Maryanne Theobald

Video-Stimulated Accounts: Young Children Accounting for Interactional Matters in Front of Peers.

Research in the early years places increasing importance on participatory methods to engage children. The playback of video-recording to stimulate conversation is a research method that enables children’s accounts to be heard and attends to a participatory view. During video-stimulated sessions, participants watch an extract of video-recording of a specific event in which they were involved, and then account for their participation in that event. Using an interactional perspective, this article draws distinctions between video-stimulated accounts and a similar research method, popular in education, that of video-stimulated recall. Reporting upon a study of young children’s interactions in a playground, video-stimulated accounts are explicated to show how the participants worked toward the construction of events in the video-stimulated session. This article discusses how the children account for complex matters within their social worlds, and manage the accounting of others in the video-stimulated session. When viewed from an interactional perspective and used alongside fine grained analytic approaches, video-stimulated accounts are an effective method to provide the standpoint of the children involved and further the competent child paradigm.

Investigating Child Participation in the Everyday Talk of a Teacher and Children in a Preparatory Year.

In early years research, policy and education, a democratic perspective that positions children as participants and citizens is increasingly emphasised. These ideas take seriously listening to childrens opinions and respecting childrens influence over their everyday affairs. While much political and social investment has been made in the inclusion of participatory approaches, little has been reported on the practical achievement of such approaches in the day-to-day of early childhood education within school settings. This article investigates talk and interaction in the everyday activities of a teacher and children in an Australian preparatory class (for children aged four to six years) to see how ideas of child participation are experienced. The authors use an interactional analytic approach to demonstrate how participatory methods are employed in practical ways to manage routine interactions. Analysis shows that whilst the teacher seeks the childrens opinion and involves them in decision-making, child participation is at times constrained by the context and institutional categories of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ that are jointly produced in their talk. The article highlights tensions that arise for teachers as they balance a pedagogical intent of ‘teaching’ and the associated institutional expectations with efforts to engage children in decision-making. Recommendations include adopting a variety of conversational styles when engaging with children, consideration of temporal concerns and the need to acknowledge the culture of the school.

In pursuit of some appreciation: assessment and group membership in children’s second stories

Abstract Group membership is central to social interaction. Within peer groups, social hierarchies and affiliations are matters to which members seriously attend (Corsaro 2014). Studies of peer groups highlight how status is achieved through oppositional actions. This paper examines the way in which competition and collaboration in a children’s peer group accomplishes status during the production and management of “second stories” (Sacks 1992). We present analysis of the interaction of young boys in a preparatory year playground who are engaged in a single instance of storytelling “rounds.” Analysis highlights the pivotal role of members’ contributions, assessments, and receipts in a series of second stories that enact a simultaneously competitive and collaborative local order.

Achieving competence: The interactional features of children’s storytelling

Early years researchers interested in storytelling have largely focused on the development of children’s language and social skills within constructed story sessions. Less focus has been given to the interactional aspects of storytelling in children’s everyday conversation and how the members themselves, the storytellers and story recipients, manage storytelling. An interactional view, using ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches, offers the opportunity to study children’s narratives in terms of ‘members work’. Detailed examination of a video-recorded interaction among a group of children in a preparatory year playground shows how the children managed interactions within conversational storytelling. Analyses highlight the ways in which children worked at gaining a turn and made a story tellable within a round of second stories. Investigating children’s competence-in-action ‘from within’, the findings from this research show how children invoke and accomplish competence through their interactions.

Introduction: Disputes in Everyday Life – Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People

Volume 15 of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (SSYC) presents a rich description of children’s and young people’s disputes. Children and young people live and experience their youth in a variety of contexts, settings and situations in contemporary society, and the studies discussed in this volume draw on empirical data to investigate the interactional procedures used by children and young people as disputes arise in varying contexts of their everyday life. The aim of this volume is to extend current understandings of on children’s disputes by examining how, in the varying arenas and social worlds of children and young people, matters of ownership, alignment and social and moral order are always at play. Applying a sociological perspective, the research papers in this special volume show that disputes can offer analytic opportunities to examine, and make visible typically unseen social and moral orders. This consideration provides rich accounts of dispute practices within social and institutional contexts.

How talk and interaction unfold in a digitally enabled preschool classroom

The use of mobile digital devices, such as laptops and tablets, has implications for how teachers interact with young students within the institutional context of educational settings. This article examines language and participation in a digitally enabled preschool classroom as students engage with teachers and peers. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis are used to explicate video-recorded episodes of students (aged between three and five years) interacting while using a laptop and a tablet. Attending to the sequential organization (when, how) and the context relevance (where) of talk and interaction, analysis shows how the intersection of interactions involving the teacher, students and digital devices shapes the ways that talk and interactions unfold. Analysis found that the teacher–student interactions were jointly arranged around a participation framework that included: (1) the teachers embodied action that mobilizes an accompanying action by a student; (2) allocation of turn-taking and participation while using a digital device; and (3) the affordances of the digital device in relation to the participants’ social organization. In this way, it is possible to understand not just what a digital device is or does, but the affordances of what it makes possible in constituting teachers’ and students’ social and learning relationships.

Co-producing Cultural Knowledge: Children Telling Tales in the School Playground

The school playground is a place where children socially engage with peers and attain membership and participation in group activities. As young children negotiate relationships and social orders in playground settings, disputes may occur and children might ‘tell’ tales to the teacher. Children’s telling on each other is often a cause of concern for teachers and children because tellings occur within a dispute and signal the breakdown of interaction. Closely examining a video-recorded episode of girls telling on some boys highlights the practices that constitute cultural knowledge of children’s peer culture. This ethnomethodological study revealed a sequential pattern of telling with three distinct phases: (1) an announcement of telling after an antecedent event (2) going to the teacher to tell about the antecedent event and (3) post-telling events. These findings demonstrate that telling is carefully orchestrated by children showing their competence to co-produce cultural knowledge. Such understandings highlight the multiple and often overlapping dimensions of cultural knowledge as children construct, practise and manage group membership and participation in their peer cultures.

“A problem of versions” : laying down the law in the school playground

Purpose – This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground duty asks two boys to each give an account of their actions over an incident that had just occurred on some climbing equipment in the playground. Methodology – This chapter employs an ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. The data are taken from a corpus of video recorded interactions of children, aged 7–9 years, and the teacher, in school playgrounds during the lunch recess. Findings – The findings show the ways that children work up accounts of their playground practices when asked by the teacher. The teacher initially provided interactional space for each child to give their version of the events. Ultimately, the teachers version of how to act in the playground became the sanctioned one. The children and the teacher formulated particular social orders of behavior in the playground through multimodal devices, direct reported speech, and scripts. Such public displays of talk work as socialization practices that frame teacher-sanctioned morally appropriate actions in the playground. Value of chapter – This chapter shows the pervasiveness of the teachers social order, as she presented an institutional social order of how to interact in the playground, showing clearly the disjunction of adult–child orders between the teacher and children.

Pretend Play and Technology: Young Children Making Sense of Their Everyday Social Worlds

Games and activities, often involving aspects of pretence and fantasy play, are an essential aspect of everyday preschool life for many young children. Young children’s spontaneous play activities can be understood as social life in action. Increasingly, young children’s games and activities involve their engagement in pretence using play props to represent computers, laptops and other pieces of technology equipment. In this way, pretend play becomes a context for engaging with matters from the real world. There are a number of studies investigating school-aged children engaging in gaming and other online activities, but less is known about what young children are doing with online technologies. Drawing on Australian Research Council funded research of children engaging with technologies at home and school, this chapter investigates how young children use technologies in everyday life by showing how they draw on props, both real or imaginary, to support their play activities. An ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis is used to explore how children’s gestures, gaze and talk work to introduce ideas and activities. This chapter contributes to understandings of how children’s play intersects with technologies and pretend play.

Conducting sociological research in educational sites

Sociological investigation is interested in the study of human behviour using quantitative or qualitative methods. Educational settings are an ideal site for the study of social interaction as children and adults interact in classroom and playground settings for many hours each day. Sociological investigation within educational sites requires many considerations from the outset to ensure a well-designed project is implemented. These include choosing a research site, gaining access, ethical procedures, and data collection methods and the role of the researcher. This case leads novice researchers through the decisions that were made in relation to a study of children’s participation in a school playground.