This contribution is a general introduction to the two symposia and presents the some of the core aspects of Dewey’s transactional perspective and how this perspective within the SMED research group has been transformed into a specific methodology for in situ studies of educational practices. Ohman explain how this approach can be used to handle methodological challenges such as the relations between continuity and change; language, meaning and reality; the individual, the social and the institutional; and fact and value. The transactional perspective has two fundamental methodological consequences: (1) these relations can be identified and described through analyses of people’s communicative actions, that is, through their language usage and (2) they have to be investigated in relation to the purposes, expectations, etc. of the practice that is studied. Based on these premises a number of analytical methods have been developed, for example Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA) for analyses of students meaning-making (Wickman & Östman 2002; Rudsberg & Öhman 2015), Epistemological Move Analysis (EMA) for analyses of teachers’ and students’ interplay within a certain practical epistemology (Lidar, Lundqvist & Östman 2006; Öhman & Öhman 2013), Companion Meaning Analysis (CMA) for analyses of the values that accompany the learning of knowledge (Östman 2010; Öhman, Öhman & Sandell 2016), and Ethical Tendency Analysis (ETA) for analyses of different forms of ethical and moral meaning-making (Öhman & Östman 2007; Andersson & Öhman 2015).

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