Carolyn D. Baker

How to be Masculine in the Block Area

This article focuses on the social interactions of several boys aged 3-5 years in the block area of a preschool classroom in a childcare setting. Using transcripts of video segments showing these boys engaged in daily play and interactions, the article analyses two episodes that occurred in the first weeks of the school year. At first glance, both episodes appear chaotic, with little appearance of order among the players. A closer analysis reveals a finely organized play taking place, with older boys teaching important lessons to the newcomers about how to be masculine in the block area. These episodes illustrate that masculinity is not a fixed character trait, but is determined through practice and participation in the activities of masculinity. Play and conflict are the avenues through which this occurs.

Producing Possible Hannahs: Theory and the Subject of Research

This article presents and compares three analyses of qualitative data drawn from an ethnographic case study using distinctive theoretical approaches. The article shows the power of theoretical approaches to constitute the “subject” of a study and to constitute the character of the social world in which such a subject is situated. The three readings of the data produce different possible subjects located in differently constituted possible worlds. By putting theory at the center of analysis, the article shows how theoretical approaches radically influence what can be found in the data and how it can be found there.

Accounting for achievement in parent-teacher interviews

This paper examines features of the talk in a number of teacher-parent interviews recently audio-recorded in a secondary school in Brisbane, Australia. The central topic of the talk is the academic achievement of the student. In offering accounts of the students achievement, participants offer ‘moral versions’ of themselves as parents and teachers. These institutional identities are oriented to and elaborated in the course and in the organisation of this talk. The student about whom the talk is done is present but largely silent, an ‘overhearing audience’ to this talk. The analysis shows how parents and teachers talk two institutions, and the relation between them, into being.

Ethnomethodological Studies of Talk in Educational Settings

Ethnomethodological studies of talk in educational settings are concerned with the explication of the ‘routine grounds of everyday life’ (Garfinkel, 1967) in classrooms, staff meetings, diagnostic and testing sessions, parent-teacher interviews, and other settings in which the practical work of schooling goes on. These studies are concerned to show, through careful and detailed analyses of actual interactive events, how members in these settings use talk and other resources to accomplish the phenomena and objects that are otherwise treated as givens in social science and education. Ethnomethodological studies examine how members in educational studies achieve as orderly, recognisable and accountable such matters as lessons, the institutional categories of “teachers” and “students”, what counts as reading, classroom order or disorder, teacher authority, power, formality, student ability, and a host of other presences in school life.

Analyzing the researcher's work in generating data: The case of complaints

This article investigates the researchers work in the coproduction (or not) of complaint sequences in research interviews. Using a conversation analytic approach, we show how the interviewers management of complaint sequences in a research setting is consequential for subsequent talk and thus directly affects the data generated. In the examples shown here, researchers sharing cocategorial incumbency with respondents may well provide spaces for research participants to formulate complaints. This article examines sequences of talk surrounding complaints to show how researchers generate complaints (or not) and handle unsafe complaints. Researchers are able to provoke specific types of accounts from respondents, whereas their respondents may actively resist the researchers’ direction. For researchers using the interview as a method of data generation, examination of complaint sequences and how these appear in interview data provides insight into how interview talk is coproduced and managed within a socially situated setting.

Escalating terror: Communicative strategies in a preschool classroom dispute

This paper describes the pragmatic and strategic communicative work of some young boys in a preschool classroom as they made themselves observable and hearable as owners of block area and members of specific activities. Using a transcript of a video-recorded episode of the boys engaged in a dispute about who could play in block area, analysis shows how the boys generated and escalated images of terror until the targeted child left the area or was evicted from the group by the other boys. In the course of escalating the terror, the boys used a range of communicative resources to construct group membership affiliation and, at the same time, to assert their individual identities. The work of the boys established and displayed credentials as to who was able to play in the block area, and who was able to determine and justify why others could or could not play. This detailed analysis of how the boys formed collaborations and strategic partnerships in the course of their dispute gives us a way of appreciating the communicative competencies that underpin membership in a local social order that is in a state of flux.

A Child's Say in Parent—Teacher Talk at the Pre-School: Doing Conversation Analytic Research in Early Childhood Settings

In this article the authors analyse how one child actively participates in a particular occasion of home—pre-school communication conducted in a pre-school setting. A conversation analytic perspective is adopted to analyse the three-way parent—teacher—child conversation. This instance shows how a child becomes a speaker in the talk rather than being only a topic of talk between adults. The analysis provides an understanding of how the participants collaboratively construct and produce ‘the competent pre-school child’ and ‘the competent conversational member’ in, and through, their talk. It also examines how the teachers version of social order is challenged by the child in the conversation. In addition, by proceeding from a distinctly different theoretical perspective, that of conversation analysis, it is possible to show how qualitative research can provide new understandings of an important dimension of early childhood practice.

LITERACY AND GENDER IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

(1992). LITERACY AND GENDER IN EARLY CHILDHOOD. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 55-67.