Repetition is a foundational component of any communication system, mediating much of our everyday lived experience. Despite its pervasiveness, the production of repetitive behavior, stimming, is a behavior of both stigma and celebration in discourse around Autism. Although these repetitive behaviors have traditionally been seen as constituting barriers to sociality, the phenomenon of interactive stimming, as written in autistic autobiographies, and empirically investigated in my work, shows that it has potential to constitute a rich communicative practice for autistic individuals. In this data session, I bring video data from two different projects on interactive stimming in the everyday lives of non-speaking autistic individuals. The first interactions are of autistic adults interacting with one another in the context of a drum circle within an autism institution. The second interactions involve autistic children interacting with their mothers on musical mats that map interpersonal touch to music. Informed by literature on embodied interaction, and in combination with musical notation, I look forward to discussing these interactional sequences and their accompanying transcripts.
October 26. Sarah Jean Johnson (Education, UT- El Paso)
La mariposita. ¿Lo recuerda?: Bilingual storytelling, metaphor, and touch within a pedagogic ensemble in children’s learning to play the violin
Authors: Sarah Jean Johnson; María Teresa de la Piedra; Alejandra Sanmiguel López (Education, UT- San Antonio)
We examine professional perception in children’s learning of the violin; that is, how teachers structure their pedagogy through the use of multiple and diverse semiotic channels to communicate the cognitive and embodied discriminations that are part of artistic practice. We focus on the role of bilingual storytelling, metaphor, and touch with the intention of expanding on existing research, which has largely characterized embodied, artistic skill as being communicated through physical demonstration coupled with vocal explanation (e.g., Douglah, 2021). We further aim, through this focus, to enhance descriptions of asset-based pedagogies for students of non-dominant backgrounds (García-Sánchez and Orellana, 2019).
Two complementary frameworks are brought to bear on this study. One is research in the socio-cultural tradition, which elucidates how children acquire cultural competence through engagement in purposeful, goal directed interaction (Lave and Wegner, 1991; Rogoff, 1990). The second is Goodwin’s (1994, p. 606) notion of professional vision, which he defines as, “The ability to see relevant entities within a professional domain that is consistent with the vision held by experts within the discursive community of practice.”
Our method is microethnographic (Erickson, 1992), relying on multiple data sources including, videotaped classes taken over the course of the academic year of 2021-2022, artifact collection, and interviews with students, their families, and teachers. The research site is a community music education program held in an unincorporated, rural town bordering Mexico.
Our paper focuses on two teaching sequences. The first is with novice children who are learning the proper hold of a violin bow. For children to learn the quality of the hand position—which the teacher describes as “suave, separado, y circulo” (soft, separated, and circular)—the teacher engages children in a collaboratively told story about a family of gallinas (hens) while forming various participation frameworks, such as facing a child while tactilely moving her fingers to rest lightly on the bow.
In the second sequence the teacher is helping a more experienced (and older) student, Jay, with his hold of the violin neck. Noticing the tension in the child’s hand position, she touches lightly the underside of Jay’s hand, opening it, while asking him, “La mariposita. ¿Lo recuerda? ¿Y como se llama tu mariposa?” (The little butterfly. Remember it? And what is your butterfly’s name?) This question leads to both the teacher and child sharing stories in English and Spanish of their respective butterflies, named after her wife and his baby brother. These stories conclude with humor as the teacher reiterates the lesson (in English), “Okay so don’t squish your butterfly,” and the boy responds in Spanish with laughter, “ya se fue” (It already left).
Our findings demonstrate how bilingual story structure and its embodied, tactile enactments provide a format for elaborating on the perceptual discrimination children need to acquire for violin performance while also building on children’s linguistic strengths. In such, they make novel contributions to scholarship in social interaction and bilingual education while opening our vision to new understandings of cognition that avoid binaries between mental activity (thinking/conceptual) and physical activity (doing/applied).
Douglah, J. (2021). “BOOM, so it will be like an attack” Demonstrating in a dance class through verbal, sound and body imagery. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 29(1).
Erickson, F. (1992). Ethnographic microanalysis of interaction. In M. LeCompte, W.L. Millroy, & J. Preissle (Eds.).The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 201-225). Academic Press.
García-Sánchez, I. M., & Orellana, M. F. (2019). Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-dominant Groups. New York: Routledge.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in a social context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
November 2. Kreeta Niemi. (Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and UCLA CLIC Visitor) Choreographing Participation in the context of Team Teaching
Co-teaching – when two or more teachers plan, teach lessons, and assess the students together – is becoming more common (e.g., King 2022). In the present study context, Finland, and more globally, schools are nowadays incorporating larger and more flexible classrooms involving multiple classes and team of teachers. Thus, the spatial design of the classroom is enabling or even encouraging teachers to teach together. Based on my preliminary observations, teachers may carry out some of their teaching independently, but shared classroom space requires collaboration with other teachers at least to some extent. In this data session, I’m especially interested in:
1) how teachers accomplish co-teaching in-situ by distributing roles and tasks and how this distribution shapes students’ participation and
2) how emergent contingencies of space and materiality are utilized to support achieving joint attention and participation
My data are drawn from video recordings of open and flexible basic education learning spaces in Finland, and my research is based on larger project that has adopted ethnography and EMCA to explore the spatial, material and social ecology of these classrooms. My theoretical framework is inspired by the work distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995), footing (Goffman 1979) and interactive organization (Goodwin 1979).
REFERENCES
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Goodwin, C. (1979). The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural Conversation. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (pp. 97-121). New York: Irvington Publishers.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT press
King, A. (2022). Synchronizing and amending: A conversation analytic account of the “Co-ness” in co-teaching. Linguistics and Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101015
November 16 Mick Smith (Dept. of Culture and Society: Linkoping University) Assessing professional perception through multisensorial depictions in scientific practice.
November 23 Julia Katila (Social Research: Tampere University, Pirkanmaa, Finland). Interaction during the emergence of the patient’s fear, pain or resistance
Dental fear is highly prevalent among pediatric patients and has been shown to lead to nonhabitual use of dental services (Grisolia et al. 2021, Liinavuori et al., 2019). When children experience fear, pain, or discomfort their bodily reactions are not entirely under their control, which not only leads to an interactionally challenging situation for the children, but also disrupts the dental team’s management of the ongoing dental procedures.
In this data session, I will show some data from Finnish pediatric dental encounters. The interest is in what happens in the interaction when the children show signs of resistance, fear or pain; for example,when their breath becomes observably heavy, when they vocalize response cries or cry, or when they “close” or turn their bodies away to anticipate or react to pain. I focus on how the dentists, dental nurses, and the patients’ caregivers attend to the children’s bodily reactions through various embodied and verbal means, and what consequences do various types of responses have for the ongoing interaction. The study data includes video recordings of authentic visits to the dental clinic of 6- to 11-year-old child patients with signs of dental fear and interviews with the dentists.
November 30 Hansun Zhang Waring (Applied Linguistics, Teachers’ College) Language Socialization at the Dinner Table:The Case of a Child’s Because-Prefaced Utterances
I’m working on a collection of 43 cases of a child’s because-prefaced utterances (BPU) (at ages 3 and 8) that account for assertions during family mealtime interactions with two questions in mind: (1) how are BPUs that are assertion accounts used by the child, and (2) what does this use say about socialization? Depending on how much progress I’ll make by November 30, this may be more of a data session than a talk. In either case, I will have a handout with extracts (along with their video clips) that showcase the diversity of my collection for us to work through.
December 7 Olga Anatoli Smith (Child Studies, Linkoping University) Collaborative discovery of word meaning in a bilingual preschool
In this data session I will show excerpts on spontaneous vocabulary work that is collaboratively achieved by teachers and children in a bilingual preschool. The excerpts illustrate implicit and explicit strategies that teachers use to highlight certain words, provide definitions, and invite children to explore the word meaning. The data were collected through ethnographically informed videorecorded observation in a Swedish-English preschool and analyzed with the method of multimodal interactional analysis. Tentatively, the analysis shows that during an ongoing structured activity, teachers employ implicit word definitions through self-initiated self-repair and in so doing preserve continuity of the activity. When a shared understanding of the word appears essential for the progression of the activity, teachers create space for the explicit vocabulary work by demonstrating the word meaning and/or addressing children directly with the question about the word meaning. In doing so, teachers invite children to a collaborative exploration and discovery. The organization of spontaneous vocabulary work demonstrates teachers’ orientation to children as language learners, while the genre of explanatory talk allows children participating in adult-child interaction from an egalitarian standpoint.
December 14 Shannon Ward: (Anthropology, U. British Columbia)
Reading in the City: Grassroots Literacy Instruction as Resistance to Assimilation
This presentation considers informal Mandarin and English literacy instruction as a syncretic practice, through which urban Amdo children acquire new subjectivities. It analyzes interactions in a multilingual reading group for preschoolers run by Tibetan parents in Xining city. I argue that parents’ increased involvement in their young children’s education has led to new forms of resistance to assimilation. Instead of promoting a standard literary Tibetan on the same terms as standard Mandarin, these reading groups encourage culturally valued forms of sociality among multiethnic urban children. This chapter portrays reading groups as a subtle form of activism that encourages children to express their Tibetan identities while avoiding discourses of exclusion that pervade formal, institutionalized efforts to promote a standard Tibetan language. It asserts that expanding urban Amdo Tibetan children’s social networks beyond their immediate households can allow for cultural and linguistic continuity.
Fall 2022
/Presentations by nalamattinaOctober 19 Rachel Chen (Education UC Berkeley)
Transcribing interactive stimming
Repetition is a foundational component of any communication system, mediating much of our everyday lived experience. Despite its pervasiveness, the production of repetitive behavior, stimming, is a behavior of both stigma and celebration in discourse around Autism. Although these repetitive behaviors have traditionally been seen as constituting barriers to sociality, the phenomenon of interactive stimming, as written in autistic autobiographies, and empirically investigated in my work, shows that it has potential to constitute a rich communicative practice for autistic individuals. In this data session, I bring video data from two different projects on interactive stimming in the everyday lives of non-speaking autistic individuals. The first interactions are of autistic adults interacting with one another in the context of a drum circle within an autism institution. The second interactions involve autistic children interacting with their mothers on musical mats that map interpersonal touch to music. Informed by literature on embodied interaction, and in combination with musical notation, I look forward to discussing these interactional sequences and their accompanying transcripts.
October 26. Sarah Jean Johnson (Education, UT- El Paso)
La mariposita. ¿Lo recuerda?: Bilingual storytelling, metaphor, and touch within a pedagogic ensemble in children’s learning to play the violin
Authors: Sarah Jean Johnson; María Teresa de la Piedra; Alejandra Sanmiguel López (Education, UT- San Antonio)
We examine professional perception in children’s learning of the violin; that is, how teachers structure their pedagogy through the use of multiple and diverse semiotic channels to communicate the cognitive and embodied discriminations that are part of artistic practice. We focus on the role of bilingual storytelling, metaphor, and touch with the intention of expanding on existing research, which has largely characterized embodied, artistic skill as being communicated through physical demonstration coupled with vocal explanation (e.g., Douglah, 2021). We further aim, through this focus, to enhance descriptions of asset-based pedagogies for students of non-dominant backgrounds (García-Sánchez and Orellana, 2019).
Two complementary frameworks are brought to bear on this study. One is research in the socio-cultural tradition, which elucidates how children acquire cultural competence through engagement in purposeful, goal directed interaction (Lave and Wegner, 1991; Rogoff, 1990). The second is Goodwin’s (1994, p. 606) notion of professional vision, which he defines as, “The ability to see relevant entities within a professional domain that is consistent with the vision held by experts within the discursive community of practice.”
Our method is microethnographic (Erickson, 1992), relying on multiple data sources including, videotaped classes taken over the course of the academic year of 2021-2022, artifact collection, and interviews with students, their families, and teachers. The research site is a community music education program held in an unincorporated, rural town bordering Mexico.
Our paper focuses on two teaching sequences. The first is with novice children who are learning the proper hold of a violin bow. For children to learn the quality of the hand position—which the teacher describes as “suave, separado, y circulo” (soft, separated, and circular)—the teacher engages children in a collaboratively told story about a family of gallinas (hens) while forming various participation frameworks, such as facing a child while tactilely moving her fingers to rest lightly on the bow.
In the second sequence the teacher is helping a more experienced (and older) student, Jay, with his hold of the violin neck. Noticing the tension in the child’s hand position, she touches lightly the underside of Jay’s hand, opening it, while asking him, “La mariposita. ¿Lo recuerda? ¿Y como se llama tu mariposa?” (The little butterfly. Remember it? And what is your butterfly’s name?) This question leads to both the teacher and child sharing stories in English and Spanish of their respective butterflies, named after her wife and his baby brother. These stories conclude with humor as the teacher reiterates the lesson (in English), “Okay so don’t squish your butterfly,” and the boy responds in Spanish with laughter, “ya se fue” (It already left).
Our findings demonstrate how bilingual story structure and its embodied, tactile enactments provide a format for elaborating on the perceptual discrimination children need to acquire for violin performance while also building on children’s linguistic strengths. In such, they make novel contributions to scholarship in social interaction and bilingual education while opening our vision to new understandings of cognition that avoid binaries between mental activity (thinking/conceptual) and physical activity (doing/applied).
Douglah, J. (2021). “BOOM, so it will be like an attack” Demonstrating in a dance class through verbal, sound and body imagery. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 29(1).
Erickson, F. (1992). Ethnographic microanalysis of interaction. In M. LeCompte, W.L. Millroy, & J. Preissle (Eds.).The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 201-225). Academic Press.
García-Sánchez, I. M., & Orellana, M. F. (2019). Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-dominant Groups. New York: Routledge.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in a social context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sarah Jean’s zoom Presentation
https://ucla.zoom.us/rec/share/5Mdj6_g2pcdmCDWTXDBXrsycc8f1ObGEU1cc7GBmvKV8EtORieeZG5XIPX3nW2lh.h3ZX6GGfZy-zgSXs
Passcode: dE2#j^P@
November 2. Kreeta Niemi. (Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and UCLA CLIC Visitor) Choreographing Participation in the context of Team Teaching
Co-teaching – when two or more teachers plan, teach lessons, and assess the students together – is becoming more common (e.g., King 2022). In the present study context, Finland, and more globally, schools are nowadays incorporating larger and more flexible classrooms involving multiple classes and team of teachers. Thus, the spatial design of the classroom is enabling or even encouraging teachers to teach together. Based on my preliminary observations, teachers may carry out some of their teaching independently, but shared classroom space requires collaboration with other teachers at least to some extent. In this data session, I’m especially interested in:
1) how teachers accomplish co-teaching in-situ by distributing roles and tasks and how this distribution shapes students’ participation and
2) how emergent contingencies of space and materiality are utilized to support achieving joint attention and participation
My data are drawn from video recordings of open and flexible basic education learning spaces in Finland, and my research is based on larger project that has adopted ethnography and EMCA to explore the spatial, material and social ecology of these classrooms. My theoretical framework is inspired by the work distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995), footing (Goffman 1979) and interactive organization (Goodwin 1979).
REFERENCES
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Goodwin, C. (1979). The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural Conversation. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (pp. 97-121). New York: Irvington Publishers.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT press
King, A. (2022). Synchronizing and amending: A conversation analytic account of the “Co-ness” in co-teaching. Linguistics and Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2022.101015
November 16 Mick Smith (Dept. of Culture and Society: Linkoping University) Assessing professional perception through multisensorial depictions in scientific practice.
Mick’s zoom presentation
https://ucla.zoom.us/rec/share/GttpH9cSPQXzJhwfz2ROK50VfI7X0PwhBwrVos_Hbm3jcFSroQ5mbiqGQYz4RUw.lIa0Nje_6M9jLIry?startTime=1668621949000
Passcode: fP.9!Gqx
November 23 Julia Katila (Social Research: Tampere University, Pirkanmaa, Finland). Interaction during the emergence of the patient’s fear, pain or resistance
Dental fear is highly prevalent among pediatric patients and has been shown to lead to nonhabitual use of dental services (Grisolia et al. 2021, Liinavuori et al., 2019). When children experience fear, pain, or discomfort their bodily reactions are not entirely under their control, which not only leads to an interactionally challenging situation for the children, but also disrupts the dental team’s management of the ongoing dental procedures.
In this data session, I will show some data from Finnish pediatric dental encounters. The interest is in what happens in the interaction when the children show signs of resistance, fear or pain; for example,when their breath becomes observably heavy, when they vocalize response cries or cry, or when they “close” or turn their bodies away to anticipate or react to pain. I focus on how the dentists, dental nurses, and the patients’ caregivers attend to the children’s bodily reactions through various embodied and verbal means, and what consequences do various types of responses have for the ongoing interaction. The study data includes video recordings of authentic visits to the dental clinic of 6- to 11-year-old child patients with signs of dental fear and interviews with the dentists.
November 30 Hansun Zhang Waring (Applied Linguistics, Teachers’ College) Language Socialization at the Dinner Table:The Case of a Child’s Because-Prefaced Utterances
I’m working on a collection of 43 cases of a child’s because-prefaced utterances (BPU) (at ages 3 and 8) that account for assertions during family mealtime interactions with two questions in mind: (1) how are BPUs that are assertion accounts used by the child, and (2) what does this use say about socialization? Depending on how much progress I’ll make by November 30, this may be more of a data session than a talk. In either case, I will have a handout with extracts (along with their video clips) that showcase the diversity of my collection for us to work through.
December 7 Olga Anatoli Smith (Child Studies, Linkoping University) Collaborative discovery of word meaning in a bilingual preschool
In this data session I will show excerpts on spontaneous vocabulary work that is collaboratively achieved by teachers and children in a bilingual preschool. The excerpts illustrate implicit and explicit strategies that teachers use to highlight certain words, provide definitions, and invite children to explore the word meaning. The data were collected through ethnographically informed videorecorded observation in a Swedish-English preschool and analyzed with the method of multimodal interactional analysis. Tentatively, the analysis shows that during an ongoing structured activity, teachers employ implicit word definitions through self-initiated self-repair and in so doing preserve continuity of the activity. When a shared understanding of the word appears essential for the progression of the activity, teachers create space for the explicit vocabulary work by demonstrating the word meaning and/or addressing children directly with the question about the word meaning. In doing so, teachers invite children to a collaborative exploration and discovery. The organization of spontaneous vocabulary work demonstrates teachers’ orientation to children as language learners, while the genre of explanatory talk allows children participating in adult-child interaction from an egalitarian standpoint.
December 14 Shannon Ward: (Anthropology, U. British Columbia)
Reading in the City: Grassroots Literacy Instruction as Resistance to Assimilation
This presentation considers informal Mandarin and English literacy instruction as a syncretic practice, through which urban Amdo children acquire new subjectivities. It analyzes interactions in a multilingual reading group for preschoolers run by Tibetan parents in Xining city. I argue that parents’ increased involvement in their young children’s education has led to new forms of resistance to assimilation. Instead of promoting a standard literary Tibetan on the same terms as standard Mandarin, these reading groups encourage culturally valued forms of sociality among multiethnic urban children. This chapter portrays reading groups as a subtle form of activism that encourages children to express their Tibetan identities while avoiding discourses of exclusion that pervade formal, institutionalized efforts to promote a standard Tibetan language. It asserts that expanding urban Amdo Tibetan children’s social networks beyond their immediate households can allow for cultural and linguistic continuity.