Touch in school is a three-year research project funded by Kone Foundation. The analytical focus of the project is on interactional practices, meanings and norms of touching in classroom settings. Our data consists of video-recorded lessons, interviews with teachers and written memories of touching in school. As research methods, we make use of multimodal conversation analysis, discourse analysis and artistic research methods.
The aim of the project is to analyze grammar of touching in contemporary school: how teachers and students touch and become touched in classroom and what kind of meanings touches convey in classroom interaction; what kind of rules, norms and practices of touching the participants construct and reconstruct in classroom interaction; what kind of touches are retrospectively recalled; what type of perspectives artistic research methods bring into research on touch.