Learning Together in Mexican and Indigenous Mexican Heritage Children's Peer Play Interactions in Preschool: Embodied Practices

• In Event: Illuminating Sociality and Learning in Diverse Educational Environments by Interrogating Movement, Touch, and Affect

Abstract

Objectives: Early childhood educators believe that children learn through play and sensorimotor experience. Although a few studies have examined the role of embodiment in the coordination of attention among children learning together (Goodwin & Cekaite 2018; Johnson 2017; Kyratzis 2017), there is a need for further research, especially given studies showing cultural variation in the organization of attention and learning, with children in many cultures of the world learning predominantly through keen attention to ongoing adult activities (Rogoff 2003). This study addresses this gap by studying how children in one such culture, Indigenous Mexican children, coordinate action and learn math domain knowledge together in block and puzzle play.

Theoretical Framework. We build on anthropological research showing that children in many cultures, including Mexican, Indigenous Mexican, and other non-Western communities learn through observing and pitching in or LOPI (Rogoff 2003). For characterizing learning, we draw on practices described by Charles Goodwin in his work on “professional vision” (1994, 2018), defined as the “socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the interests of a particular social group” (2018: 408).

Methods and Data Sources. Video-ethnography was conducted to capture naturally-occurring interactions of children in the classroom setting. Conversation analysis (CA) was used (Jefferson 1974) to examine how learning was achieved as an emic category between children. We applied Goodwin’s practices (e.g., “coding”) to understanding how children in peer play interactions achieve what we call “domain vision,” the socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are consistent with the knowledge/desired results in developmental domains (e,g., math) that all children are expected to achieve in the California preschool educational system given sufficient support, as codified in documents of the California Department of Education (e.g.DRDP, 2015). We examine the embodied and verbal practices by which children coordinate action and achieve a shared domain vision together in peer play interactions. Data is drawn from a study of peer interactions of children in two Head Start preschools serving Mexican and Indigenous Mixtec families in California.

Results: Although children used both verbal and multimodal resources in working together, in this paper we analyze two more non-verbal examples with younger children. Children coordinate action and arrive at shared domain visions of objects mainly through embodied practices. In one example, two children achieve new ways of seeing in the math domain (e.g. come to orient to the need for the ceiling of one level of 3-cube tower to be placed before the next level can be built), through following peer’s attention and action through gaze, holding back/waiting till peer’s action is completed, helping when a snag is encountered, and checking in and indexing shared understanding with smiles and other affect. Children also share responsibility, fluidly shifting between “observing helper” and “knowledgeable performer” roles (Paradise & de Haan 2009).

Significance. Although educators regularly rely on children’s talk to assess knowledge, findings point to the need to attend to the many different ways that children learn and build action together, including ways relying on embodied resources.

Authors

• Jaqueline Kemp, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Amelia Kyratzis, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author