Search

This study explores preschool children’s mathematizing in everyday block play activities. Building on an ethnomethodological and multimodal conversation analytic framework, we explore how geometry (i.e. spatiality, shape, and symmetry) is actualized in children’s verbal and embodied interaction with their peers, pedagogues, and material environment. The selected data are drawn from a video ethnographic study in a Swedish preschool in which a boy and a girl play with a magnetic construction toy. The results of the study demonstrate how the participants orient to spatial locations, properties, dimensions, orientations, transformations, and shapes as they build a house. The children are shown to rely upon verbal and embodied resources such as deictics (e.g. here, there, these) and pointing gestures as geometrical aspects are actualized in their interaction. The study contributes with knowledge on preschool children’s everyday mathematizing, in particular, children’s appropriation of geometric discourse as it emerges in the unfolding flow of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on an ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analytic approach, this paper explores the normative character and interactional embodied organization of negative emotions, in particular displays of anger, in classroom situations in which a student refuses to comply with the teachers’ reproaches. We examine how embodied displays of negative affect and ascriptions of negative emotions work as procedures in teacher–student interactions for invoking issues of accountability and teacher authority for managing problematic classroom conduct. The analyses draw on a video ethnographic study in a special teaching class, tracing trajectories of reproach-response sequences in which a student repeatedly contests the moral ordering of classroom relations. It is found that non-compliant student responses are shaped as embodied affective stances through prosody, body postures and gestures that accentuate the student's unwillingness to submit. The results show the dialogical organization of reproach-response sequences and the vulnerability of teacher reproaches to escalation of non-compliant student responses, here indexing aggressive acts as unjustifiable classroom conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores media literacy practices in children׳s everyday lives and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic media literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on video recordings documenting the activities in which four target children, aged 6–7 years old, participated at home and in school. Through the detailed analysis of two mundane media literacy activities – online calling and word processing – similarities and differences in media usage within and out-of-school are examined. It is shown how children׳s media literacy activities encompass verbal, embodied and social competencies that are made relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in interaction between the adults and children in the form of norms and guidelines for what constitutes knowledgeable participation in media literacy activities, and that are appropriated and reactualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings show how the participants coordinate their actions on and in front of the screen and where spatiality and temporality are oriented to as crucial aspects of the organization of the activities. Moreover, it is demonstrated how old and new technologies are linked together in culturally and historically embedded conceptualizations of literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The aim of this study is to explore knowing and learning as constitutive aspects of the evolving organization of action in situated activity. Using as data a video recording of a peer group where one child is teaching the others Japanese the analyses focus on (1) how local epistemic identities as knowing and unknowing are established, sustained, and contested through talk and embodied action and (2) how the dynamics between knowing and unknowing participants change over time. A learning trajectory is constructed through tracing the transformations of knowledge and the changing distribution of knowledge within the peer group and the material environment. To have learned in the activity means knowing some Japanese and having written down signs on a paper but it also includes being ratified as a knowing participant within the group. Overall, the findings shed light on micro-processes of learning in interaction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper studies parsing as a practice used in mobile instruction. The findings build on ethnomethodological conversation analysis and on observations made on video data that have been collected from three settings: skiing, driving a car and flying a plane. In the data, novice learners are instructed by more experienced instructors to accomplish various mobile tasks. The paper shows how instructors use parsing to guide learners to carry out, step-by-step, the sub-actions that the ongoing mobile task (e.g. turning, landing) is composed of. The paper argues that parsing is a practice employed by instructors to highlight the sub-actions of a mobile task. Instructors may also use parsing to orient learners to emergent problems to do with the timing, quality and order of the sub-actions in the performance of a complex mobile task. Finally, the paper shows that sometimes there is not enough time to parse an ongoing task, in which case the parsing can be carried out afterwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the organisation of correction in mobile instructional settings. Five sets of video data (>250 h) documenting how learners were instructed to fly aeroplanes, drive cars and ride bicycles in real life traffic were examined to reveal some common features of correction exchanges. Through detailed multimodal analysis of participants’ actions, it is shown how instructors systematically elaborate their corrective instructions to include relevant information about the trouble and remedial action – a practice we refer to as unpacking corrections. It is proposed that the practice of unpacking the local particulars of corrections (i) provides for the instructional character of the interaction, and (ii) is highly sensitive to the relevant physical and mobile contingencies. These findings contribute to the existing literature on the interactional organisation of correction and mobility, as well as to ongoing work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis on teaching and learning as members’ phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]