Co-producing Cultural Knowledge: Children Telling Tales in the School Playground
The school playground is a place where children socially engage with peers and attain membership and participation in group activities. As young children negotiate relationships and social orders in playground settings, disputes may occur and children mig
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Co-producing Cultural Knowledge: Children Telling Tales in the School Playground Maryanne Theobald and Susan Danby
The school playground is a place where children socially engage with peers and attain membership and participation in group activities. As young children negotiate relationships and social orders in playground settings, disputes may occur and children might ‘tell’ tales to the teacher. Children’s telling on each other is often a cause of concern for teachers and children because tellings occur within a dispute and signal the breakdown of interaction. Closely examining a video-recorded episode of girls telling on some boys highlights the practices that constitute cultural knowledge of children’s peer culture. This ethnomethodological study revealed a sequential pattern of telling with three distinct phases: (1) an announcement of telling after an antecedent event (2) going to the teacher to tell about the antecedent event and (3) post-telling events. These findings demonstrate that telling is carefully orchestrated by children showing their competence to co-produce cultural knowledge. Such understandings highlight the multiple and often overlapping dimensions of cultural knowledge as children construct, practise and manage group membership and participation in their peer cultures.
Peer Activities in the Playground Membership and participation in peer activities in the playground involves a demonstration of the interaction order and social competence as appropriate to the ongoing interaction and peer culture (Danby and Baker 2000; Theobald 2013, 2016). Such cultural knowledge is the knowledge that one displays as a member of M. Theobald (&) S. Danby Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Danby e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 A. Bateman and A. Church (eds.), Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_7
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the surrounding culture in situ; this might include adult culture, peer culture, or classroom culture (Kantor et al. 1993). Cultural knowledge draws on the expectations of the social setting, artifacts, the amount of time available, the size of the group, and the gender, culture and moral beliefs of the members according to the specific context at hand (Corsaro 2003, 2014). Ongoing membership requires access; interpretation and demonstration of social competence appropriate to the ongoing aspects of cultural knowledge (Danby and Baker 2000; Kantor et al. 1993). Cultural knowledge can be observed as participants employ features of talk such as repair, turn taking and overlap. The Opie’s research in English school playgrounds in the 1960s highlighted the ways in which children’s games were created according to who was available, the amount of time and resources children had on hand (Opie and Opie 1969, p. 10). Their observations showed how children use cultural knowledge to construct their social relationships. Similarly, Theobald’s (2013) research on p
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