Insights into Contextualised Learning: How Do Professional Examiners Construct Shared Understanding through Feedback?

Abstract

This project uses the community of practice metaphor to explore some of the discursive characteristics of learning that take place when a group of United Kingdom-based professional examiners engage in joint-work activity in both face-to-face and remote computer-mediated communication contexts. Professional examiners are all subject experts, and the essence of their work, reinforced by the hierarchical structures that organise their working relationships, means that examiner ‘learning’ involves the convergence of understandings of less senior examiners with those of other, more senior examiners around key concepts. This project looks at how more senior examiners help to induct other examiners into ways of thinking within a professional community. It also looks at the role of boundary objects, such as mark schemes, which help to coordinate different perspectives within the community. Focusing specifically on the feedback that senior examiners give to less senior examiners in their team, this study extends the use of a discourse analytical approach that has only previously been used in face-to-face learning interaction to look at how shared meanings can be built through social interaction in an applied work situation.