Amanda Bateman

Responding to children’s answers: questions embedded in the social context of early childhood education

This article presents analysis of question–answer sequences during problem inquiry between a teacher and two children in an early childhood crèche in New Zealand. Conversation analysis is used to reveal which questions the teacher asks, how children answer the questions, and the teacher’s responses to the child’s answers. Although adults’ ‘effective’ questions were identified and promoted in the REPEY study much less attention has been given to how adults respond to children’s answers. It is imperative to investigate the sequences of talk which follow a question in order to establish how teaching and learning is co-constructed in context, one utterance at a time and as a joint project between teacher and child. The findings suggest that task problems and emotional problems are treated in a similar way during problem inquiry, highlighting the complexity of interactions when teachers are providing both emotional care and educational support for young children.

Forging friendships: The use of collective pro-terms by pre-school children

This article discusses the ways in which a group of four-year-old children co-constructed friendship networks when they began primary school in Wales, UK. This discussion has emanated from a wider study of the everyday social interactions children engage in when new to their school environment. The children’s interactions were investigated through the use of an inductive, ethnomethodological approach through the combination of conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). The transcriptions revealed that the children used the collective pro-terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ in order to explicate affiliations and exclusions with their peers in their everyday social interactions. These findings offer an insight into the daily social organization processes children engage in and suggests their preference for exclusive dyadic friendships. The article also reveals the social competencies which four-year-old children have in accomplishing social organization.

Living in a broken world: how young children's well-being is supported through playing out their earthquake experiences

The therapeutic value of play can be shown in spontaneous play situations following childrens experiences of traumatic events. Following the events of the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand in 2010 and 2011, an investigation was conducted of how children used the earthquake event as a catalyst in pretend play with peers and in discussions with teachers. Supporting childrens well-being is a focus area in New Zealand early childhood education, as it is a strand of the national curriculum Te Whāriki [Ministry of Education. (1996). Te Whāriki. He whāriki mātauranga mōngā mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early childhood curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media]. In this article, children are observed engaging in pretend play episodes, and with personalized Learning Story books, to explore personal reflections of the earthquake, prompting the children to make reference to things being ‘broken’ and needing ‘fixing’. Analysis shows how the content of the pretend play experiences helped the children to come to terms with their experiences. Affording children time and interactional opportunities to play out and discuss traumatic experiences contributes to the psychological well-being of participants following a traumatic event.

Recovering from the earthquake : early childhood teachers and children collaboratively telling stories about their experiences

Purpose – Traumatic events can cause post-traumatic stress disorder due to the severity of the often unexpected events. The purpose of this paper is to reveal how conversations around lived experiences of traumatic events, such as the Christchurch earthquake in February 2011, can work as a strategy for people to come to terms with their experiences collaboratively. By encouraging young children to recall and tell of their earthquake stories with their early childhood teachers they can begin to respond, renew, and recover (Brown, 2012), and prevent or minimise more stress being developed. Design/methodology/approach – The study involved collecting data of the participating children taking turns to wear a wireless microphone where their interactions with each other and with teachers were video recorded over one week in November 2011. A total of eight hours and 21 minutes of footage was collected; four minutes and 19 seconds of that footage are presented and analysed in this paper. The footage was watched re...

Revealing the interactional features of learning and teaching moments in outdoor activity

ABSTRACT The data considered in this article was generated as part of a doctoral research study entitled: A sociocultural consideration of child-initiated interaction with teachers in indoor and outdoor spaces (Waters 2011) where child-initiated, teacher–child interaction in indoor and outdoor spaces were investigated. The purpose of the secondary analysis was twofold; firstly to explore, more deeply, the establishment of intersubjectivity between teacher and child in educative interaction, particularly in episodes that support and extend thinking. Secondly, the secondary analysis was to consider the role of the environment in such episodes. Through investigating the selected interactions using conversation analysis, it is revealed that children talk their environment into being (Heritage 1978) through the initiation of an interaction using a wh type question. Also, the childs initiation of an interaction regarding the environment sequentially offers the teacher an opportunity to engage in a sustained, affiliated interaction with the child via the mobilized topic.

Cheaters and Stalkers : Accusations in a classroom

This article explores accusations as collaboratively accomplished in classroom peer interactions in the absence of a teacher. The analysis shows how the children use local classroom rules and teacher authority as resources and warrants to invoke multi-layered moral orders and identities, and hold one child accountable through accusations about their behavior. The accused children are categorized in a duplicative way with morally degrading descriptions and as out-group members. This article argues that understanding children’s accusations requires understanding of how such interactions compose and reflect the school context that is co-produced through the implementation of accountable ways in which to behave.

Bridging Transitions Through Cultural Understanding and Identity

Internationally, there is a commitment to helping refugees resettle in a new country. However, few studies have explored the role that might be played by early childhood education and care (ECEC) to support these transitions. This chapter draws on research investigating teaching and learning in an early childhood centre for refugee children and families in New Zealand. The study gathered data on teaching and learning practices through documentation and video recording of intercultural episodes. Through interviews, the researchers investigated the perspectives of teachers and families. The chapter concludes by arguing for values of respect, social justice and dialogue as a basis for creating a community based on a sense of belonging and well-being. Through providing opportunities for families and children to contribute and communicate in ways that they feel are meaningful, early childhood teachers bridge the transition process between home cultures and the culture of the early childhood centre.

Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: An Introduction

Understanding what children know and how they display knowledge is at the centre of education. Interactions with young children are not only central to learning in early childhood settings and schools, as interactions with parents, siblings, families and friends are the fundamental site for children’s learning about how to be in the world. We—the editors and authors in this collection—are most interested in how it is that children manage to navigate their social lives, including the classroom, and how they and others respond to their demonstrable knowledge of the world. The title of this collection Children’s knowledge-in-interaction captures our preoccupation with understanding what children know by paying close attention to the turn-by-turn, unfolding and collaborative, nature of talk. The illumination of intersubjectivity provided by talk-in-interaction is why we are all drawn to the methodology and method of conversation analysis in our research.

Children’s use of objects in an early years playground

ABSTRACT Early childhood research has investigated children’s use of objects largely focusing on cognitive and motor development. Yet members of a particular culture, such as young children’s peer groups, use objects that have cultural relevance as conversational items, as a means to interacting with other members of the group. This article illustrates the role of objects in children’s everyday lives by demonstrating how children orient to objects as a way of approaching an existing group. The findings are taken from a study using conversation analysis (CA) to explore playground interactions between four-year-old children in a Welsh primary school. The analysis reveals that children systematically use objects as access tools to initiate interactions with each other, thereby using immediately available resources – and exploiting the sequential rules of talk – to co-construct the social organisation of the playground.

Using Conversation Analysis for Understanding Children’s Talk about Traumatic Events

There is a wealth of research and literature investigating children’s traumatic experiences from a psychological perspective, whereas there is relatively less literature using a sociological approach that includes discourse, narrative, and conversation. This chapter aims to demonstrate the importance of investigating children’s trauma talk through this latter approach by providing a theoretical overview of literature that uses conversation analysis (CA) to explore children’s interactions related to trauma and associated mental health matters.