A Preliminary Study of the Orderliness of University Student Note-Taking Practices

P. 119–142.

Korbut A.

Note-taking is an ordinary, common student practice at universities, which is rapidly changing under the influx of electronic technologies for recording and storing audio and visual educational materials. However, little attention has been paid to the actual organization of note-taking. This chapter presents an ethnomethodological study of the real-world orderliness of note-taking. It shows that note-taking is a collaborative production of teachers and students: students take into account the details of teacher’s speech and gestures while teachers adjust their lecturing activities to the visible actions of note-taking students. The analysis, based primarily on the data from lectures for undergraduate students in a Russian university, shows that note-taking practices are interwoven into the choreography of classroom interaction, the local history of student learning, and the knowledge certification practices at universities. The preliminary description of the details of local material practices of note production and usage lays the foundation for the analysis of note-taking as a routinely organized and organizational situated activity.

Keywords: ethnomethodology, university education, note-taking, knowledge transfer, classroom interaction

Publication based on the results of: Reaction, Justice, and Progress: Social Order in the Phronetic Social Science (2018)

In book

Studentische Praxis und universitäre Interaktionskultur: Perspektiven einer praxeologischen Bildungsforschung

Springer, 2019.