This ongoing study aims to explore what takes place during a series of online student driven workshops in a media course for art- and media teachers to be. How the online setting is put to use by the students, but also how norms and pedagogical strategies concerning learning and education are negotiated in the pedagogical space and how this affects the students design of the workshops.

The study has been conducted using an ethnographic approach with participatory observation as method to access the field. In focus is a series of five workshops where 14 teacher students, divided in small groups, take on the teacher role by planning and performing a lesson of their own choice for the rest of the students in the group. They design a lesson with a specific target group in mind, adjusted to the online setting, and with a content and purpose that matches the course´s focus on digital media and learning. The workshops, where I took part as a student, were documented with screen recordings that documented everything that took place on the screen. These recordings, along with the prepared material used during the workshop constitutes the data for this study.

My theoretical understanding draws on a design-oriented multimodal perspective on learning (Selander & Kress, 2021; Åkerfeldt, 2014). This perspective helps to make visible and reflect on both the design for learning, that is the conditions and framing of the learning situation, as well as design in learning. In the representations, one can distinguish the students' perspectives, what they have taken note of and how they choose to shape their understandings. From a design-oriented perspective learning is about, among other things, meaning-making, knowledge representations and cultures of recognition.

Preliminary findings show how pedagogic strategies appear and are negotiated as the students take on the performative task of orchestrating the lessons during the course of the five workshops. Other contributions include making visible what characterizes the specific context these online-workshops offer and what is enabled in this specific setting. I also aim at giving examples of how collaborative meaning-making can contribute to online teaching practices.

References:

Selander, S., & Kress, G. R. (2021). Design för lärande : ett multimodalt perspektiv. Studentlitteratur.

Åkerfeldt, A. (2014). Didaktisk design med digitala resurser : en studie av kunskapsrepresentationer i en digitaliserad skola. Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik, Stockholms universitet.