Talk in activity during young children’s use of digital technologies at home

This article establishes ways that family members engage and disengage in talk so as to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other.AbstractInternet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video-recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk so as to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children’s everyday practices with mobile technologies.Authored by Susan Danby, Christina Davidson, Maryanne Theobald, Brooke Scriven, Charlotte Cobb-Moore, Sandra Houen, Sandra Grant, Lisa M. Given, and Karen Thorpe

Young Children Enacting Governance: Child's Play?

Schools, homes and communities are increasingly perceived as risky spaces for children. This concern is a driving force behind many forms of governance imposed upon Australian children by well-meaning adults. Children are more and more the subjects of both overt and covert regulation by teachers and other adults in school contexts. Are children, though, passive in this process of governance? It is this issue that is the focus of this paper. In order to respond to the question of how young children enact governance in their everyday lives, video-recorded episodes of naturally occurring interactions among children in a preparatory classroom were captured. These data were then transcribed and analysed using the methods of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. This paper shows a number of strategies that the children used when enacting governance within their peer cultures in the classroom. It focuses specifically on how adult and childformulated rules and social orders of the classroom were drawn upon and developed in order to control and govern during the interaction. This paper illustrates that children are not passive in enacting governance, but actively and competently enact governance through their peer cultures. These findings are significant for educators to consider, as they help to develop an understanding of the complex social orders that children are continually constructing in the early childhood classroom

The novice researcher: Interviewing young children

Being a novice researcher undertaking research interviews with young children requires understandings of the interview process. By investigating the interaction between a novice researcher undertaking her first interview and a child participant, we attend to theoretical principles, such as the competence of young children as informants, and highlight practical matters when interviewing young children. A conversation analysis approach examines the talk preceding and following a sticker task. By highlighting the conversational features of a research interview, researchers can better understand the co-constructed nature of the interview. This paper provides insights into how to prepare for the interview and manage the interview context to recognize the active participation of child participants, and the value of artifacts to promote interaction. These insights make more transparent the interactional process of a research interview and become part of the researcher’s collection of devices to manage the conduct of research interviews

Education Bill: Committee Stage Report. Research paper 11/37

"This is an account of the House of Commons Committee Stage of the Education Bill. It complements Research Paper 11/14, prepared for the Commons Second Reading debate... The Bill, as amended in Public Bill Committee, was published as Bill 180.

Script proposals: A device for empowering clients in counselling

Much of the research on the delivery of advice by professionals such as physicians, health workers and counsellors, both on the telephone and in face to face interaction more generally, has focused on the theme of client resistance and the consequent need for professionals to adopt particular formats to assist in the uptake of the advice. In this paper we consider one setting, Kid’s Helpline, the national Australian counselling service for children and young people, where there is an institutional mandate not to give explicit advice in accordance with the values of self-direction and empowerment. The paper examines one practice, the use of script proposals by counsellors, which appears to offer a way of providing support which is consistent with these values. Script proposals entail the counsellors packaging their advice as something that the caller might say – at some future time – to a third party such as a friend, teacher, parent, or partner, and involve the counsellor adopting the speaking position of the caller in what appears as a rehearsal of a forthcoming strip of interaction. Although the core feature of a script proposal is the counsellor’s use of direct reported speech they appear to be delivered, not so much as exact words to be followed, but as the type of conversation that the client needs to have with the 3rd party. Script proposals, in short, provide models of what to say as well as alluding to how these could be emulated by the client. In their design script proposals invariably incorporate one or more of the most common rhetorical formats for maximising the persuasive force of an utterance such as a three part list or a contrastive pair. Script proposals, moreover, stand in a complex relation to the prior talk and one of their functions appears to be to summarise, respecify or expand upon the client’s own ideas or suggestions for problem solving that have emerged in these preceding sequences

Uncertainty, responsibility, and reassurance in paediatric palliative care: A conversation analytic study of telephone conversations between parents and clinicians

Background: Families play a vital role in the day-to-day medical care of children with life-limiting conditions. Navigating their child’s symptoms, treatments, and the possibility of sudden deteriorations, presents myriad challenges and can be distressing for the family. Paediatric palliative care can provide crucial support for families who are typically responsible for many aspects of their child’s care. Aim: To understand how paediatric palliative care clinicians use reassurance to support families through the uncertainties associated with caring for their children. Methods: One hundred routine telephone conversations between parents and clinicians of a paediatric palliative care service were recorded and analysed using Conversation Analytic methods. Findings: When parents report uncertainty about a specific care task, imply a causal link between this care task and an adverse outcome for their child, and a moral responsibility for the outcome, clinicians respond with reassurance. Clinicians produce reassurance through refuting parents’ accounts and providing an explanation to reframe the potential adverse outcome as independent of parent actions. Parents often agree with the clinicians’ reframings and demonstrate being reassured. Discussion: Specialist paediatric palliative care clinicians routinely foreground support for family members through reassurance. Conclusions: This study demonstrates how family-centred care can be accomplished in clinical practice

Foreword in "In Bateman, A. and Church, A. (ed.). (2016) Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: Studies in Conversation Analysis"

The exciting contribution of this book is that children’s perspectives and displays of their knowledge are understood through a lens that observes their everyday practices, in situ. In the studies reported here, the children are not being invited to report or give an account to an interested researcher about their everyday learning lives. Rather, the children are observed as they go about their everyday interactions with family, peers and educators. These activities would be happening regardless of whether the researcher was present or not, and captures what participants did and how they did it, and with whom and, alongside all this, the accomplishments of knowledge underpinned through all these interactions..

Watching young children 'play' with information technology : everyday life information seeking in the home

Research on how young children use information to orient themselves in daily life and to solve problems (known as everyday life information seeking or ELIS) has not been conducted, in-depth, in information science. This exploratory observation study examines how 15 Australian preschool children (aged three to five) used information technologies in their homes to orient themselves in daily life and to solve problems. Children engaged in various ways with the digital technologies available to them and with parents and siblings during play activities. The results explore the value of artistic play, sociodramatic play, and early literacy and numeracy activities in shaping young children's ‘way of life’ and ‘mastery of life’ as outlined in Savolainen's (1995) ELIS model. Observed technology engagement provided an opportunity to explore children's social worlds and the ways that they gathered information during technology play that will inform future learning activities and support child development. By using ELIS theory as an analytic lens, the results demonstrate how children's developmental play with technology tools helps them to internalize social and cultural norms. The data also point to the type of capital available to children and how that capital contributes to children's emerging information practices

Children’s Perspectives of Play and Learning for Educational Practice

Play as a learning practice increasingly is under challenge as a valued component of early childhood education. Views held in parallel include confirmation of the place of play in early childhood education and, at the same time, a denigration of the role of play in favor for more teacher-structured and formal activities. As a consequence, pedagogical approaches towards play, the curriculum activities that constitute play, and the appropriateness of play in educational settings, have come under scrutiny in recent years. In this context, this study investigates children’s perspectives of play and how they understand the role of play and learning in their everyday activities. This article reports on an Australian study where teacher-researchers investigated child-led insights into what counts as play in their everyday classroom activities. Children (aged 3–4 years) described play as an activity that involved their active participation in “doing” something, being with peers, and having agency and ownership of ideas. Children did not always characterize their activities as “play”, and not all activities in the preschool program were described as play. The article highlights that play and learning are complex concepts that may be easily dismissed as separate, when rather they are deeply intertwined. The findings of this study generate opportunities for educators and academics to consider what counts as “play” for children, and to prompt further consideration of the role of play as an antidote to adult centric views of play.Lady Gowrie QLD Health Wellbeing and Happiness Program of QUT’s Children and Youth Research CentrePeer Reviewe