Browsing by Author "Räsänen, Vilma"

In the future the school will be working more and more together with the formal learning environments in the informal environments. Taking a socio-cultural perspective on learning it is characterized as a process that happens in interaction through collaborative participation. The earlier studies have illustrated that an initiative-response-evaluation -cycle (IRE-cycle) is reproduced in formal classroom interaction. This way of organizing interaction supports a teacher-led conversation culture in the classroom. Even though the school strives for expanding outside the formal environment the ways that the interaction is organized in an informal environment during school time have been studied very little. The purpose of this study was to find out how the interaction is like in an informal learning environment during the school time. The study was aimed to find out how the interaction was organized on a school birding trip and how was it like. The study was qualitative and data-driven. The data of the study consisted of a two-hour and 59-minutes video data that was collected as a part of the Learning Bridges research project in 2008-2010. The data was filmed on a school birding trip in Viikki and the participants were 18 fourth graders, their teacher and a birdwatcher. The analysis started of an urge to find out why the atmosphere on the birding trip was so free. The data was analyzed using the progressive refinement of hypotheses as an analysis method which implies that the research questions were formed watching the data over and over again. During this process significant episodes were selected in the data and they were analyzed more carefully. In the data there were only a few situations in which the interaction was organized as a teacher-led and by the IRE-cycle. The interaction was organized this way only in those situations where the teacher for example was checking out the knowledge of the students of something and the use was then well-grounded. Instead on the birding trip the interaction was organized often around the observations in the shared observation process. I called it crowding when an observation gathered the people together suddenly in the middle of the ongoing interaction and fading when people were little by little moving away from a shared situation to make something else. It were the teacher and the birdwatcher who usually brought the observations to the shared attention but they also encouraged the students to share their observations with others by giving them responsibility and choice of how they participated. The conclusion can be drawn that working in an informal environment can create new interactional structures in the formal learning and that they can enable different ways of learning. The informal learning environments should be brought as a natural part of the curriculum and the everyday life at school to support the idea that learning takes place everywhere.