A transactional methodology for analysing learning

ABSTRACT Investigating learning in ongoing classroom practices involves a number of methodological challenges. One main challenge, identified by scholars in sociocultural approaches, is how to take both the individual and the environment into consideration in analyses. Although the challenge we are addressing are methodological in character, the work of coming up with a transactional methodology requires philosophical and theoretical clarifications and here we use mainly the work of John Dewey. The main ambition of this article is to present and empirically illustrate a transactional research methodology – a package of analytical models and an analytical method – that fully recognize the dynamic relations between the individual and the environmental dimensions – how they interplay in the learning process and how certain learning outcomes result from that interplay. The three models we present concerns the trajectory of learning, how the influence of the individual and environmental dimensions on students learning can be understood and approached transactionally respectively the learning outcome in terms of what the person learn when (re)creating habits. The analytical method presented and illustrated is built upon a first person perspective on language use, which dissolves some of the methodological problems when investigating the individual dimension through in situ analyses.