Evaluating
the impacts of trainings in educational settings is a permanent preoccupation for
researchers in education, as well as for professional facilitators and teachers.
We address this preoccupation by proposing an empirical methodology based on
video-recordings - the VIA methodology for Video-based Interactional Assessment
Methodology. It will allow the researchers/ professionals to develop a deep
understanding of the social interactions that occur between the learners and the
facilitators during their workshops and/or pedagogical activities. By working
with VIA, professionals will be able to identify the good, the problematic, the
unexpected practices, and therefore to adjust continually the organization of
their workshops in cultural mediation as well as in language learning
activities, in classroom or in museums. The VIA methodology is presented in
this manual through video-recordings collected during the workshops we led in
Vienna, Turku and Paris as part of the LALI project.

The
presentation of the VIA methodology goes along with the assessment of LALI
workshops. It provides then an explanation of the special interests we found in working in museums with artworks to
organize language-learning activities. Artworks revealed as particularly
stimulating resources for animating interactions among the participants,
learners as well as facilitators. In this sense, the following document provides
instances of how the VIA methodology can be applied to specific cases of workshops.

This manual contains two parts:

1. Theoretical and methodological aspects of VIA

2. Comparative analysis for LALI assessment