Welcome to the first FinEd Online Research Talk (FORT) of the autumn 2026 season! On Monday, September 28 at 13.00-14.00, Kreeta Niemi will talk with the topic ”From Close Observation to Broader Inquiry: Researching Everyday Classroom Interaction”. Kreeta Niemi is a tenure-track researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. Her research examines participation and learning across diverse learners and learning environments, with particular attention to the social, spatial, and material conditions of classroom life. Her work combines video-based interaction research with quantitative and mixed-methods approaches. Please see the abstract of the talk below.
Link to the online talk https://jyufi.zoom.us/j/63118004080
From Close Observation to Broader Inquiry: Researching Everyday Classroom Interaction
A student sitting in the “wrong” place. A student seeking help but not gaining the teacher’s attention. Two teachers in the same classroom, each engaged in a different activity. A student who is physically present but gradually withdraws from shared activity. These are seemingly unremarkable moments of everyday classroom life that are easy to overlook.
In this talk, I draw on my research on interaction across diverse learning environments, including flexible and technology-rich classroom settings. Through examples from video-recorded classroom interaction, I show how questions of where teachers and students position themselves, how participation is organised, and when and how teachers engage with students during independent and group work can reveal the complex organisation of everyday classroom interaction.
Observations across different classroom settings have gradually shifted my attention from learning environments as spatial, material, and pedagogical arrangements to the interactional processes through which teaching, participation, and learning are organised. They have also raised a more fundamental methodological question: how does something we notice in our data become an analytical phenomenon?
Drawing on these examples, I discuss the movement from observation to interpretation and analytical claims and consider how the concepts and methods we bring to our data shape what we notice and what we are able to see. I also consider what happens when we move across methodological approaches: how detailed analyses of situated interaction can be brought into dialogue with quantitative data and what becomes visible when different forms of data are brought together.
