“Order in the Court”: Handling Peer Disputes Through Gestural Socialization in an Elementary Classroom

• In Event: Exploring Students’ Sociocultural and Sociopolitical Practices and Identities Through Multimodality and Embodiment

Abstract

This study focuses on children’s gestural practices during peer disputes, an area which remains underexamined due to a history of neglect of both embodiment and conflict in interactional research. Building on language socialization and gesture studies scholarship, I propose a gestural socialization framework for analyzing how the US second graders in this study used and socialized one another to use two gestures, “quiet coyote” and “open hand prone,” in classroom conflicts. An ethnographically informed, multimodal interactional analysis of practices among a multiracial group of girls shows how participants subverted norms of conflict avoidance, efficiency, and appropriateness associated with Whiteness, developmentalism, neoliberalism, and standard language. Overall, the study highlights the importance of understanding conflicts as multimodal, interactionally emergent, and socioculturally situated.

Author

• Meghan Corella, University of British Columbia