When studying interactions in pedagogic settings, we want to gain an in-depth understanding of the micro actions. But we also want to understand how the micro actions connect to practices, and how they link to larger discourses.

Multimodal (inter)action analysis is a framework that brings together detailed analysis of micro actions with analysis of practices and discourses that participants draw on as they perform the actions and interactions.

With examples from family video conferences, an elementary school classroom, and an art school, I demonstrate what can be learned when using this multimodal framework for the analysis of interactions in pedagogic situations.

This PhD course explores multimodal analysis from a multimodal mediated perspective. With mediated discourse theory (Scollon, 1998, 2001) building the theoretical core, multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 20111) explores the actions that people perform and links these to the practices that the actions draw upon and re-produce or change.

More specifically the course will examine the following areas:

• Video data and analyse the lower-level, higher-level and frozen actions that participants perform.
• Using the site of engagement (Scollon, 1998) as analytical tool, the actions are then further analysed as linked to practices.
• The term practice is here used in Scollon’s (2001) sense and is defined as an action with a history.

The course delves into analysing video data from a multimodal mediated (inter)action analytical point of view. The students will learn the basic units of analysis, the mediated action (Wertsch, 1998; Scollon, 1998), the lower-level, higher-level and frozen mediated action (Norris (2004), the site of engagement (Scollon, 2001; Norris, 2014), and practice (Scollon, 2001).

With this theoretical and analytical background, the students will then be lead to conduct their own analysis either using their own data or using data made available by VILA.

The workshop will form a pre-conference activity of the annual Association of Visual Pedagogy Conference and will be supported through resources provided through DIGHUMLAB.