Interactional role negotiation among co-facilitators in an online design workshop

Research has demonstrated the important role of co-teacher communication and planning, but relatively little is understood about co-teacher interactions during the act of teaching itself and how these interactions relate to educators’ positionings and ongoing identity development. This paper presents a case study of interaction between two co-facilitators of a team of Japanese youth during a week-long, synchronous, online workshop on human-centred design. One co-facilitator had several years of experience, and the other was a first-timer. Using positioning theory and discourse analysis, we show that the co-facilitators developed a relatively stable pattern of instructional authority delegation, or the social order that guides who has rights and responsibilities over which forms of instructional decision-making. We describe the delegation between the co-teachers in this study as involving ‘instructional content authority’ and ‘instructional language authority’, established through interactions of positioning early in the workshop. Then, we examine an interview activity later in the workshop that seemed to disrupt the established pattern. This work extends research on co-teacher communication and teacher learning to understand co-teacher interactions during live teaching, with potential implications for co-teacher preparation and the learning of less experienced co-teachers.