Tillträde, förhandling och deltagande i förskolebarns egenorganiserade gemensamma aktiviteter

Abstract

The overarching aim of this thesis is to explore preschool children’s participation in and creation of self-organized joint activities (henceforth activities) in a Swedish preschool with a focus on how children’s everyday activities (initiated by children) are produced sequentially in time. The theoretical framework of the study is taken from childhood sociology (Corsaro, 2011), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and conversation analysis (Schegloff, 2007) and targets the production of children’s activities from beginning to end. The thesis is based on recorded video observations, which are analysed sequentially (Schegloff, 2007), emphasizing the contextualization of children’s physical and verbal actions within participation frameworks (Goffman, 1961). The children’s activities are categorized into episodes, segments of one to several sequences (Schegloff, 1987), in which their interactions take on a new or distinguished course. The episodes are categorized as follows: established, maintained, transformed, finished and negotiated. Children’s performance is studied as a semiotic resource whereby structurally different sign systems (Goodwin, 2000) are carried out in interactions with peers. The analysed episodes are played out in The imaginary activity in the play hall where children pretended to be a Minecraft figure and in The swing activity at the preschool yard in negotiations about taking turns. The result shows that there is a large breadth and depth of work involved in children’s participation in activities with peers, scrutinizing their inclusion, participation and exclusion as stepwise processes. The thesis illuminates how children foresee physical routines when the participator role and participator status are changed which leads to transformed episodes, defined as transition spaces (Jacknick, 2011). Their changed performance, for example visibly (Heath, 2011) ignoring peers, leads to transition spaces and to the production of a new kind of episode, an intra-activity-shift (Jacknick, 2011). The study thereby highlights children’s treatment of concurring participation frameworks, one concerning physical interaction and the other concerning social interaction (swing activity). Children use humour, seen as a semiotic resource (Goodwin, 2000) which orders interactions (Sidnell, 2010), to accomplish diverse actions in a variety of episodes. The pedagogical implications of this study concern teachers’ ability to observe and provide support to children who appear to have difficulties participating in activities with peers. Whether the structural resources, details that participators in the analysis are seen oriented to in the coordinating of actions (Mondada, 2006), were of intellectual means (e.g. a narrative) or material objects (e.g. a swing), was crucial in children’s ability to create different kinds of episodes. The former was invisible and fleeting, which was actualized in negotiations constituting a break in the activity. The present thesis contributes to ethnographic studies within childhood sociology; knowledge concerning the production of episodes and the use of structural resources is crucial for preschool teachers to be able to support children’s participation in the creation of activities with peers.