Abstracts - Earli

foci are different, the reference to underpinning rationales or theoretical frames is varied, thebalance of talk and analysis between the coach and the ‘coachee’ is very uneven. We discuss theneed for school leaders to provide ‘learning space’ (Clement & Vandenberghe, 2000) for teachersto develop both autonomy and collaborative professional development. This is increasinglyimportant as governments seek to move away from centralised control of education in order todevelop more creative and responsive educational systems.Negotiating and re-negotiating conversational ground rules. Applying the Thinking together -approach in a Finnish contextJaakko Hilppo, University of Helsinki, FinlandLasse Lipponen, University of Helsinki, FinlandBuilding on a socio-cultural framework on learning (Wertsch 1991, Lave & Wenger 1991) thisstudy applies the Thinking together -approach (Mercer et al. 1999) in a Finnish elementary schoolcontext. At the heart of the programme lies a set conversational ground rules designed to promoteexploratory engagement in collaborative learning tasks. Yet for any educational programme to besuccessful it has to take seriously the concerns, agendas and ideas of the participants involved. Inother words it has to adapt to the local context of the intervention. The aim of the study is to focuson the intercontextuality of the conversational ground rules as they are constructed and adopted asthe common knowledge of the classroom. The intercontextual analysis will look closely at thesociocultural trajectories (Kumpulainen et al. 2003) of each of the ground rules. This is seen toprovide insight into the "long conversation" (Mercer 2000) of that particular community and alsointo the construction of a tool designed to promote exploratory collaboration.Formulating text: The practice of commenting in academic writingGustav Lymer, Department of Applied IT, Göteborg University, SwedenJohan Lundin, Department of Applied IT, Göteborg University, SwedenThe practice of commenting and criticizing text is pervasive in higher education. The goal of thisstudy is to provide an ethnomethodologically informed understanding of this instructive practice,through analyses of teachers’ ways of formulating comments to student texts, and students’ waysof using these comments. The study builds on video-data from a course in "applied researchmethod", given as part of a study program where students learn to apply social scientific methodsand perspectives to design. The second half of the course is mainly built around a project wherethe students are to perform ethnographic studies of workplaces. Based on their findings, they writea report. We videotaped and analysed the instruction sessions involving teachers and students, andsome of the students’ own meetings, where they discuss and apply the teachers’ instructions andcomments. Based on these analyses, we discuss three interrelated points: first, the teacher’spractices of formulating instructions and exercising his competencies are seen as inextricablybound to the students’ texts and made possible by those texts; second, the students’ ways of usingcomments is conceptualized as a thoroughly material and analytic practice, in which annotatedcopies of the report are used to recreate "what the teacher meant"; and third, we argue thatcommon apprehensions about direct text instruction – as either providing students with easy fixes,or being incomprehensible to students in presupposing knowledge that they do not have – might beunwarranted, given the work students do in order to follow even "simple" instructions.– 845 –