'Getting on the Page': The Practical Accord of Material Resources in Educational Interaction

Abstract

This article explicates the notion of "practical accord", encompassing the routine nonproblematic relationship of material artifacts and textual objects that provides the necessary grounds for further classroom work. Practical accord consists of courses of action that are temporally aligned with structured objects such as series of pages, slides or questions, ordered as a sequence of steps. Grounded in the video-based analysis of a single case, the article argues that such practical accord can be a necessary requirement for an educative activity to take place in an orderly way in the classroom. The analysis focuses on a particular instance of three students working with a shared laptop and a paper worksheet, and losing their grasp of the relationship between the screen and the sheet. The identified practices used to get back "on the page" include the verbal and gestural constitution of the screen and the sheet as two separate objects that are related through instructions provided on the screen, which serves as a link between two independent but interrelated numbering systems used to organise the on-screen material and the questions on the worksheet. The article concludes with a discussion of the notion of practical accord with regard to instructed action and gestalt contextures.