities for collaboration, but also tensions in ways of renegotiating norms and expectations of accountable actions, objects and contributions in classroom activities for both teachers and students. Thus, the dynamics of framing and co-constructing in-situ displays how students’practices expand with new forms of accountability. Simultaneously, teacher’s dilemma of inviting new practices creates tensions within the institutional framing of schooling. The study contributes to understand how the layers of accountable practices in institutional contexts function as intermediaries in classroom interactions.