Description
The presentation investigates how asymmetries are (re)produced and negotiated in teacher-child interaction in an English-speaking Indian preschool. While teacher and children may have pre-established deontic status (roles and responsibilities) in this institutional setting, deontic stance (the display of authority over another) is interactionally negotiated (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2014; see also Tam, 2021). The present study looks at instances of children challenging the teacher’s deontic authority after uttered threats of punishment for a specific problem behavior. Particularly, it looks at practices of threatening to expel children from the class community or the current classroom activity as consequence of their misbehavior which may be considered as a form of status degradation (Garfinkel, 1956).Previous research suggests that caregiver’s strategies to pursue children’s compliance often follow an escalating trajectory from demands to threats along with touch and increasing bodily manipulation (Craven & Potter, 2010; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013; Hepburn & Potter, 2011) thus reifying the adult’s higher deontic status over the child. Caregivers may, however, adapt their deontic claims in an attempt to secure a preferred response (Craven & Potter, 2020; Kent, 2012). While most research has looked at caregivers’ deontic stances in adult-chiold interactions, Tam (2021) looked at how children on their part display deontic stances and how parent’s responses can either reinforce or challenge the child’s deontic claims. The present study looks at how children display resistance and challenge teachers’ deontic stances in situations in which the teacher is not successful in pursuing her original line of action after uttering a threat and how asymmetries of deontic authority are negotiated in these interactions. In line with previous studies on embodied aspects of interaction with children (e.g., Cekaite, 2015; Demuth, 2021) the study investigates how bodily resources are used in tandem with discursive devices.
The data corpus consists of audiovisual recordings of naturally occurring teacher–child interactions from an Indian preschool collected over the period of 3 months. Analysis draws on multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, 2000) as well as Discursive Psychology (Potter, 2012).
The findings demonstrate how, in drawing on subtle embodied resources rather than overtly verbal protest, children display competencies to test and challenge the teacher’s deontic stance without threatening her deontic authority. They may succeed in pursuing their own interactional goals without being incongruent with their deontic status (cf. Tam, 2021). The teacher, on her part, by adapting her deontic claims, secures the child’s compliance without threatening her own deontic status. I suggest that these interactional strategies can be seen as part of a socio-cultural choreography of orchestrating activities (Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018) that serve to maintain social order in line with broader socio-cultural ideologies.
Period | Jun 2023 → … |
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Event title | International Conference on Conversation Analysis |
Event type | Conference |
Location | Brisbane, Australia, QueenslandShow on map |
Degree of Recognition | International |