Visually impaired students (VIS) typically attend lessons with sighted students and are therefore supported by a professional assistant (PA), who helps interpret school assignments and translate them into non-visual forms. When VIS and their PA engage in such co-operative work (Goodwin, 2013), they may encounter issues that require assistance from the teacher. However, VIS and the teacher cannot have a joint visual attention (Kidwell & Zimmerman, 2007) towards physical objects constituting the school assignment, e.g., worksheets featuring text and calculations, that are central for the joint activity of reviewing VIS’ work (Goodwin, 2007). Consequently, VIS must rely on the PA and/or teacher to perform inclusive-oriented actions to be able to participate, thus establishing these situations as atypical compared to the typical joint visual attention. In this paper, we show how there occurs a shift in the participation framework (Goffman, 1981), whereby VIS are excluded from the joint activity of reviewing their work and thus learning-in-interaction. We do so by focusing on A) the opening of the encounter where participant roles for the reviewing-activity are established, B) how the teacher and PA’s practice of engaging with the assignment causes VIS to perform off-task activities, and C) the closing of the encounter where participant roles for the co-operative work are resumed. The paper is based on video ethnographic data collection (Heath et al., 2010) with video data and transcripts analyzed using EMCA (Mondada, 2019). The analysis shows how the PA takes on the local role of a “learner” that demonstrably differ from her institutional role as VIS’ “helper”. The analysis is used to discuss the phenomenon of visually impaired people being included/excluded and contributes to a respecification of atypicality as being a more multisensorial phenomenon, not only relating to speech impairment but also to other sensory systems, in this case visual impairment.

Keywords: Visually impaired students, participation framework, classroom interaction, social inclusion

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