Spring Term Lab Presentations

April 12 Olga Anatoli Smith and Asta Cekaite (Child Studies, Linkoping University):  Social interactional affordances of walking outdoors in preschools in Sweden

Social interactional affordances of walking outdoors in preschools in Sweden

In this data session we will draw attention to interactional affordances constituted during group walking among preschool teachers and children (2 to 3 years old) within urban environments in Sweden. This is a part of a larger project comparing data from Sweden and Japan (Matt Burdelski), to be presented at IPRA 2023. The data for the session come from video-recordings of naturally occurring social interactions in a bilingual (Swedish-English) early childhood education and care setting.

 

Previous educational research has drawn on the notion of “affordances” (Gibson 1977) and argues for the importance of “unedited” natural landscapes, with an idealized depiction of, for example, a forest, as potentially more engaging for children than a playground (Aziz and Said, 2015; Hammarsten, 2021). We propose to broaden this approach and look at affordances not as a static characteristic of environments, but rather as engendering dynamic and dialogically constructed pragmatic meaning. Previous research has described adult-child interactions during outdoor walking as an educational activity for encouraging “environmental noticings” among children (Bateman, 2015: 102–104), as well as an opportunity for playful “occasioned knowledge exploration” (Goodwin, 2007). In this talk, we build on this research to look at walking that while instrumental—a compelled activity or “a mode of transport” (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020)—affords opportunities for the co-construction of meaning. We suggest that for young children, walking outdoors allows for initiating spontaneous conversations that draws upon environmental resources, while at the same time “mastering” their bodies (Kern, 2018) in relation to their surroundings.

 

References

Aziz NF and Said I (2015) Outdoor Environments as Children’s Play Spaces: Playground Affordances. In: Evans B, Horton J, and Skelton T (eds) Play, Recreation, Health and Well Being. Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp. 1–22. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-4585-96-5_7-1.

Bateman A (2015) Conversation Analysis and Early Childhood Education: The Co-Production of Knowledge and Relationships. Directions in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.

Gibson J J (1977) The theory of affordances. In Shaw R., Bransford J. (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing: Toward an ecological psychology (pp. 67–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

Goodwin MH (2007) Occasioned knowledge exploration in family interaction. Discourse & Society 18(1). SAGE Publications Ltd: 93–110. DOI: 10.1177/0957926507069459.

Hammarsten M (2021) What are Schoolchildren doing Out There? Children’s Perspectives on Affordances in Unedited Places. Built Environment 47(2): 186–205. DOI: 10.2148/benv.47.2.186.

Kern F (2018) Mastering the body: Correcting bodily conduct in adult-child interaction. Research on Children and Social Interaction 2(2): 213–234. DOI: 10.1558/rcsi.37389.

Loukaitou-Sideris A (2020) Special issue on walking. Transport Reviews 40(2). Routledge: 131–134. DOI: 10.1080/01441647.2020.1712044.

 

April 19 Lourdes de León and Hilario Chi Canul (Linguistics and Anthropology: CIESAS): Directive trajectories in Mayan families: A look at Tsotsil Mayan peasant families and bilingual Spanish-Mayan Yucatec urban families  in goal-oriented activities

 

Lourdes de León Pasquel

Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS-CDMX)

Hilario Chi Canul

Universidad de Quintana Roo -CTM | Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS-CDMX)

 

 

Directives are a central resource for the organization of attention in everyday family activities. Studies in middle class families reveal that they are patterned and repeated in the everyday routines of children’s lives, providing the basis for their learning of skills, accountability, and moral discernment (Goodwin 2006, Goodwin and Cekaite 2018).

Studies of directives in Tsotsil Mayan peasant families show that children’s frame attunement and establishment of common orientational perspectives need not rely on high dosages of parental directives to frame activities and to structure and manage attention (de León 2015, 2017; Martínez-Pérez 2016). Children engage in age-appropriate relevant activities (e.g., chopping kindling, knitting, gardening activities, helping in the kitchen, feeding chickens, etc.) where experts occasionally monitor the novice’s actions and identify problems that require correction in a correctional directive trajectory that leads to a “professional vision” (C. Goodwin 1994) of particular fields of activities. By contrast, an ongoing study of Spanish-Yucatec Mayan three-generation urban families reveals extended recycled directive trajectories to persuade children to accomplish urban homes goal-oriented activities (e.g., picking up toys, sweeping the floor) as they are socialized in Yucatec Mayan as part of a family project to revitalize the language.

The ethnographic and talk-in-interaction analysis of four everyday goal-oriented activities reveal that aggravated directive trajectories unfold in multiparty recyclings with adult parties providing resources for children’s collaborations (e.g., reported speech, affect, gesture, F-formations, the sociospatial organization of bodies), and the use of silence and F-formation avoidance to show refusal from children.

The first study is rooted in over four decades of linguistic anthropological research in the Tsotsil Mayan highlands of Chiapas. The second study is an ongoing research on the socialization of six Yucatec Mayan in urban families of three-generations, with grandparents as the main socializers of children.

 

References

 

Chi Canul, Hilario

2014    “Cuerpo, alma y carne de la lengua maya. Vitalidad lingüística: desde la maya, a lo maya y con lo            maya”, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 39, Núm. I, Canadá, University of Ottawa,            pp. 213-237.

 

2023    (en prensa) “El renacimiento del maya yucateco en un hogar urbano”, Revista Forma y Función, Colombia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

 

De León, Lourdes

2011 “«Calibrando» la atención: directivos, adiestramiento y responsabilidad en el trabajo doméstico de los niños mayas zinacantecos” [“Calibrating attention: directives, enskilment and responsibility in a Zinacantec Mayan children participation in household work”]. In Susana Frisancho, et al. (eds.), Aprendizaje, cultura y desarrollo. Una aproximación interdisciplinaria, Perú: Universidad Católica, pp. 85-110.

 

2015 “Mayan Children’s Creation of Learning Ecologies by Initiative and Cooperative Action.” In M. Correa-Chávez, R. Mejía-Arauz, B. Rogoff, (eds) Children Learn by Observing and Contributing to Family and Community Endeavors: A Cultural Paradigm, Vol 49, Advances in Child Development and Behaviour  (ACDB), Waltham, Ma. Elsevier, Academic Press, pp. 153-184.

 

2017 “Emerging learning ecologies: Mayan children’s initiative and correctional directives in their everyday enskilment practices.”.In A. Kyratzis & S. J. Johnson (Eds.), Multimodal and Multilingual Resources in Children’s Framing of Situated Learning Activities. Linguistics and Education. 41, 47-48.

 

Goodwin, Marjorie Harkness

2006 “Participation, affect, and trajectory in family directive/response sequences.” In Text

and Talk 26 (4/5). Special issue entitled Family Discourse, framing family. Deborah

Tannen and Marjorie H. Goodwin (eds.), pp. 513-542.

Goodwin, Marjorie Harkness and  Asta Cekaite

2018 “Negotiation within directive trajectories.” In Goodwin Marjorie Harkness y Asta Cekaite (eds.), Embodied Family Choreography. Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity, London and New York: Nueva York, Routledge, pp. 83-104.

 

April 26 Maria Erofeeva (School of Communication and Media, Ulster University) and Nils Klowait Department of Technology and Diversity, Paderborn University.

Tactile Talk: A Multimodal Exploration of Embodied Action in Cognitive Experimentation

 

In this data session, we explore the multimodal interactions within a cognitive research laboratory, focusing on the deployment of material objects and the real-time unfolding of embodied actions. Utilizing a selection of recorded video data from various subject-experimenter interactions, we aim to understand how objects, talk, bodies, and gestures intertwine and influence the experimental process.

 

Our inquiry centers on the role of objects as haptic mediators, facilitating touch and control without direct contact between the experimenter and the subject. We seek to reconsider objects as part of an embodied interactional mesh, shaping the distribution of rights to manipulate within a specific material environment.

 

May 3 Xiaoting Li (Chinese Linguistics Department of East Asian Studies, Calgary): Offering Assistance in Mandarin Interaction

 

This study investigates how Mandarin speakers use grammar, prosody, and bodily-visual movements to offer assistance to one another. The data for this study are naturalistic Mandarin face-to-face interactions involving collaborative activities such as cooking and playing board games. In this session, I focus on a particular grammatical structure yaobu wo X ‘or I X’ used by participants when they offer assistance to others. I examine how this structure is used together with other multimodal resources and the interactional and sequential environments where this structure is used.

 

 

May 10. Mick Smith ( Linkoping University):  The cadaver as mock-up

 

We will present data from a project investigating the use of cadaver-based instruction for the training of surgeons in different surgical techniques and procedures, collected at the Surgical Anatomical Training Center at the Sahlgrenska institute. While cadaver-based instruction provides a close approximation of the experiences that surgeons may have in surgery, it necessarily differs. As such, participants routinely attend to the artifactuality of the cadaver and the ways in which it relates to real world scenarios. We examine the practices that instructors use for decontextualising and recontextualising the student’s learning experiences, drawing the learner’s attention to the here and now versus generalisations and/or juxtapositions to the experiences they may have in actual surgery. As this data has only recently collected, we are at the beginning of our analysis and are interested generating discussion in the data session.

 

 

May 17 Julia Katila Leelo, Keevallik, and Emily Hofstetter: Sounds and touch during affective episodes between romantic partners

Julia Katila (presenter)

 

Research on interaction has only recently ventured into the domain of the senses, hitherto considered inaccessible for video analysis, showing how matters such as touch are systematically oriented to in families with children and in institutionalized tasting sessions (Goodwin & Cekaite 2018, Mondada 2019). Our study contributes to this emerging field by targeting the interface of touch and vocal sound, dissecting the intersubjective potential of sounding when bodies are intertwined. The data entails video recordings of the naturally occurring lives of 10 same and different sex couples at their homes in Finland. The everyday life of each couple was documented for seven days for 10–20 hours a day with 4–5 video cameras set up in different rooms. In the data session, we show videos of affective episodes including kissing and hugging between the romantic partners. The focus is on how vocalization can express comfort and thus lead to extension of mutual bodily contact, or inform of discomfort, which leads to swift release of the problematic contact.

 

 

May 24 Federica Raia (Education, UCLA) Stories at Conviviality: Doctors and patients tell stories

 

 

May 31 Jianhong LIN (Department of Humanities, Osaka University and Visiting Graduate Researcher, Center for Language, Interaction and Culture, UCLA) Co-operations and Negotiations in Transitions from Other Family Activities to Picture-book Reading

 

In communities across the globe, picture book reading is a mundane family activity during early childhood. In previous research utilizing conversation analysis, many has worked in relation to the verbal forms and embodied bodily resources that are deployed to sustain the reading activity, or to look on a particular phenomenon (labeling, pointing, etc.) during reading. However, to truly understand why some communicative resources are deployed, and the meaning of picture-book reading activity itself, it is important to access to the expansive context in which talk, and its constituent utterances reside. This indicates the necessity of combination of ethnography and conversation analysis (Maynard 2006).

In this presentation, I focus on how parents and children co-operate and negotiate on the transition into picture book reading activity, from other ongoing domestic activities. My research aim is identifying the activity trajectories to reveal where picture book reading is positioned among multiple (and often competing) family activities.

 

References:

Heller, V. (2019). Embodied displacements in young German children’s storytelling: Layering of.

spaces, voices and bodies. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 3(1-2), 168–195.

Kevoe-Feldman, H. & Iversen, C. (2022). Approaching institutional boundaries: Comparative conversation analysis of practices for assisting suicidal callers in emergency and suicide helpline calls, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 191, pp. 83–97

Maynard, D. W. (2006). Ethnography and conversation analysis: What is the context of an utterance? Hesse-Biber, S., & Leavy, P. (Eds.), Emergent Methods in Social Research, 55-94. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Ninio. A., & Bruner, J.S. (1978). The achievement and antecedents of labeling. Journal of Child

Language, 5, 1-15.

Takada, A., & Kawashima, M. (2019). Caregivers’ strategies for eliciting storytelling from  toddlers in Japanese caregiver–child picture book reading activities. Research on Children.

and Social Interaction, 3(1-2), 196–223.

 

 

 

 

June 6 Norma Mendoza-Denton (UCLA Anthropology); Mixed reality gaming, intonation.

 

 

 

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