Follow the Actions
Classrooms are characterized by established organizational practices and constitute environments rich in material technologies. A tool such as the board supports classroom activity, and is the object towards which the participants to the classroom event coordinate their mutual attention. The local organization of classroom interaction is accomplished through talk, but also through gazed, gestures, body posture. How is the embodied conduct made for the management of the endogenous (emic) activity ? How does the ability to follow and understand the actions of others allow the accomplishment of co-orientation towards a common interactional moment ? This paper examines a transition moment between two activities with the interactive whiteboard, during which the teacher manipulates the tool and interrogates the students about how to use the board for next activity. This teaching situation has been recorded from the video analysis perspective of the local order in the classroom, whose basic requirement is to preserve the resources mobilized and used by the participants to the interaction. Analysis is interested in how students follow the teacher’s actions, raise their hands to pre-select, begin to respond to attract attention, and produce pointing gestures towards the board in a publicly intelligible way. We examine how, through their embodied conduct (verbal and gestural), children make visible how they orient to, and how they are able to manage, the observability of their conduct in the classroom.