Learning to play the seminar game: students’ initial encounters with a basic working form in higher education1

Andreas Fejes and Kristina Johansson were equal contributors to this article. Madeleine Abrandt Dahlgren was supportive in the process of analyzing the data and structuring the article.

Abstract

This paper investigates students' initial encounters with the seminar as a working form in higher education. The main interest was to explore how the communication pattern, the aim of the seminar and meaning were negotiated. The results originate from an ethnographic field study where we followed a group of students in a Masters program in Social Science during their first five weeks. Data were analyzed from a socio-cultural perspective and the concepts of participation and reification. We found that there was an implicit negotiation of the communication pattern, what to discuss and the function of the seminar. In these processes, the students and teacher participated in the negotiation of meaning. Different objects were created through a reification process, around which the negotiation of meaning took place.

Notes

Andreas Fejes and Kristina Johansson were equal contributors to this article. Madeleine Abrandt Dahlgren was supportive in the process of analyzing the data and structuring the article.