Multimodal Participation and Engagement. Social Interaction in the Classroom

This book provides an in-depth, systematic investigation of student participation in the classroom. It studies the phenomenon from several different angles, taking into account students’ displayed identities, their willingness – or not – to take part in the joint construction of the class, the norms and expectations teachers and learners in classrooms orient to, and the ways in which these are reflexively and jointly brought about. The methodology to investigate these phenomena is Conversation Analysis – a highly appropriate choice considering that participation in classrooms is intricately linked with social interaction. The author’s point of departure is a very central student problem, namely that there might be ‘misalignment’ between what teachers understand by ‘participation’ and what students take it to mean. In her analysis, however, Jacknick moves away from the lay category of ‘participation’ as it is used in pedagogical contexts as a common (albeit, scarcely defined) criterion for evaluation and presents a complex model of multimodal participation and engagement based exclusively on her empirical data. She analyses teaching and being taught as processes that are enacted and co-constructed in classroom interaction. Her aim is to further our understanding of how student participation in classrooms works through a detailed examination of its multimodal complexity. The book starts with one of the most enjoyable introductions to an academic book I have read for a long time. To my great surprise, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a Harry Potter movie! The author very entertainingly analyses an extract of one of the films, complete with close-ups of the film’s characters. She uses this analysis to show how misalignments between teacher expectations and student perspectives in terms of participation lead to categorisations of students as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within the first few moments of a class.