Winter 2021 | Co-Operative Action Lab

Jan 6 Rachel Chen, Education, UC Berkeley:

Diverging goals in Autistic child-parent interaction

Parents of minimally-speaking autistic children often use routinized, co-constructed verbal sequences as communicative resources for engagement, expanding upon the child’s limited linguistic repertoire to foster their verbal output (Loveland & Tunali 1991; Wray, 2008; Sidtis, 2012). These shared sequences have a specific verbal format (e.g. “ready… set… go!”, “one… two… three… blow!”), where the child and adult alternate in providing verbal utterances that co-jointly progress toward a particular goal. But what happens if a child’s goals differ from their parent’s? Previous work has shown that Autistic children can progress a shared sequence, but may alter its direction through variation to the sequence (Chen, 2013; Muskett, 2010, Sterponi & Fasulo, 2010). However, some questions remain: 1) Can pre-established templates be identified structurally in co-constructed shared sequences? 2) When parent and child seem to diverge in their intended goals, what means does the child have for directing interaction in a way that favors his goal?

In this data session, I will present co-constructed interactional sequences between parents and their autistic children. The data comes from a corpus of video recordings (10 hours) of naturally-occurring family interactions involving two minimally-speaking children aged 6 and 8 years old, each with clinical diagnosis of Autism. The children were video-recorded in their homes during their everyday activities. This study shows how despite the formulaicity and rigidity in these shared interactional sequences, they nonetheless offer structure from which autistic children can exercise creativity in transforming interaction.

Jan 13 Federike Kern: Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft
Universität Bielefeld

Autistic and non-autistic children’s joint activities in an inclusive kindergarten setting

My data stem from an inclusive kindergarten in Germany with children with and without Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Autism is described as a neurological condition with strong effects on communicative and interactive behaviour [1], often leading to viewing affected people as having diminished social interest [2]. However, studies, especially in the area of conversation analysis, have shown how autistic children organise their participation in an ongoing interaction. Likewise, my analysis concentrates on the children’s interactive and communicative competences to organise their participation in various play activities.
So far, approximately four hours of free and structured play have been collected at the beginning of the year. The analysis focusses on two autistic children and the ways they move in and out of interactions with their peers, and teacher’s role in this. I am especially interested in finding ways to describe the embodied resources the children use to organize their (non-)participation, and their interactive competences.

[1] American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSMV (5th edition), Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing.
[2] Jaswal. V.K. & N. Akhtar (2019). Being versus appearing socially uninterested: Challenging assumptions about social motivation in autism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42, e82: 1–73.

Jan. 20 (Cancelled because of inauguration in US)

Jan. 27 Amanda Bateman, Waikato University and Linda Mitchell, Waikato University, New Zealand
Socialising a pedagogy of care in a New Zealand early childhood refugee centre

A single case analysis of interactions between two refugee toddler aged children during their collaborative baby doll play is presented and analysed here. The interaction, which lasts 5 minutes 21 seconds includes exploration of how the children involve their teacher in their play, and the ways in which the teacher responds through modelling being a carer for the doll. Through detailed transcriptions using a conversation analysis approach, we explore the early socialisation practices (Ochs & Shiffer, 1989) involved in ‘doing’ being a carer of the dolls through specific actions such as wrapping the dolls in scarves and carefully carrying them, demonstrating empathy socialisation practices (Burdelski, 2013). Through engaging in this play, the children’s actions make demonstrable their collective belonging to a group of people who engage in these caretaking activities. Advice to future teachers around offering space and opportunities for children to practice these social organisation activities with each other to feel a sense of belonging as considered.

Burdelski, M. (2013). “I’m sorry, flower”: Socializing apology, relationships, and empathy in Japan, Pragmatics and Society, 4:1, 54-81.

Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a Heart. Text 9(1), 7–25.

Feb. 3 Farzad Amoozegar-Fassie, Music, UCLA
Moral experience, Language and Dreaming of the Dead Other: Being a Syrian Refugee children in Brooklyn”

The aim of this presentation is to analyze how Jamilā, a 13-year-old girl Syrian refugee girl in Brooklyn, constructs a language that can be perceived as a human responsiveness and responsibility to the dead other. My doctoral research focused on Syrian refugee children’s experiences of genocide and civil war, their ways of life, the cultural activities that connect them to particular world-views as “refugees,” their state of uprootedness before arriving in the United States and their new livelihood in the New York area. I draw on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics that proclaim the ethical subject is constituted through the other, even in the other’s absence. In other words, the moral experiences of Ghazal are based on the presence of the non-presence, the dead other. The death of the other is a “demand” on the self. I will be focusing on a video clip of Jamilā discussing the dead other vis-à-vis her recurring dream. Jamilā imagines Safiyya (an elderly neighbor in Aleppo who was killed during an air bombing) through her dreams. Jamilā’s dream became a “selfscape” (Hollan 2004) of her moral experiences and emotions towards the dead other, Safiyya. This mode of relationality highlights through a language that entails infinite responsibility to the other.

Feb. 10 Sara Merlino Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università degli Studi Roma Tre; Coordinating bodies and talk in therapeutic activities for the recovery of aphasia

Difficulties in articulating speech sounds are recurrent in people with a speech and language impairment such as aphasia. In the course of the therapy, they can emerge as part of a broader difficulty in word-finding, specifically during naming exercises (such as card naming). My current research focuses on the way the speech-language therapist addresses this type of difficulties and instructs the aphasic patient about the pronunciation (e.g. articulation) of linguistic items, by deploying a cluster of auditory, visual and haptic resources. The research is based a corpus of video-recordings (60 hours) that I collected in France and in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I conducted fieldwork in different therapeutic settings (hospital, rehabilitation clinic, private speech-therapy office) along the recovery of people who developed aphasia as a consequence of a stroke. In this data session, I will focus on excerpts issued of sessions that take place in the hospital setting, during the early treatment of the pathology. My analysis focuses not only on the multimodal resources used by the therapists in order to correct and model pronunciation and to assist the patient in word-finding, but also on the practices used in order to direct the patients’ visual attention towards these resources (e.g. the use of pointing gestures, directives, verbal and haptic summons) (cf. Ronkainen, 2011). More broadly, I’m interested in how the therapist and the patient achieve forms of verbal and bodily coordination in the accomplishment of “multimodal” (see Pierce et al. 2019) therapeutic activities.
Pierce, J. E., O’Halloran, R., Togher, L., & Rose, M. L. (2019). What Is Meant by “Multimodal Therapy” for Aphasia? American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 28(2), 706-716.
Ronkainen, R. J. (2011). Enhancing listening and imitation skills in children with cochlear implants-the use of multimodal resources in speech therapy. Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 2(2), 245-269.

February 17 Sara Goico: UC President’s and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Sociology, UCLA
Snacktime Interactions in a Preschool classroom with deaf children

My most recent project with deaf children consists of video recordings in deaf classrooms that use American Sign Language (ASL) as the language of instruction. The data for this talk comes from a classroom at a State Deaf School. State Deaf schools are known as centers of US Deaf culture, and Deaf families often move close to the schools for the education of their Deaf children. While it is common for deaf children to be born to hearing parents (~95%), State Deaf Schools often have high numbers of students (particularly preschool, Kindergarten, and elementary age) with Deaf parents, who are socialized into ASL from birth. The classroom in which I conducted video recording was an early intervention program with children from 18 months – 3 years old. All 16 children in the classroom were exposed to ASL from birth; all but one child had a Deaf parent, and the child without a Deaf parent had a mother who was a CODA (Child Of a Deaf Adult). Prior to school closures due to Covid, I was able to conduct 7 days of recording (~30 hours of recording across two cameras). I am currently in the exploratory face of working with the data. In a previous analysis of one girl (2;4), I looked at her preference for adult over peer interaction. She displayed a tendency to use attention getting devices with adults but not peers and often engaged in territorial behaviors, such as taking toys from her peers. From this analysis, I became interested in interactions during snacktime, in particular the way in which the students responded to other students taking their bowls, water cups, or food. In this presentation, I look at some of these snacktime interactions.

Feb. 24
Presenter: Sarah Jean Johnson, Assistant Professor Childhood Education, Literacy/Biliteracy, and Sociocultural Studies, UTEP College of Education

Practices of professional proprioception in the teaching and learning of ballet folklórico

The burgeoning field of multimodality research has made inroads with that of situated cognition to provide nuanced understandings of human learning and development in ways that have discredited long-held distinctions in developmental research between mental activity (thinking/conceptual) and physical activity (doing/applied). How embodied learning intersects with aesthetic perception in arts learning, however, has largely failed to capture the curiosity of scholars within these traditions. I attend to this oversight by adapting Charles Goodwin’s conceptualization of professional vision in my study of professional proprioception in children’s learning of ballet folklórico.

I conduct this video ethnographic research at a small ballet folklórico studio in El Paso, Texas near the US and Mexico border. The children at the school are between the ages of four years and twelve years and are of Mexican descent. The data I present for this talk primarily are derived from the video documentation of classes at the studio; I select key incidents (Erickson, 1977) to analyze that demonstrate moments of refinement (e.g., sound of the foot hitting the floor, positioning of the torso) of the children’s practice. Following the approach taken by Marjorie Goodwin and Asta Cekaite (2018) in their study of embodiment in everyday family practices, I examine these key incidents in terms of how the visual, aural, and haptic senses are co-implicated as an “intersensorial” (Howe, 2005, p. 7) practice and detail their sequential and simultaneous social organization. I draw upon interviews with teachers and family members as well as my research into the history of ballet folklórico education in the US and Mexico to relate these key incidents to their wider social context.

In my preliminary analyses, I have begun to develop a category scheme comprised of the varied proprioceptive responses teachers wish for students to acquire. Lightness of being while hitting the foot to the floor to make a clear sound, ways of hearing the sound the teacher makes and replicating the rhythm in one’s own body, ways of feeling the lift of the torso that communicates the charro (proud and dignified) posture of the bailarin are a few examples of this category scheme. I also describe how the teachers interweave a variety of instructional approaches comprised of multiple symbol systems in order to communicate to students these cognitive and embodied discriminations. A teacher, for example, might cradle a young dancer from behind to show her how to lean on an angle into the posture or ask the child dancers to “listen” with their eyes closed as she performs the rhythm of the footwork. Lastly, I show how emotional valiance overlays this teaching in a manner that shows both an ethic of care for the children while also demanding their competency through hard work so as honor the tradition of the cultural dance. In these ways my analysis begins to detail the complex cultural and historical organization of teaching and learning in ballet folklórico—practices that are multisemiotic, multisensorial, and cognitive in combination.

March 3 Cheryl Lee, Anthropology , UCLA 10-11
Emerging Social Lives of Translanguaging among Chinese and Japanese American Preschoolers
Cheryl Lee, UCLA
Abstract for Co-Operative Action Lab, March 3, 2021

While historically not always the case, a common perception currently held within the United States suggests that bilingual children tend to be lucky: lucky to acquire multiple languages so seemingly effortlessly, lucky in their capacity to become fluent, lucky to be a blank slate. To a certain extent, these claims are difficult to disregard. Strictly framed in this way, however, bilingualism becomes conceptually mystified through its presupposed potentiality and ambiguity. It transforms into an innate asset, something that just happens through use and exposure to young children. Furthermore, it erases the experiences of bilingual children who ultimately face situations including repressive school and academic environments, language minoritization, language shift, and language loss. Such ideologies of bilingualism obfuscate the crucial social encounters that shape the formation of linguistic identities.
The purpose of this project is an attempt to locate bilingualism as a discursive practice in its social context. This ethnographic case study examines the language practices of young Chinese and Japanese American students at a Mandarin-Japanese immersion Montessori school in Northern California. Engaging with theories of language use and socialization, I show that translanguaging is a discursive practice that emerges and is sustained through social interaction. Juxtaposing student language practices with the school’s full immersion language policy, I present and describe typical classroom translanguaging events that I observed from the students. During these events, students of both classrooms engaged in dynamic and fluid language use, but for particular social purposes and in overtly different ways. Initial findings suggest that these contrasting translanguaging practices develop through multiple processes of language socialization, creating potentially divergent pathways for bilingual identity development. In this Co-Operative Action Lab session, I review some of these key findings and explore future directions for this short-term ethnographic project.

Keywords: language socialization, translanguaging, bilingual education, Asian American, identity

SECOND PRESENTATION `11-12 : Farzad will play music on the setar and tar.

March10 Norma Mendoza-Denton, UCLA Anthropology Sticking it to the Man”/wallstreetbets, Generational Masculinity and Revenge in Narratives of our Dystopian Age