A Preliminary Study of the Orderliness of University Student Note-Taking Practices

Zusammenfassung

Note-taking is an ordinary, common student practice at universities, which is rapidly changing under the influx of electronic technologies for recording and storing audio and visual educational materials. However, little attention has been paid to the actual organization of note-taking. This chapter presents an ethnomethodological study of the real-world orderliness of note-taking. It shows that note-taking is a collaborative production of teachers and students: students take into account the details of teacher’s speech and gestures while teachers adjust their lecturing activities to the visible actions of note-taking students. The analysis, based primarily on the data from lectures for undergraduate students in a Russian university, shows that note-taking practices are interwoven into the choreography of classroom interaction, the local history of student learning, and the knowledge certification practices at universities. The preliminary description of the details of local material practices of note production and usage lays the foundation for the analysis of note-taking as a routinely organized and organizational situated activity.

The chapter was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program