Fall 2024 Lab Presentations
October 2. Sasha Kurlenkova, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. and Ekaterina Rudneva, Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (Laboratory of Anthropological Linguistics) in Saint Petersburg: Negotiating Multiactivity in Interactions of a Child with Cerebral Palsy and His Teacher.
In this data-session, Sasha Kurlenkova and Ekaterina Rudneva will present their current work-in-progress – analysis of how Vlad, a non-speaking child with cerebral palsy, and Tatiana, his orally speaking teacher, negotiate different school-related activities on the computer controlled via a touchpad (Teacher), an eyetracking device and a mouse control app (Vlad). Both are engaged in doing exercises aimed at teaching Vlad to distinguish between soft, hard and vowel sounds in the Russian language.
We are interested in multiactivity, which is “the different ways in which two or more activities can be intertwined and made co-relevant in social interaction” [Haddington et al. 2014: 3]. Multiactivity in this case consists in switching between an educational activity and an activity, initiated by a child, which can be framed as “fooling around”. While Tatiana focuses primarily on the educational agenda, i.e. moving from one exercise to another prescribed by the school program, and is supposed to scaffold Vlad’s learning of the rules and skills of Russian, Vlad sometimes gets bored along the way and starts to “fool around”. He may also actively resist a particular exercise suggested by Tatiana. Both Tatiana and Vlad have their ways of pursuing the educational course of action or resisting and subverting it, though those of Vlad are restricted by his available physical resources. These multimodal ways, resources and strategies will be the subject of our exploration in this data-session.
The data were collected by Vlad’s family living in Russia as a part of Sasha’s dissertation research in 2020-2022.
Reference
Haddington Pentti, Keisanen Tiina, Mondada Lorenza, Nevile Мaurice. Towards multiactivity as a social and interactional phenomenon // Multiactivity in social interaction: Beyond multitasking, ed. by Haddington P., Keisanen T., Mondada L., Nevile М. John Benjamins Publishing Company. 2014. P. 3–32.
October 9. Jianhong Lin jh911561172@gmail.com, Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University.
Nested Position Reimagined: How Children Adjust and Shape Family Reading Habitusì
This study focuses on how children engage with the practice of reading picture books with their parents, particularly through the lens of bodily positioning and social roles. By examining 86 hours of video recordings from family book reading sessions, the research aims to explore how children are socialized into the act of reading by mimicking and adjusting the physical arrangements their parents initially encourage.
The study utilizes Conversation Analysis and Language Socialization methodologies to delve into these interactions. One of the key observations is how parents attempt to position their children on their laps during reading sessions. Over time, children begin to offer to sit on their parents’ laps without much prompting, suggesting that they internalize and reshape the reading habitus.
This raises some important research questions, such as 1) how children perceive and reshape this particular bodily relationship of “lap reading” 2) what social roles they adopt as they adjust their bodily configurations in relation to their parents during reading sessions. The data analyzed comes from Chinese and Japanese families (2-year-olds and their parents).
October 16 Nicolo Nasi : University of Bologna, Dept. of Education Studie
Children’s peer interactions during collaborative tasks with a digital device
Children have been shown to use various multimodal resources to negotiate their peer participation frameworks and social relationships, both in ordinary and institutional contexts (Goodwin 1990, 2006; Cekaite et al. 2014). These interactional negotiations also map onto interactions with digital devices, which increasingly characterize the material ecology of children’s mutual engagement (Danby et al. 2018, Jakonen & Niemi 2020).
In this data session, I will show data involving children aged 10 to 11 who work on a shared task with a digital device. Specifically, the (physically co-present) children work in small groups with the task of narrating a story through the digital device. I’m interested in how children exploit the resources in their interactional repertoires and in the surrounding socio-material environment to negotiate the local participation framework and their peer relationships and hierarchies. Children locally mobilize verbal, embodied, and material resources to negotiate and dispute their roles and responsibilities for the task (e.g. they negotiate access to the device or dispute dominant/subordinate roles), thereby co-operatively reconstructing the social organization of the peer group.
References
Cekaite, Asta, Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Vibeke Grøver and Eva Teubal. 2014. Children’s peer talk: Learning from each other. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danby, Susan, Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Helen Melander and Pal Aarsand. 2018. Situated collaboration and problem solving in young children’s digital gameplay. British Journal of Educational Technology 49(5): 959-972.
Goodwin, Marjorie. 1990. He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among Black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
October 23 Ali Reza Majleski, Dept. of Education, Stockholm University
Affectivity and Accountability in Human-Robot Interactions.
My presentation will be in form of a data session which will focus on video-recorded interactions between high school students and a humanoid robot named Furhat. The selected sequences are drawn from a dataset of human-robot interactions (HRI) involving students from two distinct educational programs: a natural science program and an electronic and energy program. In these sessions, the students interact with Furhat to solve electronic circuit problems. While the conversations were based on pre-designed tasks, Furhat was programmed to operate autonomously. These recordings provide insight into how the exchange of questions and answers not only progresses the conversation but also influences the emotional stances the human participants adopt toward both the robot and the topics under discussion. Furhat’s responses, though shaped by its design, are limited in their sensitivity to the situational context, offering a unique opportunity to study how accountability and affectivity are co-constructed in real-time.
October 30. Mick Smith; Dept. of Culture and Society, Linköping U.
Maxims & Mock-ups in cadaver-based surgical training
Cadavers, considered the “gold standard” for surgical training, provide the closest, highest fidelity medium, short of ‘live’ operation, for instructing surgical skills. Despite this fidelity, instructors and learners must ‘mock up’ the cadaver as an instructional artifact in order to render it into an intelligible, structure-governed medium, not only for providing experiences and instructing on skills but for contextualizing those within the learners’ everyday work as practicing surgeons. Mockups, as models, function as representations of given phenomena because they preserve and make accessible a set of specific relationships consistent with the phenomena of interest. Moreover, they are ostensively treated as provisional in that they only capture “some relationships and some of the features” at the expense of others, while simultaneously making “specifically and deliberately false provisions” for other essential features of the phenomena (Garfinkel, 1963, p. 9).
While we tend to think of fabricated ‘mock-ups’ in educational settings (e.g., a plastic anatomical model), mocking up can also be accomplished through interactional practices, particularly when instructing on ‘natural’ objects or materials (e.g., cadavers in medicine, rock outcrops in field geology, etc.). These objects are unfabricated—whatever relationships they preserve are not intended in their creation, nor are they treated as obvious for the participants. Rather, these relations are made accessible through discursive practice in instruction. In this study we investigate the training of surgeons using cadavers and analyze the instructional practices that instructors use for making the cadaver intelligible and actionable as an instructional medium, focusing in particular on the instructors’ use of maxims in instruction—phrases or sayings capturing general truths or principles shared within a community of practice (Button, 2023).
In this setting, maxims are routinely formulated as prescribed/proscribed rules of conduct for trainees to follow. In our analysis, we observe that maxims are routinely produced for the purpose of contextualizing a given instruction within the experiences of the trainees as practicing surgeons as lesson that is transitional across occasions (ibid, p. 127). In doing so, learners not only get instruction on performing a procedure in the here-and-now, but in its application in the there-and-then of similarly constituted scenarios in their surgical practice.
NOTE: Lab will not meet from November 6 to November 20.
November 27, Maria Erofeeva: Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Dealing with Diversity in a Virtual Reality Classroom
My data come from French sign language classes in virtual reality, which include both Deaf and hearing students. The core activity involves students repeating signs after the teacher. The environment is highly asymmetrical and diverse in terms of participants’ sensory access to the world, language proficiency, and technological skills. In such a setting, different types of trouble are occasioned to arise, while students may not necessarily have conventional resources to signal it (such as vocals or gaze). Thus, the teacher’s practical task is to accommodate the diverse needs of the participants to ensure efficient learning. I am interested in how trouble is signaled, managed, and anticipated in this fully non-vocal interaction.
In classroom interaction studies, the notions of repair and correction, including fully embodied ones, have been extensively employed to analyze communicative and instructional breakdowns. In contrast, the notion of recruitment denotes the presence of trouble during the execution of a practical activity. I would like to discuss the relevance of these terms in the study of L2 learning in an asymmetrical environment where producing signs is the main practical activity that is not inherently communicative, which might make the notion of repair less relevant (although breakdowns of intersubjectivity are quite common in this setting and may accompany the observed practices). Additionally, it is not always the teacher who initiates the process, which would typically bring the notion of correction into play.
Finally, I invite participants to consider how anticipated trouble, within the context of the teacher’s pedagogical project, influences instructional sequences.
December 4
Mandy Bateman Dept. of Early Years, Faculty of Health, Education and Social Work, Birmingham City University and Xiaoting Li; Department of East Asian Studies, U of Alberta, Canada
‘Intertwining food and laughter during mealtimes’.
Looking across data from an early childhood setting in Wales to Mandarin speaking adults in mainland China, we aim to explore commonalities and differences at the intersection of eating and laughing in public mealtime episodes. We will discuss preliminary interests regarding how the mouth can attend to the function of eating morsels of food whilst also providing an acoustic/vocal acknowledgement and receipt of a humorous prior turn. Participants’ bodily movements presented as torso leans, head positioning that manage physical embodied displays of humour alignment with interlocutors, and employment of hands to touch specific parts of the face – including covering open mouths full of food – will also be explored in the symphony of mealtime activity. The broader impact of cultural norms around eating in the two diverse settings, such as sharing food in Xiaoting’s data as opposed to bringing one’s own individual meal in Mandy’s data, will provide further discussion.