Students’ Framing of a Reading Annotation Tool in the Context of Research-Based Teaching

 ABSTRACT

In the studied master’s course, students participated both as research objects in a digital annotation experiment and as critical investigators of this technology in their semester projects. The students’ role paralleled the researcher’s role, opening an opportunity for researcher–student co-learning within what is often referred to as research-based teaching. Drawing on a sociocultural approach, this article reports on how this setting may affect students’ framing (Goffman, 1974). It compares students’ framing of the tool used during the digital annotation experiment (Case 1) with students’ framing of the tool when investigating the technology in their semester projects (Case 2). The study shows that students’ framing of the tool and researcher–student collaborative inquiries were principally different in the two cases. Case 1 mostly adapted the original framing of the tool (tool perspective), whereas Case 2 challenged this framing (tool inquiry perspective). The exploration of these two foci provides a better understanding of students’ epistemological, social, and affective framing under varying contexts and the consequences these have for their tool inquiries.