Publications

The researchers in this collection share a common interest in understanding the practices and processes of teaching and learning. They are especially interested in how learning opportunities are created and limited.

Through interactional ethnography, each author represents these processes in action, in ways that are instructive for researchers new to this approach, as well as for teachers and teacher educators. They study teaching and learning as interactional events, situated in particular contexts, and related across time. Their studies illustrate how teaching and learning events are performed through discourse in social situations that are meaningful and purposeful to the social groups involved. Complex, interrelated events are rendered through a variety of modes and methods of analysis and representation—including, in addition to interactional ethnography, conversation analysis, critical discourse, and intertextual analysis.

The studies are organized in four sections: assessing opportunities for learning; applying intertextuality; building conceptual knowledge; and positioning student identities. Each study is unique in its site of learning and singular in its research purpose or question.

Rex, L. A. (Ed.) (2006). Discourse of Opportunity: How Talk in Learning Situations Creates and Constrains. Interactional Ethnographic Studies in Teaching and Learning. Discourse and Social Processes Series, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Opportunity and the Challenge