Classroom video data and resources for teaching: Some thoughts on teacher education

Abstract

In this chapter, we first study the teacher’s action in the classroom, focusing on her use of material and symbolic elements (students writings) as resources. We present a case study corresponding to a specific experimental teaching exercise. This experimental teaching exercise was designed by a team of researchers and teachers. We analyse the teacher’s action referring to the joint action theory: we look at her action as part and parcel of a dis-symmetric teacher-pupils transaction, about a piece of knowledge at stake, and we focus on the language used in the classroom. We articulate these analyses with a proxemics perspective: we also focus on body and space “fittings”. Then we connect non-verbal aspects to linguistic interactions. Next we investigate the use of video data for exploring classroom practices. Proxemics, in particular, introduces new ways of drawing on videos. We argue that teacher’s and pupils’ joint actions cannot be accessible by using only written material, but have to be supported by video studies, in particular by analyses of didactic techniques of expert teachers. This raises the question of the use of videos as a resource for teacher education.