Description
The present study investigates how normative standards of social conduct are managed in everyday interaction with children in a preschool in India. It particularly addresses the multimodal practices of monitoring and dealing with problem behavior and the educator’s orientation to the accountability of children’s action.Previous research on how children are socialized towards accountability in everyday interactions has looked at practices that parents employ when they seek to forward some course of action for their child and manage children’s resistance to these attempts (Hepburn, 2019), how children’s ‘transgressive’ conduct is oriented to and treated as “problem behavior” (Potter & Hepburn 2020) and how parents provide children with normatively acceptable ways of accountability (Sterponi, 2003, 2009). Recently, multimodal video analysis has shed insight on how embodied resources are used to socialize children towards normatively appropriate conduct in family (Cekaite, 2015; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018; Kern, 2018; Hepburn & Mandelbaum, 2018, Hepburn, 2019; 2021) and preschool interactions (Burdelsky, 2010, 2013; Burdelski & Cekaite, 2021). This line of research suggests to reconsider the notion of ‘membership’ in ethnomethodology which is demonstrated in the display and recognition of reflexively accountable action (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970) and to expand them to include embodied aspects. It aims at sharing insights into how children are socialized to the normative features of full membership of a cultural community and culturally appropriate social conduct.
The present study investigates how teachers’ expectations of children’s behavior are brought about in the interaction and how children are socialized towards accountability for their bodily conduct. It combines conversation analytical and multimodal tools with discursive psychological and language socialization insights. The data corpus consists of video recordings taken within a 3 months ethnographic study in an Indian preschool. Analysis focuses on:
- How children’s ‘transgressive’ conduct is oriented to and treated as “problem behavior”
- What practices are employed to prospectively or retrospectively address or even change that behavior (e.g., through behavior modification techniques or various moralizing practices of sanctioning children for their misconduct)
- How these practices are shaped by asymmetries between teacher and children
The findings reveal various interactional moves that orient to the children’s agency and intentionality in engaging in problem behavior and in that way position them as accountable agents, similar to what Potter and Hepburn (2019) have discussed as ‘shaming interrogatives’ and what Hepburn (2019) describes as ‘preference for self-direction’. Moreover, embodied resources serve as upgrade of discursive resources in the teacher’s interactional moves, starting with very low invasiveness (e.g., requests) and then increasingly become more coercive and invasive (e.g., bodily manipulation), similar to findings in middle class families in the UK (Hepburn, 2019), US and Sweden (Cekaite, 2015; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2014). While the interaction sequences end with children displaying compliance, they use subtle embodied resources to display defiance. By rephrasing instructions given to the child the teacher reframes the situation as compliance and manages face work in their joint attempts to resolve the conflict.The resolution or dissipation of conflict thus re-establishes not only classroom order but also the identity of the teacher as authority.
| Period | Jun 2023 → … |
|---|---|
| Event title | International Conference on Conversation Analysis |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Brisbane, Australia, QueenslandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |