Learning as Longitudinal Interactional Change: From Other-Repair to Self-Repair in Physiotherapy Treatment

Abstract

The aims of this article are to address how learning is constituted and can be studied as a phenomenon in interaction and to discuss how teaching and learning are related. Theoretically, the article argues for and discusses constraints and affordances for relating sociocultural understandings of learning as changing participation to conversation analysis understandings of participation. The data material consists of longitudinal video recordings of authentic physiotherapist–patient encounters. This study traces the progressional change in the formation of movement behavior through detailed analysis of repair and correction practices. The results show a change in participation over time through capturing changes in the repair and correction organization participants use to resolve troubles with understanding and movement performance. In sum, there is a successive change for the patient from other- to self-initiated repair and correction, and from other- to self-repair and correction. The findings relate to the notion of educational scaffolding and have implications for teaching professions.

Notes

¹This is not the place for a thorough presentation of conversation analysis (CA), especially because there already are many excellent such presentations available (for two recent examples, cf. Drew & Heritage, 2006; Schegloff, 2007). In this article, CA is regarded as a generous and inclusive concept, encompassing a fairly broad range of work.

²In relation to the view of learning as a situated social process, the stance that contextually embedded multiparty interaction is the primordial site for human sociality resonates well with how current research in the cognitive sciences research for some time has argued a notion of the human mind as socially and materially “extended” (cf. Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Hutchins, 2006; Wilson, 2004).

³The understanding of understanding as a doing rather than a state obviously resonates well with the view of learning as changing participation.