In classrooms of today, as teachers and students have become equipped with laptops, tabletsand phones, social interaction no longer depends on face-to-face interaction alone but hasbecome dependent upon communication mediated by screens of various sizes and shapes(Nilsberth et al., 2022). The constant connectedness and access to digital devices means thatclassrooms become hybrid spaces for social interaction where students participate incommunications on a continuum between being on- and offline. From the perspective ofinteraction order, this has been shown to increase student participation in classroominteraction and release some of the general constraints related to traditional IRE-patterns inteaching (Sahlström et al., 2019). However, there could potentially be tensions between theteacher’s talk and the students focus with regard to subject content in the connectedclassroom.This presentation departs from ethnomethodological understandings of theclassroom interaction order (Mehan, 1979), and address questions about how the conditionsfor creating shared focus towards subject content in screen-mediated plenary teaching canbe investigated and understood. It is part of the larger video-ethnographic project ConnectedClassroom Nordic (CCN), where digitalisation of education is understood from a mediaecologicperspective in terms of changed environments and infrastructures where differentmedia, analogue as well as digital, mutually relate to, remediate and affect each other (Strate,2017). The analysis draws on video-recordings with multiple cameras from a Swedish lowersecondary school, where the same class of students have been followed during three years insubjects of English, Swedish (L1), mathematics and social studies. The three camerassimultaneously followed the teachers, a focus student’s desk interactions and the focusstudents’ screens.Drawing on notions of creating shared epistemic stance in interaction, twoexamples of teaching instances, one in L1 and one in social science, were selected formultimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, 2007). A specific focus was on how sharedepistemic stance towards subject content were managed in interactions between teacher,student and different semiotic structures in the hybrid social environment of the connectedclassroom. Preliminary findings show how teachers’ use of pre-made presentations throughfor example Powerpoints or learning platforms might constrain possibilities to bring instudents’ previous knowledge and questions in the shared classroom dialogue. On the otherhand, students’ engagement with subject content sometimes increased on an individual basisas they could search for information or try out solutions on their own laptops, in parallel tothe teacher’s talk.

ReferencesGoodwin, C. (2007). Participation, Stance, and Affect in the Organization of Activities.Discourse and Society, 18, 53-73.

Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. HarvardUniversity Press.

Nilsberth, M., Olin-Scheller, C. & Kristiansson, M. (2022). "Transformation and literacyengagement through digitalized teaching practices in Social studies". In: Gericke, N.,Hudson, B., Olin-Scheller, C. & Stolare, M. Researching Powerful Knowledge andEpistemic Quality across School Subjects, pp. 117-136. London: Bloomsbury.

Sahlström, F., Tanner, M. & Valasmo, V. (2019). Connected youth, connected classrooms.Smartphone use and student and teacher participation during plenary teaching. Learning,culture and social interaction, 21, 311-331.

Strate, L. (2017). Media ecology. An approach to understanding the human condition. PeterLang.