The first lecture: playing upon identities and modeling academic roles

In this paper we investigate the discursive practices that contextualize active student participation in a formal ‘first lecture’ situation. The observation that some experienced lecturers consistently generate high levels of student involvement, regardless of the specific student populations they are faced with, provided the starting-point for this enquiry. We zoom in on student speaker roles that are scaffolded in embedded and hypothetical interactional domains that often ‘pass under the radar’ (Erickson, 2004) of what counts as data in educational research. Attention to interactional detail in the multimodal performance of participant roles reveals how emergent open learning cultures might be bootstrapped on hybrid and complex discourse practices.