In response to the growing needs associated with an ageing population, the training and competencies of care and support staff in long-term care institutions have gained renewed prominence in Switzerland (Merçay et al., 2024). Public swiss french authorities have recently demonstrated a strong commitment to enhancing the skills of a workforce that is highly experienced yet formally underqualified. In this context, federal training programmes are being offered to professionals, many of whom have migrant backgrounds and lack formal qualifications. These programmes aim to develop and broaden their competencies, particularly in care, support and social care activities, while fostering reflective capacities that may ultimately enable them to access professional status recognised at a federal level. We were commissioned to evaluate these training programmes through a research-intervention project.

To respond to this evaluation, and support participants' professional development, we encouraged professionals to analyse their own practices through video-based interaction analysis.This method has been increasingly recognised and understood in the social sciences as both a research method and a 'pedagogical institution' that supports learning and development (Harris et al., 2012; Stevanovic & Weiste, 2017; Stokoe, 2014). Recent experiments have explored the potential for 'data sessions' based on conversation analysis principles to facilitate the development of interactional competence in vocational training contexts (Filliettaz, Garcia & Zogmal, 2022).

Our contribution focuses on this practice collective analysis approaches inspired by the principles of interaction analysis (Filliettaz, 2018; Filliettaz et al., 2021) and on how it can foster the interactional competence of the professionnals participanting. All language coordination involves the mobilisation of interactional competence, defined as the set of abilities enabling interactants to participate effectively in an interaction by coordinating their actions and accomplishing the social activity in which they are engaged (Young & Miller, 2004). Shaped by the socio-historical context of the activity in question (Pekarek Doehler, 2006) and visible through the behaviour of the participants, interactional competence is subject to continuous evaluation and regulation throughout the interaction (Mondada, 2006). Our contribution will focus on how participants use filmed footage to coordinate their efforts in describing their professional activity and indentify their professionnal competences. It also examines how they mobilise, share and co-construct knowledge and expertise related to their professional activity, and how this enables them to define themselves as professionals.

The collective analysis commonly referred to as a 'data session' generally unfolds in three stages: (1) audio and/or video recording of naturally occurring interactions; (2) selection of specific sequences; and (3) collective analysis of these sequences. Similarly, a corpus of filmed workplace interactions, focusing on interactions between professionals and care recipients that exemplify key occupational challenges, was compiled for collective analysis. Unlike the traditional approach, the collective analysis presented here was designed from interactional and visual socio-material perspectives. Drawing on socio-historical theory (Vygotsky, 1934/1997), tangible graphic materials representing the verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal resources mobilised in interactional contexts were made available to participants (Kress et al., 2001). Participants used these materials to reconstruct and discuss the interactional trajectories identified in the filmed sequences on a shared board. These discussions were recorded (for a total of 14 hours of footage) and constitute the analysed corpus. From this corpus, we identified excerpts documenting the trajectory of an interactional phenomenon — touching — discussed by the participants and we analysed thos excerpts according to the classical conversation analysis procedure (ten Have, 2007).

The analyses documented how the collective analytical method enables professionals to identify a phenomenon characteristic of their work — namely, touch — and to understand its different functions, the skills required to perform it, why it is characteristic of the profession and how it enables them to define themselves as professionals. In other words, this collective analysis method enables professionals to document both their work activities and the skills they use, to define the contours of the profession and how, as professionals, they uniquely inhabit it.

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