First Steps from Walking in Snow to Cross-Country Skiing: An Interactional Perspective on Ephemeral Surfaces for Personal Mobility

This article investigates the ways in which a young child learns to sense and move through a transient environment while learning to walk on skis. Audiovisual recordings were made of a parent instructing a child on how to walk on snow and to start moving on skis. Focusing on social interaction, the article examines how snow is sensed and made salient in spatio-interactional practices of walking on snow for the purposes of learning to ski. Talk about the weather and snow surface conditions while walking over the snow develops the child’s feeling for snow as a surface for personal mobility.