Abstracts - Earli

classrooms and classroom instruction would be unimaginable. The classroom materials willsuggest both the unremarkable diversity and the actionable bases of understanding in classroominstruction. The paper further aims to show that the work of understanding—both its first work inthe world and our disciplinary study of it—is work for which psychology has no particularpurchase. The understanding we aim to understand is the work of a deeply social world, played outon the surfaces of social action, overwhelmingly talk–in–action, or, as our panel’s title suggests,interaction. Informed by prior work in ethnomethodology and sequential analysis, the paperrecommends a praxiological understanding of understanding, in classroom instruction andelsewhere.Reference in explanation: An aspect of prenatal examinations in Japanese obstetric settingsAug Nishizaka, Meiji Gakuin University, JapanThis study is part of a larger body of research currently underway, concerning ways in whichreferences to the uterine or fetal conditions are accomplished in Japanese obstetric settings, clinicsor "midwife houses". I focus on the explanations, given by medical providers, obstetricians ormidwives, to pregnant women, of what they perceive, visually or tactilely, particularly, thoseexplanations given during the on-going examinations, of what is being done and perceived in andthrough these very examinations. Those explanations require reference to pregnant women’srelevant internal body parts or fetal body parts. I explore how reference to a uterine or fetal part isachieved in the course of explanation of what is being perceived or done. Through the detailedanalysis of interaction between medical providers and pregnant women in prenatal examinations, itis revealed how reference is lodged in the normative organization of the ongoing actionsequencing, particularly, the organization of "explanation sequence" in prenatal examinations inthe environment equipped with a specific device, an ultrasound scanner. I show that referencemust be accomplished in ways appropriate to the current status of the on-going activity, such as aprenatal examination. The variety of reference originates from different compositions that eachutterance in each sequence takes and different positions that each utterance occupies in themultilayered organization of action sequencing. The understanding of the current explanation isalways an interactional achievement, insofar as it depends on the success of references in thecurrent explanation sequence and actual action sequences must be organized depending on all thecontingencies in interaction.Understanding as participationAlan Zemel, Drexel University, USATimothy Koschmann, Southern Illinois University, USAInteractional approaches to ‘understanding’ as a matter of analytical interest provide a powerfulalternative to cognitivist models of mind. To begin to unpack how the practical business ofknowing, understanding and learning are accomplished interactionally, however, we do not needto rely on the view of cognition that treats understanding as a psychological state of the individual.When actors engage in self- or other-repair, when they produce or call on others to produceaccounts, explanations, demonstrations, when they engage in correction or other forms of sensemaking,they are doing the work of problematizing their ongoing achieved understanding and arealso working to achieve understanding through their problematizing work. The indexicalorganization of understanding’s work is central to the organization of our analysis. As Hanks(1992) argues, the indexical properties of social interaction locate the speaker, the referent and therecipient in a web of relationships and shared perspectives embodied in the referential workperformed that also provide for the intelligibility of the referential action for the parties to the– 151 –