In our contribution, we will look at the relationship between teachers’ instruction practices and students’ learning practices from two methodological perspectives: documentary method and ethnomethodology. The documentary method allows us to reconstruct individual and collective emergent phenomena as well as students’ subject-specific skills and knowledge (Martens & Asbrand 2022) in the classroom. While ethnomethodology examines local education orders and procedures of everyday organisation of classroom activities and instruction-in-interaction (Hester & Francis 2000). Most studies within these two methodological approaches have so far focused primarily on teachers’ instruction (for overview, see Gardner 2019), or solely on classroom public conversations. The question of how ‘learning’ – not in the sense of a product of certain procedures and classroom activities, but as a learning process – can be empirically observed has only become the subject of more detailed analysis in recent years (e.g., Eskildsen & Majlesi 2018; Hackbarth et al. 2022). From the perspectives of documentary method and ethnomethodology, ‘learning’ is not only to be conceived as a cognitive, individual-bound process, but as a socially constituted phenomenon – as a contingent and complex process of changes, constituted in interaction, imbued with pragmatic orientations, and accomplished with the help of various semiotic resources (linguistic, interactional, nonverbal, graphic, etc.). It can be analysed in terms of procedures of communicative representation of knowledge or conceptualizable as “learning moments” (Moutinho & Carlin 2021) or as an actionist practice of understanding and interpreting (Hackbarth et al. 2022), which is particularly evident in peer learning situations in the classroom. Drawing on these perspectives on the social emergence of learning and based on the concrete empirical video data from the symposium, we will focus on two questions. First, how are different instructional resources (specific didactical tools, material objects, verbal accounts, non-verbal actions etc.) used by the teacher to explicate a specific subject-related school knowledge and to facilitate its understanding by the students? Second, how do students’ representations of knowledge and understanding, or changes in understanding, correspond to characteristics of the learning environment and instructive activities of the teacher? This focus makes it possible to consider the tension between the teacher-intended or facilitated impulses or tasks in relation to the students’ processing of these, for example in cooperative student-student interactions. At the same time, this enables an empirical description of phenomena such as students’ understanding of a particular subject-matter learning content.

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