Helen Melander Bowden

Senior Lecturer in Education, Associate Professor in Education

PhD in Education, MA in French and BA in Cultural Anthropology

My research centers on social interaction in different educational settings, with a particular interest in epistemics and learning.

Research interests

My research interests are learning and cognition as interactional achievements in a lived social and material world. Grounded in a Conversation Analysis (CA) perspective, I am interested in how participants simultaneously use talk, embodied action, and material structure in the environment in shared meaning making. As a basis for the analyses I use video recordings of naturally occurring interaction, that is, everyday practices in which people participate. I am interested in children’s and young people’s interaction and learning in different practices, both in the home and in different institutional contexts. Another area that I have studied is flight lessons within the context of pilot training.