Abstract
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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bateman, A. (2011a). Huts and heartache: The affordance of playground huts for legal debate in early childhood social organisation. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(13), 3111–3121.
Bateman, A. (2011b). To intervene, or not to intervene, that is the question. Early Childhood Folio, 15(1), 17.
Bateman, A. (2015). Conversation analysis and early childhood education: The co-production of knowledge and relationships. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Beach, W. (1993). Transitional regularities for ‘casual’ “Okay” usages. Journal of Pragmatics, 19, 325–352.
Björk-Willén, P. (2007). Participation in multilingual preschool play: Shadowing and crossing as interactional resources. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 2133–2158.
Butler, C. W. (2008). Talk and social order in the playground. London: Ashgate.
Cekaite, A. (2012). Tattling and dispute resolution: Moral order, emotions and embodiment in the teacher-mediated disputes of young second language learners. In S. Danby & M. Theobald (Eds.), Disputes in everyday life: Social and moral orders of children and young people (pp. 165–192). New York: Emerald.
Church, A. (2009). Preference organisation and peer disputes: How young children resolve conflict. Surrey: Ashgate.
Circourel, A. V. (1970a). The acquisition of social structure: Toward a developmental sociology of language and meaning. In J. D. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding everyday life: toward the reconstruction of sociological knowledge (pp. 136–168). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Circourel, A. V. (1970b). Basic and normative rules in the negotiation of status and role. In H.P. Dreitzel (Ed.), recent sociology No. 2: Patterns of communicative behavior (pp. 4–45). New York: Macmillan.
Clift, R., & Holt, E. (2007a). Introduction. Reporting talk: Reported speech in interaction (pp. 1–15). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clift, R., & Holt, E. (Eds.). (2007b). Reporting talk: Reported speech in interaction. Cambridge University Press.
Cromdal, J. (2004). Building bilingual oppositions: Code switching in children’s disputes. Language in Society, 33, 33–58.
Cromdal, J. (2010). Gender in children’s management of play. In S. A. Speer & E. Stokoe (Eds.), Conversation and gender (pp. 294–309). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Corsaro, W. A. (2003). We're Friends, Right?: Inside Kids' Culture. Washington DC: Joseph Henry Press.
Corsaro, W. (2014). The sociology of childhood (4th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage.
Danby, S. (1998). The serious and playful work of gender: Talk and social order in a preschool classroom. In N. Yelland (Ed.), Gender in early childhood. London: Routledge.
Danby, S., & Baker, C. (2000). Unravelling the fabric of social order in block area. In S. Hester & D. Francis (Eds.), Local educational order: Ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action (pp. 91–140). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Drew, P. (1998). Complaints about transgressions and misconduct. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(3), 295–325.
Drew, P., & Holt, E. (1988). Complainable matters: The use of idiomatic expressions in making complaints. Social Problems, 35, 398–417.
Emmison, M., Butler, C. W., & Danby, S. (2011). Script proposals: A device for empowering clients in counselling. Discourse studies, 13(1), 3–26.
Evaldsson, A.-C. (2002). Boys’ gossip telling: Staging identities and indexing (non-acceptable) masculine behavior. Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 22(2), 199–225.
Evaldsson, A.-C., & Svahn, A. C. (2012). School bullying and the micro-politics of girls’ gossip disputes. In S. Danby & M. Theobald (Eds.), Disputes in Everyday life: Social and moral orders of children and young people (pp. 297–324). New York: Emerald.
Friman, P. C., Woods, D. W., Freeman, K. A., Gilman, R., Short, M., McGrath, A. M., & Handwerk, M. L. (2004). Relationships between tattling, likeability, and social classification: A preliminary investigation of adolescents in residential care. Behaviour Modification, 28, 331–348.
Goodwin, M. (1990). He said-she said: Talk as social organisation among black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Goodwin, M., & Goodwin, C. (1987). Children’s arguing. In S. Phillips, S. Steele, & C. Tanz (Eds.), Language, gender and sex in comparative perspective (pp. 200–248). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haakana, M. (2007). Reported thought in complaint stories. In R. Clift & E. Holt (Eds.), Reporting talk: Reported speech in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holt, E. (1996). The use of direct reported speech in conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 29(3), 219–245.
Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13–31). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kantor, R., Elgas, P. M., & Fernie, D. E. (1993). Cultural knowledge and social competence within a preschool peer culture group. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 8(2), 125–147.
MacNaughton, G., & Williams, G. (2004). Techniques for teaching young children: Choices in theory and practice (2nd ed.). Frenchs Forest NSW: Pearson.
Mandell, N. (1991). The least adult role in studying children. In F. C. Waksler (Ed.), Studying the social worlds of children (pp. 38–59). London: Falmer Press.
Maynard, D. W. (1985a). How children start arguments. Language in Society, 14, 1–30.
Maynard, D. W. (1985b). On the functions of social conflict among children. American Sociological Review, 50(2), 207–223.
Maynard, D. W. (1986). Offering and soliciting collaboration in multi-party disputes among children (and other humans). Human Studies, 9, 261–285.
Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1969). Children’s games in street and playground. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peräkylä, A., & Vehviläinen, S. (2003). Conversation analysis and the professional stocks of interactional knowledge. Discourse & Society, 14(6), 727–750.
Pomerantz, A., & Fehr, B. J. (1997). Conversation analysis: An approach to the study of social action as sense making practices. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction (pp. 64–91). London: Sage.
Psathas, G. (1992). The study of extended sequences: The case of the garden lesson. In G. Watson & R. Seiler (Eds.), Text in context: Contributions to ethnomethodology (pp. 99–122). Newbury Park: Sage.
Rigby, K. (2002, August). Should we make our school a telling school?. Principal Matters, 37, 44.
Robinson, J., & Kevoe-Feldman, H. (2010). Using full repeats to initiate repair on others’ questions. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 43(3), 232–259.
Sacks, H. (1984). Notes on methodology. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversational analysis (pp. 21–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sacks, H. (1995). Lectures on conversation (Vol. I & II). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Schegloff, E. (1987). Analyzing single episodes of interaction: An exercise in conversation analysis. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50(2), 101–114.
Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Selting, M. (2010). Affectivity in conversational storytelling: An analysis of displays of anger or indignation in complaint stories. Pragmatics, 20(2), 229–277.
Sharrock, W. W. (1974). On owning knowledge. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology: Selected readings (pp. 45–53). Harmondsworth: Penguin Education.
Speier, M. (1973). How to observe face-to-face communication: A sociological introduction. Pacific Palisades, California: Goodyear Publishing.
Speier, M. (1976). The child as conversationalist: Some culture contact features of conversational interactions between adults and children. In M. Hammersley & P. Woods (Eds.), The process of schooling: A sociological reader (pp. 98–103). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Theobald, M. (2013). Ideas as ‘possessitives’: Claims and counter claims in a playground dispute. Journal of Pragmatics, 45(1), 1–12.
Theobald, M. (2016). Achieving competence: The interactional features of children’s storytelling. Childhood, 23(1), 87–104.
Theobald, M., & Danby, S. (2012). ‘A problem of versions’: Laying down the law in the school playground. In S. Danby & M. Theobald (Eds.), Disputes in everyday life: Social and moral orders of children and young people. New York: Emerald.
Waksler, F. C. (1991). Studying children: Phenomenological insights. In F. C. Waksler (Ed.), Studying the social worlds of children (pp. 60–69). London: Falmer Press.
Watson, R. (1987). Interdisciplinary considerations in the analysis of pro-terms. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organisation (pp. 261–289). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Weider, D. L. (1974). Telling the code. Ethnomethodology, 144–172.
Acknowledgements
Preparation of this chapter was supported by the Excellence in Research in Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network, an initiative funded through the Australian Government’s Collaborative Research Networks (CRN) program. An earlier version of this chapter was awarded a Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association’s Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section (2008).
We thank the teachers, students and families of the Department of Education Queensland. We thank Jakob Cromdal, Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Polly Björk-Willén and anonymous reviewers for comments on this work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Theobald, M., Danby, S. (2017). Co-producing Cultural Knowledge: Children Telling Tales in the School Playground. In: Bateman, A., Church, A. (eds) Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1703-2_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-1701-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-1703-2
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)