Abstracts - Earli

also enriching their learning environment. In particular, the role of students’ questions in meaningmakingof science are explored, underlining the manner they shift classroom discourse frommonologic to dialogic talk while they are also tools that make meaning-making of abstractscientific content possible and visible. To do so, I draw upon qualitative case studies of sevenpartnership projects (astronomy, astronaut, archeology, entomology, ornithology, paleontologyand robotics) among 12 different elementary classrooms (grade 3 – 6). Within each model,scientists animated classroom sessions and visits to museums or research facilities while thestudents were also engaged in a project related to the topic of the partnership. Through interactivevideo analysis, exchanges provoked by student questions are explored in terms of the work suchquestions accomplish. The analysis underlines that student initiated questions transformed muchmonologic talk driven by scientists’ presentation of abstract and complex scientific knowledge intodialogic talk owned by the students. Students’ questioning also made readily visible their activeengagement in meaning-making and the manner they used their prior everyday and academic waysof knowing as resources in such a process, most often looking for confirmation by the scientists oftheir meaning-making. In essence, the analysis makes visible the manner knowledge and discourseare continuously negotiated, made and re-made, and hence, in flux. Yet, such hybridity of ways ofbeing and talking are at the heart of effective communities of learners valued by learners.Orchestration with the Interactive WhiteboardKaren Littleton, The Open University, United KingdomJulia Gillen, The Open University, United KingdomJudith Kleine Staarman, University of Cambridge, United KingdomNeil Mercer, University of Cambridge, United KingdomAlison Twiner, The Open University, United KingdomThe Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) is the first ICT tool primarily well-designed for whole-classinteraction. It is now in regular use in most British primary schools. Research into its introductionin classrooms has revealed its distinctive potential for enabling the teacher to plan and orchestratelessons using a wide range of multimodal resources. In this paper we explore ways in whichteachers use the IWB in their everyday practice. In doing so we draw upon a conception ofteaching as a form of improvisational performance. Our UK Economic and Social ResearchCouncil (ESRC) funded project has focussed on use of the IWB within four classes of childrenaged 7-11 years, at the upper end of primary education. Each class was video recorded during twosequences of two lessons, providing 16 lessons overall. Teachers were also interviewed to discoverhow they account for their use of IWBs within their teaching and learning. Our analyses illuminatethe ways in which teachers orchestrate a rich blend of multimodal resources to engage students’cognitive and imaginative capacities. We show how teachers use combinations of ‘matchedresources’ to support the bridging of pupils’ understanding from the known to the new, and fromeveryday to academic understandings. We focus on the distinctive contributions that the IWB canmake to teaching and learning, including resourcing the development of ideas and themes overtime, while enabling spontaneous responsiveness to situations as they arise. We show how,through imaginative deployment of the semiotic resources made available through use of the IWB,teachers vary the tempo of lessons and moderate mood and tone, to sustain pupil engagement increative acts of transformation.– 343 –