Teaching and learning practices are rather established in school institutions. Yet, alongside the stability that characterises school institutions new forms of teaching and learning practices have emerged and matured (Cuban, 1993). Theme, project and group-work often in combination with ICT are today enacted on a regular basis in many classrooms particularly in Scandinavia (Bergquist & Säljö, 2004; Klette, 2003). This research investigated how teachers and pupils engage in planning during project work in a primary classroom. The findings show that ICT-rich project work presuppose rather complex skills on the parts of pupils being able to define the task and to plan what to do and how to do it. Learning to plan and structure the ordering of work becomes essential in such learning environments. In fact, the teachers spend most of their time scaffolding the pupils in this kind of work.

Aims

This study investigates how teachers and pupils engage in activities of planning in project work in a primary school in Norway. Project work and various forms of group or theme based work have a long tradition and are relatively frequently used at all levels in Scandinavian schools (Dokka, 1988; Ludvigsen & Løkensgaard, 2002; Säljö & Linderoth, 2002). The everyday practices of project work is often characterised by a low degree of structure and where discovery as an instructional method is given priority (Polman, 2004). Project work is also often used in combination with ICT and open-ended tasks (Kozma, 2003). Considering this, it is important to investigate project work as a contemporary school practice: the skills and competencies that are actually needed to carry out a task in such environments and what characterises the practices that develops.

Methodology

The empirical study was undertaken at a primary school that used project work and ICT on a regularly basis. The data are collected over a period of three years. One project work was followed each year. The data consisted of field notes based on observations of participants, video and audio recordings of social interactions and collections of pupils work. Most of the data has been used as a background against which interaction analysis of video recordings have been carried out (Jordan & Henderson, 1995).

The study is grounded in a sociocultural approach to learning, with its key concepts of activity, mediation and artefacts (Wertsch, 1991). Central concepts within the participation model, such as talk and activities, concern moment-to-moment interactions. Other concepts, such as appropriation, artefacts and social practice, point towards historically developed conditions that characterise participation in institutions. In the present study, the unit of analysis is participation trajectories (Lave & Wenger, 1991). By following participation in social practices over periods of time, the analyst is able to open the ‘black box’ and investigate how learning is actually constituted, not only as isolated units, but as interactions situated in settings marked by accumulated historical knowledge.

Findings

The investigation found that teaching and learning practices are changing in ICT-rich project work environments.

The study indicates that historically developed interaction structures, like the teacher-centred IRF pattern, are challenged by a mode of communication that is more negotiation based than directive. Teacher led interactions with peer groups and whole classes were characterised by informal conversations and a high level of pupil initiative. However, the purpose of the activities and the connection between different activities was often left implicit.

Consequently, the pupils were left to author much of the task as part of their peer group work. The implication of this shift together with the use of open-ended tasks, group work and the use of ICT is that the nature of schoolwork is changing. Pupils agency increases along with the need to understand how to frame and perform the task. This presupposes rather complex skills on the parts of pupils, such as being able to stay focused while searching for, selecting, structuring and evaluating information and arguments of different kinds.

To support these complex processes new practices emerge. The teachers developed directive learning resources in the form of printed ‘hand-outs’ with step-by-step recipes to support processes of planning and self-organisation. While the pupils appropriated these resources they also developed their own support tools, often in the form of drawings or by the use of computer tools that provided overviews of contents. The pupils created in other words superordinate representations to assist their integrating and evaluation of content and arguments of different kinds.

Educational and theoretical implications

Educational implications of this study can be drawn from the analysis of emergent new practices. From an institutional point of view, project work and ICT call for systematic intervention in order to capitalise on interactions in which the learning of school content is likely to occur. However, this study demonstrate that there is a tension between different institutional concerns in project work – between learning subject content and learning to plan and structure the process of work. The latter is a new institutional requirement that is closely connected to skills and competencies that are generally seen as essential in a society marked by a rapid escalation in the volume of complex information.

The nature of the work and the expectations are in other words different from those of more traditional teacher and text-book centred practices. One central educational implication is that planning is best understood as an additional task that requires skills and competencies both on the part of the teachers and the pupils.

In the case of the teachers, planning must be systematically scaffolded during both peer-group supervision and whole-class interaction. The present analysis showed that the teachers’ scaffolding included monitoring the unfolding of the activities in peer groups and intervening when necessary.

The pupils that appropriated the teachers’ planning model also developed additional planning devices. This kind of meta-work is cognitively demanding and requires time and effort on the part of both teachers and pupils.

The theoretical contributions from this study lie in the elaboration of the concept of trajectory that emerges from the empirical findings and the multilevel approach that has been developed and tried. This theoretical and methodological exploration has allowed me to take into account structural features that characterise participation and how participants in interaction make sense of the features that characterise the situations: what is made relevant, what has an impact on their interactions, and why. Taking interdependency and time as central analytical regulators provided insights into how certain types of activities or knowledge became relevant not only transitorily, but also how and why it stayed relevant throughout the activity and how it related to the social practice.