Introduction: The embodied work of teaching

Building on a growing body of ethnomethodological conversation analytic research on teaching, the chapters in this volume further empirical understandings of teaching as embodied, contingent and jointly achieved with students in the complex management of various courses of action and larger instructional projects. Together, the chapters make three specifi c contributions to research on teaching. First, they further document the embodied accomplishment of teaching by identifying specifi c resources that teachers use to manage instructional projects. Secondly, the chapters demonstrate that teaching entails both alignment and affi liation work. Finally, each chapter shows the signifi cance of using high-quality audiovisual data to document the sophisticated work of teaching. By providing analytic insight into routine grounds of the highly specialized work of teaching, the studies make a signifi cant contribution to a practice-based understanding of teaching.