Abstracts - Earli

C 1229 August 2007 08:30 - 10:30Room: 7.14SymposiumUnderstanding understanding as an interactional matterChair: Timothy Koschmann, Southern Illinois University, USAOrganiser: Timothy Koschmann, Southern Illinois University, USADiscussant: Roger Säljö, Department of Education, Göteborg University, SwedenUnderstanding and how it is produced are central issues for research in education, but thesematters have also been a long-standing focus of interest in the social and communicative sciences.For example, in an early essay Moerman and Sacks (1988) posed the following series of questions:What forms of social organization secure the recurrence of understanding among parties toconversation, the central institution of language use? What forms of social organization getparticipants to occasions of talk to do the work of understanding the talk of others in the very waysand at the very times at which they demonstrably do that work? And what are the understandingswhich those forms secure? (p. 182) Moerman and Sacks argued that these questions might to somedegree be addressed by carefully studying how turns within a conversation are actually organized.In his lectures and subsequent writings, Sacks demonstrated precisely how such studies might beconducted. But understanding how participants competently and routinely manage turns at talkrepresents only one facet of how understanding is produced. Considerable terrain remains to beexplored. To do so, several important questions must be taken up. What are the basicorganizational features of doing an understanding? How would we go about actually studyingthese features? And most critically, what does it actually mean to ‘have an understanding’ or,stated more plainly, how is having an understanding to be understood? These questions arestrongly connected to old and contentious issues in western philosophy and social theory. Thispanel will address them empirically by presenting a series of analyses of understandings producedin concrete settings. References Moerman, M., & Sacks, H. (1988). On "Understanding" in theanalysis of natural conversation. In M. Moerman (Ed.), Talking culture: Ethnography andconversation analysis (pp. 180-186). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Embodying understanding: Training and the body in clinical situationsJon Hindmarsh, King’s College London, United KingdomThis paper is concerned with the interactional organisation of real-time, co-present clinical trainingin dentistry. One dimension of these clinical environments is that they entail an intriguing tensionbetween issues of teaching and learning and of the safe delivery of dental care - whilst they aretraining environments the students are providing care to real patients. The paper explicates theorganisation of interaction during moments when supervisors inspect the quality of the clinicalassessments made by students and indeed the dental work they undertake. These activities areroutinely organised through a collaborative viewing and discussion of the (work in the) patient’smouth. These episodes are critical as they provide ongoing assessment of students’ work andprovide the basis for discussions of how to initiate or progress the treatment plan. This studyexplores the interactional management of these collaborative viewings to consider the ways inwhich tutors, students and patients order the work of teaching and learning. The paper takesparticular interest in the ways in which displays of understanding are organised through bodilyconduct just as much (and sometimes rather than) verbal conduct. It considers how these displays– 149 –