Practices of instructing visually impaired people in new technologies: identifying applied trainables for video learning workshops

This paper is concerned with how ICT-consultants are instructing visually impaired people (VIP) in the use of AI-fused mainstream technologies like e.g. Google Home Assistant (GHA). The applied perspective of this research is to outline what needs to be reflected on during video learning workshops with consultants regarding their instructional practices. Choosing what clips to show the practitioners during these workshops – the “trainables” in CARM (Stokoe, 2014) and ViRTi (Due & Lange, 2015) – requires in the first place a detailed analysis of just what kind of practices regularly occurs during instructional sequences.
Based on ethnomethodological multimodal CA analysis (Streeck et al., 2011) of video recorded instructions we have identified five instructional practices of particular relevance for practitioners: We focus on three of these which relates to the VIP’s epistemic stance: i) practices of uncovering what knowledge the VIP already have about the technology; ii) practices of assessing how much knowledge about the technical ecology of the technology is sufficient for the VIP to utilize its features and iii) practices of determining which of the GHA’s many features are relevant for the VIP in his or her everyday life.
The presentation will show excerpts of these practices and discuss the perspectives for application in video learning workshops. This research thus contributes to EM/CA research in instructional practices (Macbeth, 2011) and epistemic stance (Heritage, 2012) by showing how in particular visual resources are used and suspended in the context of visual impairment, and it also contributes new knowledge to practitioners in and during the actual workshops.
Due, B., & Lange, S. B. (2015). Videobased Reflection on Team and employee Interaction. Circd Working Papers in Social Interaction, 1 (3), 1–38.
Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646684
Macbeth, D. (2011). Understanding understanding as an instructional matter. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(2), 438–451. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.12.006
Stokoe, E. (2014). The Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM): A Method for Training Communication Skills as an Alternative to Simulated Role-play. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 47(3), 255–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2014.925663
Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., & LeBaron, C. (2011). Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge University Press