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Literacy, encompassing the ability to produce written outputs from the reading of multiple sources, is a key learning goal. Selecting information, and evaluating and integrating claims from potentially competing documents is a complex literacy task. Prior research exploring differing behaviours and their association to constructs such as epistemic cognition has used ‘multiple document processing’ (MDP) tasks. Using this model, 270 paired participants, wrote a review of a document. Reports were assessed using a rubric associated with features of complex literacy behaviours. This paper focuses on the conceptual and empirical associations between those rubric-marks and textual features of the reports on a set of natural language processing (NLP) indicators. Findings indicate the potential of NLP indicators for providing feedback regarding the writing of such outputs, demonstrating clear relationships both across rubric facets and between rubric facets and specific NLP indicators.

Literacy, encompassing the ability to produce written outputs from the reading of multiple sources, is a key learning goal. Selecting information, and evaluating and integrating claims from potentially competing documents is a complex literacy task. Prior research exploring differing behaviours and their association to constructs such as epistemic cognition has used ‘multiple document processing’ (MDP) tasks. Using this model, 270 paired participants, wrote a review of a document. Reports were assessed using a rubric associated with features of complex literacy behaviours. This paper focuses on the conceptual and empirical associations between those rubric-marks and textual features of the reports on a set of natural language processing (NLP) indicators. Findings indicate the potential of NLP indicators for providing feedback regarding the writing of such outputs, demonstrating clear relationships both across rubric facets and between rubric facets and specific NLP indicators.

The interactive whiteboard (IWB), the first ICT tool primarily designed for whole-class interaction, is now in regular use in most British primary schools. In this paper, we explore its distinctive potential for enabling the teacher to plan and orchestrate activities and lessons using a wide range of multimodal resources, to engage students' cognitive and imaginative capacities. We show how teachers use combinations of 'matched resources' to support the bridging of pupils' understanding from the known to the new, and from everyday to academic understandings. We demonstrate how teachers can use the IWB to resource the development of ideas and themes over time while maintaining spontaneous responsiveness to situations as they arise, effectively enacting Sawyer's notion of teaching as 'disciplined improvisational performance'.

The interactive whiteboard (IWB), the first ICT tool primarily designed for whole-class interaction, is now in regular use in most British primary schools. In this paper, we explore its distinctive potential for enabling the teacher to plan and orchestrate activities and lessons using a wide range of multimodal resources, to engage students' cognitive and imaginative capacities. We show how teachers use combinations of 'matched resources' to support the bridging of pupils' understanding from the known to the new, and from everyday to academic understandings. We demonstrate how teachers can use the IWB to resource the development of ideas and themes over time while maintaining spontaneous responsiveness to situations as they arise, effectively enacting Sawyer's notion of teaching as 'disciplined improvisational performance'.

This report presents the interview project conducted as part of the composite project ‘Nontraditional participation and pathways’ funded by the National Arts Learning Network (NALN). The interview project investigates participants’ experience and understanding of work and study pathways in Art and Design and their perceptions of postgraduate level study as part of these pathways. Our micro-level data analysis investigates how the experience and perceptions of our participants are mediated by the established knowledge and definitions of the larger contexts of cultural sector and creative industries which are generated by policy-level discussions and commentaries. The research employs a narrative-discursive approach to the interview process and to the interpretation and analysis of interview material.

This report presents the interview project conducted as part of the composite project ‘Nontraditional participation and pathways’ funded by the National Arts Learning Network (NALN). The interview project investigates participants’ experience and understanding of work and study pathways in Art and Design and their perceptions of postgraduate level study as part of these pathways. Our micro-level data analysis investigates how the experience and perceptions of our participants are mediated by the established knowledge and definitions of the larger contexts of cultural sector and creative industries which are generated by policy-level discussions and commentaries. The research employs a narrative-discursive approach to the interview process and to the interpretation and analysis of interview material.

This report presents the interview project conducted as part of the composite project ‘Nontraditional participation and pathways’ funded by the National Arts Learning Network (NALN). The interview project investigates participants’ experience and understanding of work and study pathways in Art and Design and their perceptions of postgraduate level study as part of these pathways. Our micro-level data analysis investigates how the experience and perceptions of our participants are mediated by the established knowledge and definitions of the larger contexts of cultural sector and creative industries which are generated by policy-level discussions and commentaries. The research employs a narrative-discursive approach to the interview process and to the interpretation and analysis of interview material.

This chapter discusses Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) from an educational perspective. Our core claim is that CIS has the potential to bring together rich collaborative, and multimodal, contexts in which important learning processes may take place. We thus see CIS as more than just an activity with potential to ‘speed up’ information seeking, or contribute to effective division of labour. This claim is independent of the particular classroom subject, or the form of technological mediation; rather, the chapter provides a focus on some key considerations in collaborative learning that should be of interest to both educators and those interested in the ‘benefits’ of CIS. This chapter first outlines our broad educational interest in elements of CIS, connecting that to the focal points of CIS research. We go on to highlight the importance of dialogue as a tool for learning, before discussing the complexities of understanding ‘success’ in CIS tasks, and then specifically the role that dialogue has played so far in CIS research. We conclude with a call to researchers in both CIS and education to explore the nature of learning in CIS contexts, making use of a rich understanding of the importance of dialogue to create meaning together.

[About the book]: Educational Dialogues provides a clear, accessible and well-illustrated case for the importance of dialogue and its significance for learning and teaching. The contributors characterise the nature of productive dialogues, to specify the conditions and pedagogic contexts within which such dialogues can most effectively be resourced and promoted. Drawing upon a broad range of theoretical perspectives, this collection examines: theoretical frameworks for understanding teaching and learning dialogues; teacher-student and student-student interaction in the curricular contexts of mathematics, literacy, science, ICT and philosophy; the social contexts supporting productive dialogues; implications for pedagogic design and classroom practice. Bringing together contributions from a wide range of internationally renowned researchers, this book will form essential reading for all those concerned with the use of dialogue in educational contexts.

Although recognising the significance of the literature on peer tutoring and cooperative learning, our focus in this chapter is on peer collaboration. In contrast to peer tutoring - which builds on the shared work of pairs with asymmetrical abilities - and peer cooperation - which typically involves the subdivision of tasks for a shared goal, with each participant responsible for one particular aspect of the activity - peer collaboration assumes the relative symmetry of abilities and sharedness in respect of both the process and the products of learning. In collaborative contexts, children bring togehter a range of perspectives or knowledge base arising from the diversity of individual histories, experiences, interests and personalities. But the relationship is conceptualised as being symmetrical, and the aim is to reconcile - share as well as compete - these perspectives to achieve a common learning goal.

A central challenge for science educators is to enable young people to act as scientists by gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments, and engaging in informed debate. We report the design of the nQuire toolkit, a system to support scripted personal inquiry learning, and a study of its use with school students ages 11–14. This differs from previous work on inquiry learning by its emphasis on learners investigating topics of personal significance supported by a computer-based toolkit to guide school pupils through an entire inquiry process that connects structured learning in the classroom with discovery and data collection at home or outdoors. Findings from the studies indicate that the toolkit was successfully adopted by teachers and pupils in contexts that included teacher-directed lessons, an after-school club, field trips, and learner-managed homework. It effectively supported the transition between individual, group, and whole-class activities and supported learning across formal and informal settings. We discuss issues raised by the intervention studies, including how the combination of technology and pedagogy provided support for the teacher despite difficulties in managing the technology and integrating field data into a classroom lesson. We also discuss the difficulty of altering young people’s attitudes to science.

A central challenge for science educators is to enable young people to act as scientists by gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments, and engaging in informed debate. We report the design of the nQuire toolkit, a system to support scripted personal inquiry learning, and a study of its use with school students ages 11–14. This differs from previous work on inquiry learning by its emphasis on learners investigating topics of personal significance supported by a computer-based toolkit to guide school pupils through an entire inquiry process that connects structured learning in the classroom with discovery and data collection at home or outdoors. Findings from the studies indicate that the toolkit was successfully adopted by teachers and pupils in contexts that included teacher-directed lessons, an after-school club, field trips, and learner-managed homework. It effectively supported the transition between individual, group, and whole-class activities and supported learning across formal and informal settings. We discuss issues raised by the intervention studies, including how the combination of technology and pedagogy provided support for the teacher despite difficulties in managing the technology and integrating field data into a classroom lesson. We also discuss the difficulty of altering young people’s attitudes to science.

Studies of collective rehearsal for musical performance are relatively scarce; reflecting both the paucity of interest within music education research, in creative rather reproductive musical activities and the enduring emphasis on composition as a solitary rather than a collective, community-based process Furthermore, as Sawyer and DeZutter (2009) have noted, even though there has been a wave of research that has recognised how creativity is embedded in social groups (e.g. Sawyer, 2006) and how creative products emerge from collaboration (p. 81) we still have very little understanding of the processes whereby creative products emerge from groups: ‘The most substantial studies of group creativity have been social psychological studies of brainstorming groups…but these studies have not analysed the interactional processes that occur within groups. This failure to analyse collaborative processes is a significant lacuna in creativity research because a wide range of empirical studies has revealed that significant creations are almost always the result of complex collaborations’ (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009, p.81). One of our aims in this chapter is therefore to underscore the case that we should be studying these processes - both to advance our understanding of the nature of collaborative music making and ‘imagining’ and collaborative creativity more generally.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the significance of gender in respect of children’s interactions and how this relates to processes of development and learning. We examine possible theoretical explanations for gender differences in respect of patterns of interaction, before reporting a study which investigates the efficacy of these different explanatory accounts in the context of collaborative work on an English language problem solving task.

In this chapter we present extracts drawn from analyses of an extended technology-mediated scientific inquiry learning activity concerning micro-climates undertaken by 11-12 year olds, as part of the Personal Inquiry project to both exemplify and explore how progressive ‘connection building’ is accomplished multi-modally over time through a multiplicity of semiotic resources. Such progressive connection building is not, as we shall see, a narrow and unidirectional process. Rather, the effective co-construction of mutual, cohesive understandings makes use of multiple representations and interactions and involves revisiting and (re)negotiating ideas and understandings. The metaphor of ‘orchestration’ sits at the heart of our exploration as this metaphor draws attention to the subtle interweaving of activities, ideas and resources and the ways in which a teacher may make (what are often moment-by-moment) shifts between what is fore-grounded and what is back-grounded in an on-going inquiry. It also captures the sense in which a teacher, or more knowledgeable other, encourages, and works with, learners’ contributions in the context and pursuit of overall goals as part of a longer trajectory of meaning-making.

The contributors to this book offer characterisations of the nature of inquiry learning. They attempt to specify the conditions and pedagogic contexts within which such learning can most effectively be promoted and are working to distil the results into concrete messages for practical application. Whilst a key focus for many authors is the inquiry learning that is conducted in and framed by the concerns of formal educational settings, for example schools and colleges. Other learning contexts are also considered, including school grounds, homes, museums and discovery centres, streets and parkland. A theme of the book is how to connect learning within and beyond the classroom.

The International Handbook of Psychology in Education provides researchers, practitioners and advisers working in the fields of psychology and education with an overview of cutting-edge research across a broad spectrum of work within the domain of psychology of education. The chapters in the handbook are authored by internationally recognised researchers, from across Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim. As well as covering the latest thinking within established areas of enquiry, the Handbook includes chapters on recently emerging, yet important, topics within the field and explicitly considers the inter-relationship between theory and practice. A strong unifying theme is the volume's emphasis on processes of teaching and learning. The work discussed in the Handbook focuses on typically developing school-age children, although issues relating to specific learning difficulties are also addressed.

The chapter is a personal reflection on the transition into the academy after twenty five years as an educational practitioner. It explores issues around assuming an academic identity and questions whether critical thinking is the exclusive preserve of academia. The chapter draws on a narrative and autobiographical approach to inform understanding and generate discussion.

This article examines how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened, and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building. A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task). Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue. The study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic comparisons, and aiding our understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.

This conceptual paper contributes towards our understanding of the underlying mechanisms in children’s understanding of self and the other with media. We synthesise diverse bodies of literature, concerned with children’s reading with digital and traditional (print) books, to explicate the parameters that may, in part, explain positive learning outcomes and further illuminate the patterns across various measures. We propose the “Distance Model”, which suggests that a child’s interest in a reading activity depends on its proximity to the child’s funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014). The closer the proximity, the more salient the impact on the child’s cognitive understanding and sense of belonging. The familiarity of the reading content and the relevance of the reading medium for a child’s personal life can be evoked through a number of reading strategies and design techniques, which we discuss in relation to children’s literature and the contemporary design of children’s interactive e-books. We conclude with some suggestions regarding future applications of the Distance Model in children’s media research.

This paper makes a distinctive contribution to the current debates concerning the role of personal mobile technologies (PMTs) in public education. It does this through drawing attention to the imperative to integrate digitally-mediated personalised education with teacher-mediated pluralised education. Premised on the notion that children’s learning needs to be both tailored to individuals’ aspirations (i.e. personalised), and participatory, entailing the consideration of multiple perspectives (i.e. pluralised), the argument is made that for optimal learning outcomes, both personalisation and plurality need to be integrated when deploying PMTs in schools. Vygotsky’s theory (1928; 1930/2004; 1967, 1978) is mobilised to provide a theoretical rationale for emphasising the vital role educators play in harnessing PMTs to support the development of traditional as well as new, 21st century skills, and for the argument that personalisation and pluralisation need to be conceptualised as complementary forces within 21st century education reform. A community project, which deployed PMTs, is used to exemplify how personalised and pluralised educational goals can be integrated and pursued within teaching-learning activities mediated by innovative technologies and educational professionals.

This paper offers a new characterisation of young children’s (2–8 years) reading for pleasure (RfP) with digital books. This characterisation is rooted in a re-contextualisation of Anna Craft’s conceptualisation of twenty-first century childhoods in Creativity and education futures (Stoke on Trent, Trentham, 2011) and a review of the literature concerning young children’s RfP with digital books. The paper develops Craft’s (2011) work by considering the ways in which digital books can resource the ‘4Ps of digital childhood’ in reading for pleasure. Six facets of reader engagement, nested within Craft’s (2011) 4Ps, are presented: affective, creative, interactive, shared, sustained and personalised reading engagements. It is argued that this characterisation of young children’s reading engagements can enrich our understanding of the affordances of digital books in relation to RfP in the twenty-first century. The paper thus offers an important new contribution, going beyond established work in the field, which typically explores digital books in relation to children’s learning, product design or developmental outcomes.

The paper describes our novel perspective on ‘searching to learn’ through collaborative information seeking (CIS). We describe this perspective, which motivated empirical work to ‘orchestrate’ a CIS searching to learn session. The work is described through the lens of orchestration, an approach which brings to the fore the ways in which: background context – including practical classroom constraints, and theoretical perspective; actors – including the educators, researchers, and technologies; and activities that are to be completed, are brought into alignment. The orchestration is exemplified through the description of research work designed to explore a pedagogically salient construct (epistemic cognition), in a particular institutional setting. Evaluation of the session indicated satisfaction with the orchestration from students, with written feedback indicating reflection from them on features of the orchestration. We foreground this approach to demonstrate the potential of orchestration as a design approach for researching and implementing CIS as a ‘searching to learn’ context.

In this article we define and conceptualize the notion of ‘intercreating’ and how the notion relates to interthinking. This new characterization of the processes of collective creativity emerges from an empirical study, reported here, examining how intercreating was constituted in interaction between primary-aged learners who were working in groups to create digital video (DV) stories. The study focuses on one group, comprising three girls and two boys. Whilst the context of DV production was motivating for the members, their differing ideas regarding ‘violent’ versus ‘soft’ themes (representing their different lifeworlds) appeared to provoke conflicts. Despite initially disputational and superficial interactions, the group was subsequently able to negotiate joint strategies, constraints and norms and to establish and sustain intersubjectivity – which in turn appeared to be a prerequisite for intercreating. In this open-ended fictive DV task, there was relatively little common ground that could provide an initial basis for discussion and the suggestions made were accepted or rejected according to implicit, tacitly shared criteria. There was little evidence of explicit reasoning in talk; the norms and constraints in play related to the school-based nature of the task and it was these that were used as justifications for ideas or possible solutions. As pedagogical solutions, sub-tasks with tangible goals and the requirement to establish consensus on ideas seemed to facilitate and enhance group discussion. We suggest that intercreating, in the context of divergent fictive content creation, can be defined as a process involving shared meaning-making and group flow.

We draw on recent accounts of social epistemology to present a novel account of epistemic cognition that is ‘socialised’. In developing this account we foreground the: normative and pragmatic nature of knowledge claims; functional role that ‘to know’ plays when agents say they ‘know x’; the social context in which such claims occur at a macro level, including disciplinary and cultural context; and the communicative context in which such claims occur, the ways in which individuals and small groups express and construct (or co-construct) their knowledge claims. We frame prior research in terms of this new approach to provide an exemplification of its application. Practical implications for research and learning contexts are highlighted, suggesting a re-focussing of analysis on the collective level, and the ways knowledge-standards emerge from group-activity, as a communicative property of that activity.

A core concern in learning is coming to understand the ways in which claims of knowledge are made. The epistemic cognition literature typically characterises this learning in terms of how learners cognitively conceptualise the source and nature of knowledge. Recent work has offered alternative accounts of epistemic cognition that recognise the discursive nature of the construct. These accounts are derived from analysis of the ways that learners talk about knowledge in tasks such as evaluating scientific claims from sources of varying qualities. In this paper we draw on this recent work to advance a novel approach to the analysis of discourse data in epistemic contexts. This approach is exemplified through its application to an existing dataset, demonstrating both the application of the approach and the particular kinds of discourse that learners engaged in. This discursive approach has the potential for broad application in the learning sciences’ treatment of epistemic cognition.

This study is the first to systematically investigate the influence of child gender and age, on parents’ perceptions of UK children’s digital media use at home. It provides an in-depth exploration of how children’s age and gender influence the balance between children’s use of digital and non-digital media at home. The data draw on 709 parents’ responses to an open-ended question asked in the context of a national survey investigating the digital reading habits of children, conducted in 2015. Parents’ responses were analysed using content and thematic analysis, which yielded eight main categories, collapsed into three major themes: control, child’s healthy development and diversity of experiences. Quantitative analyses evidenced that more parents of boys were concerned about the health implications of their children’s digital media use and this was a concern especially for parents of the youngest (0-2-year old) children. More parents of 6-8-year olds cited the appeal of technology as the main reason for the perceived imbalance in their children’s engagement with digital media. The study provides a more secure understanding of the factors that influence parental perceptions of their children’s digital media use at home, which has implications for policy-makers, digital designers and early years professionals.

[About the book] Responding to the creative economy's status as an industry, education and government priority, this edited volume brings together original contributions to examine the experiences and realities of working within a number of creative sectors and addresses how higher education can both enable students to pursue and critically examine work in the cultural industries. Debates on cultural work are garnering more interest than ever before and this volume presents critical discussion based on research findings from academics and policy-makers in the fields of media and cultural studies, enterprise, employability, psychology, and education. The volume addresses: what cultural work is and how higher education is connected with its growth as a sector; educational initiatives that see students gaining ever more detailed experiences and insights; the ways in which students and cultural workers position their identities; and the politics of access and issues of exclusion as they relate to industry networks, race and gender.

There is an increasing interest in developing learning analytic techniques for the analysis, and support of, high quality learning discourse. This paper maps the terrain of discourse-centric learning analytics (DCLA), outlining the distinctive contribution of DCLA and outlining a definition for the field moving forwards. It is our claim that DCLA provide the opportunity to explore the ways in which: discourse of various forms both resources and evidences learning; the ways in which small and large groups, and individuals make and share meaning together through their language use; and the particular types of language – from discipline specific, to argumentative and socio-emotional – associated with positive learning outcomes. DCLA is thus not merely a computational aid to help detect or evidence ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performance (the focus of many kinds of analytic), but a tool to help investigate questions of interest to researchers, practitioners, and ultimately learners. The paper ends with three core issues for DCLA researchers – the challenge of context in relation to DCLA; the various systems required for DCLA to be effective; and the means through which DCLA might be delivered for maximum impact at the micro (e.g. learner), meso (e.g. school), and macro (e.g. governmental) levels.

The LAK15 theme “shifts the focus from data to impact”, noting the potential for Learning Analytics based on existing technologies to have scalable impact on learning for people of all ages. For such demand and potential in scalability to be met the challenges of addressing higher-order thinking skills should be addressed. This paper discuses one such approach – the creation of an analytic and task model to probe epistemic cognition in complex literacy tasks. The research uses existing technologies in novel ways to build a conceptually grounded model of trace-indicators for epistemic-commitments in information seeking behaviors. We argue that such an evidence centered approach is fundamental to realizing the potential of analytics, which should maintain a strong association with learning theory.

Learning Analytics is an emerging research field and design discipline which occupies the ‘middle space’ between the learning sciences/educational research, and the use of computational techniques to capture and analyse data (Suthers and Verbert, 2013). We propose that the literature examining the triadic relationships between epistemology (the nature of knowledge), pedagogy (the nature of learning and teaching) and assessment provide critical considerations for bounding this middle space. We provide examples to illustrate the ways in which the understandings of particular analytics are informed by this triad. As a detailed worked example of how one might design analytics to scaffold a specific form of higher order learning, we focus on the construct of epistemic beliefs: beliefs about the nature of knowledge. We argue that analytics grounded in a pragmatic, sociocultural perspective are well placed to explore this construct using discourse-centric technologies. The examples provided throughout this paper, through emphasising the consideration of intentional design issues in the middle space, underscore the “interpretative flexibility” (Hamilton & Feenberg, 2005) of new technologies, including analytics.

This paper presents the design and application of a web service architecture for providing shared access to web-based visual representations, such as dynamic models, simulations and visualizations. The Shared Representations (SR) system was created to facilitate the development of collaborative and co-operative learning activities over the web, and has been applied to provide shared group access to: a high-resolution image viewer, a virtual petrological microscope, and a forces and motion spring simulation. As well as explaining the architecture and three applications, we briefly present the findings from a user study looking at primary school children’s use of a shared spring simulation. The study findings indicate that shared access to a web-based simulation complements exploratory discussion and enables learners to demonstrate their understanding of a subject. Future work will explore how the system can be combined with dialogic support and embedded in activities to encourage learners with contrasting opinions to discuss and resolve their differing perspectives.

Collaborative information retrieval is an area of increasing interest. However, the wider sensemaking context in which it occurs is understudied. Furthermore, the role of users’ beliefs about the domain they are querying, its structure, stability, complexity, and justifications – their epistemic beliefs – has been little studied in either individual or collaborative IR software development contexts. Here we discuss a tool to combine the knowledge mapping tool Cohere, with reference management capabilities through which the iterative, epistemically germane, potentially (but not necessarily) collaborative IR process may be ‘brought out’ both for sensemaking, and research purposes.

This chapter presents findings from research which we conducted with participants who were current and former art college students, practitioners in different areas of creative arts and design, and therefore workers in a relatively newly named part of the economy, the ‘creative industries’. Originally identified by New Labour as a significantly successful new sector, they have subsequently received considerable attention from policy-makers and also academic commentators, in the UK and elsewhere. The list of creative industries cited by New Labour (DCMS 2001) also corresponds closely to the subject areas and activities of many art college courses, indicating how these institutions function as a vocational training ground and entry point for the creative industries. In this chapter, we discuss special issues which our research raised in relation to creative working; the implications of our research findings for vocational learners themselves and for course providers, teachers and institutions; sources of advantage and disadvantage for learners, as indicated by our research, and some further implications for those aiming to assist and expand lifelong learning opportunities.

In this paper we offer a significant development of Baldry and Thibault’s (2006) notion of a ‘meaning-making trajectory’ to explore the collective, and often improvisational, interactional processes of meaning making in classroom dialogue. We report a sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004) of a series of history lessons with a class of 6-7 year-old children, which utilises the notion of ‘meaning potential’: to highlight the valuable distinction and flexible interplay between a teacher’s intended meaning-making trajectory, and the meaning-making trajectories that are instantiated in interaction with pupils through dialogic interaction. We argue that where disparities are identified, often through pupils’ unexpected questions or contributions, there can be valuable teaching-and-learning opportunities for collaboratively constructing and appropriating common knowledge.

We explore how small-format laptops ('netbooks') have been used within evidence-based investigations undertaken by secondary school students, to what extent these are suitable for effectively supporting learners across different locations and contexts, and their implications for open learning. Over the course of seven trials with 300 students and seven teachers we have gathered data on how netbooks have been used in formal and informal learning contexts, bridging school, field locations and home. The netbooks have supported individual, group and class tasks, and acted as both stand-alone and networked devices. Three themes have emerged: the use of a single device to support inquiries across activities and places; student use and appropriation; and organisation and management. We conclude that netbooks are a category of device that can be highly effective in supporting open learning, although careful consideration is required when considering their deployment and use.

Asynchronous online dialogue offers advantages to learners, but has appeared to involve only limited use of new literacy practices. To investigate this, a multimodal approach was applied to asynchronous dialogue. The study analysed the online discussions of small groups of university students as they developed collaboratively authored documents. Sociocultural discourse analysis of the dialogue was combined with visual analysis of its structural elements. The groups were found to employ new literacies that supported the joint construction of knowledge. The documents on which they worked together functioned as ‘improvable objects’ and the development of these was associated with engagement in ‘attached dialogue’. By investigating a wider range of conference dialogue than has previously been explored, it was found that engaging in attached dialogue associated with collaborative authorship of improvable objects prompts groups of online learners to share knowledge, challenge ideas, justify opinions, evaluate evidence and consider options.

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Here we explore how technology can be applied to support inquiry learning spanning a range of contexts. The development process of a location-based inquiry learning toolset is presented for a secondary school GCSE Geography project. The design framework used and the process of participatory development is discussed with regard to the co-development of the activities and tools involved in an inquiry project. The lessons learned relate to the formation of a motivational context for the inquiry; the role of personal data collection in the field; the use of bridging representations across field and classroom activities; and the development of flexible, re-usable tools to support and bridge sequences of activities.

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Recent studies have described professional identity as the interplay between individual agency and social context. However, we need to understand how these are intertwined in different kinds of work settings. This paper focuses on teachers’ professional identity negotiations as involving the work organisation, the professional community and individual agency. The data were gathered from two work organisations representing different management cultures and sources of control over teachers’ work. Open-ended narrative interviews were used, focusing on teachers’ own experiences and perceptions. A data-driven qualitative analysis was applied. Our findings indicated that different work organisations provided differing resources for teachers’ professional identity negotiations. Teachers were more committed to their work organisation if they had enough agency, if they had opportunities to practise their own orientations towards the profession, and if major changes were not imposed on their working practices from outside.

The identity projects of novice creative practitioners must take account of the economy of art work. It has been suggested (McRobbie, 2002a) that in the contemporary cultural industries in the UK, a new understanding of the connection between creative work and money has replaced past 'anti-commercial' notions. This claim is investigated through a narrative-discursive analysis of interviews from a longitudinal study with current and recent Art and Design postgraduates. Their ongoing identity projects are shaped by established understandings of creative work and the prospects it offers for earning and employment, and also by more local discursive resources given by personal life contexts. An analysis of two interviews with a single speaker shows how these resources are taken up within her ongoing and distinctive identity project. Both old and new repertoires of art and money are in play in her talk. She must negotiate dilemmas and potentially troubled positionings in order to reconcile a creative identity with relationships and responsibilities towards others. Coherence is only achieved momentarily and is disrupted by new life circumstances. By investigating an identity project at the level of talk, the analysis shows the complexity of the speaker's work to construct and claim a creative identity.

This paper presents a study of a series of band rehearsals run by five young people as they practised for a gig together: preparing new songs as well as developing their existing sets. The analysis specifically explores the ways in which the band members collectively develop and evaluate their musical ‘works in progress’. Their interactions were distinctive: with evidence of emotive, highly critical and sometimes conflictual dynamics in places. Within and through such processes the band members constructed a musical ‘shared knowledge’ which resourced the negotiation of their emergent band identity.

The interactive whiteboard (IWB), the first ICT tool primarily designed for whole-class interaction, is now in regular use in most British primary schools. In this paper, we explore its distinctive potential for enabling the teacher to plan and orchestrate activities and lessons using a wide range of multimodal resources, to engage students' cognitive and imaginative capacities. We show how teachers use combinations of 'matched resources' to support the bridging of pupils' understanding from the known to the new, and from everyday to academic understandings. We demonstrate how teachers can use the IWB to resource the development of ideas and themes over time while maintaining spontaneous responsiveness to situations as they arise, effectively enacting Sawyer's notion of teaching as 'disciplined improvisational performance'.

In this paper, we describe an innovative approach to promoting effective classroom-based groupwork and the development of children's speaking and listening at Key Stage 1. This approach, known as Thinking Together, was initially developed for use with Key Stage 2 children. The work reported here explains how this approach has now been applied to the teaching of speaking and listening at Key Stage 1. The approach is founded on contemporary sociocultural theory and research. At the heart of the Thinking Together approach is a concern to help children build and develop their knowledge and understanding together, through enabling them to practise and develop ways of reasoning with language.