Learning To Be Vélomobile

There are few qualitative studies to date of how children learn to become vélomobile, and of how parents and caregivers talk and interact with children to instruct them how to ride safely. This paper reports on a study of how children learn to sit in a carrier bike as a passenger and to ride their own bike. In my data from Denmark, these activities take place in urban areas with good biking infrastructure, including separate bike lanes and dedicated cycle paths, as well as bike-only traffic lights at intersections. Therefore, this study provides insight into how riders actually use and learn to use a bike-friendly infrastructure, and how in such an environment they learn to ride with the help of others. Video and audio recordings of family bike rides as well as school bike training sessions and school bike tours were made to capture from multi-angles the aural and visual features of the local organisation of the ride from the participants’ perspectives. Multiple ‘micro’ video cameras were placed on the researcher’s bike as well as on some of the children’s bikes. In addition, new ways to represent (in transcript form) specific features of the sensefulness of riding together are proposed. My ethnographic study attempts to combine qualitative approaches to situated learning with interactional mobility studies to derive a complementary approach to investigating the following phenomena:
1) the discursive pedagogical framing of cycle training and cycling in situ;
2) instruction and instructed action: directing, assessing and shepherding children who are learning to cycle;
3) learning to ride in formation: the ‘bike train’ as an instructed formation-in-action;
4) sharing the experience of riding together;
5) learning to navigate an obstacle course together;
6) practising safe cycling in real traffic;
7) negotiating the appropriate conduct of other road users.