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Questions and Answers, A Seesaw and Embodied Action: How a Preschool Teacher and Children Accomplish Educational Practice

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Abstract

In the educational practice of the Swedish preschool, teaching and learning often take place in everyday activities and are intertwined with play and care. This chapter examines how this educational practice is accomplished by a Swedish preschool teacher and three children in interaction. More specifically, the present chapter shows how complex physical concepts are incorporated into early childhood education through a playful seesaw activity. In the analysis of the video-recorded activity, this chapter demonstrates how question-answer sequences function as important interactional and educational resources for the participants when they organize their interaction. Through question-answer sequences, vis-á-vis a seesaw and embodied action, it becomes possible for the preschool teacher to capture and direct the children’s attention towards physical phenomena, in line with the curriculum, as well as create a shared experience of these physical phenomena in playful practice. Thus, this chapter displays how teaching and learning are intertwined with play, in situ, in preschool practice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Swedish word “va?” is a very common word that is hard to translate into English. “Va?” in Swedish is often used whenever problems of hearing occur (in order to initiate a repair) and could in that way be translated into a huh. However, “va?” is also used frequently when a question does not receive any (verbal) answer, which is the case here, and I have therefore translated it to a wha.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the two editors for their careful reading and fruitful comments and also Polly Björk-Willén and Jakob Cromdal for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping University in Sweden, Linköping, Sweden

    Sara Dalgren

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  1. Sara Dalgren
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Correspondence to Sara Dalgren .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand

    Amanda Bateman

  2. Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Amelia Church

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Dalgren, S. (2017). Questions and Answers, A Seesaw and Embodied Action: How a Preschool Teacher and Children Accomplish Educational Practice. In: Bateman, A., Church, A. (eds) Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-1701-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-1703-2

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