This chapter focuses on young children’s use of digital technologies and on participation in situated digital literacy practices within and across activities and institutional settings. First, we present a review of research focusing on digital literacy as embedded in children’s everyday lives and on multimodal engagements with and around digital technologies together with peers, siblings and adults. Second, we explore three mundane activities involving different participant constellations, technologies and settings, using an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach in order to discuss theoretical challenges related to the idea that digital literacies are situated.

This study explores children’s appropriation of media rules in a group of boys (10 years) in Sweden. The analysis is based on focus-group interviews where rules regulating children’s use of mobile phones in school was discussed. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the focus is on how rules are made sense of and appropriated, and how this contributes to establishing, negotiating, and sustaining a moral order for digital media use. The findings show that the children justify rules by discussing them in relation to their school context, through criticism of the enforcement of rules, and through navigating different rule systems.

This article explores media literacy practices in children’s everyday lives and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic media literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on video recordings documenting the activities in which four target children, aged 6-7 years old, participated at home and in school. Through the detailed analysis of two mundane media literacy activities – online calling and word processing – similarities and differences in media usage within and out-of-school are examined. It is shown how children’s media literacy activities encompass verbal, embodied and social competencies that are made relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in interaction between the adults and children in the form of norms and guidelines for what constitutes knowledgeable participation in media literacy activities, and that are appropriated and reactualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings show how the participants coordinate their actions on and in front of the screen and where spatiality and temporality are oriented to as crucial aspects of the organization of the activities. Moreover, it is demonstrated how old and new technologies are linked together in culturally and historically embedded conceptualizations of literacy. 

This video-ethnographic study investigates how designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) are used during home literacy events in three bilingual families with young chidlren in Sweden to prompt collaborative storybook reading in the chidlren's heritage language, Russian. The multimodal interactional analyses uncover how DIUs, in concert with other semiotic resources, create a sequential environment to prompt chidlren's speech production  in relation to the text at hand, to negotiate language choice and alignment with an ongoing literacy project, and to creatively exploit the DIU structure to initiate storytelling. The findings moreover show that recurrent use of DIUs during reading of well-known to teh child texts with rhythm and rhyme allow for ritualized engagemnet in co-narration, in all contributing to children's socialization to oral performance in the heritage language. 

Collaboration is an important aspect of social activity associated with young children’s digital gameplay. Children organise their participation as they communicate with and support one another, through sharing knowledge and problem-solving strategies, displaying their expertise, encouraging others and creatively exploring possibilities for collaborative game moves. Drawing on a social interactional perspective, we explore the situated and embodied practices of the young players aged 3–8 years. We present three video ethnographic case studies of young children’s everyday peer interactions from three different settings and age groups: Australia (home), Norway (pre-school) and Sweden (afterschool). Across these settings, the findings identify how children collaborate with one another to progress the game by using multiple strategies, including instructing each other, monitoring each other’s actions and problem solving. In the process, collaborative peer culture was maintained and built as the players worked towards problem solutions that require taking each other’s perspectives, and sharing digital devices and skills. This focus on children’s situated language use and assemblage of multimodal resources shows their moment-by-moment collaborative action. These multimodal interactions create opportunities for peer and sibling learning without the presence of an adult. The collaborative activity was a strategic resource used by the children in their digital game playing. In capturing young children’s own strategies, we highlight their agency in learning occurring through social interaction and gameplay.

This study explores how displays of strong emotions in narrative accounts of emotional experiences provide a context for invoking moral accountabilities, including the shaping of the teller's character. We use a dialogical approach (i.e., ethnomethodology, linguistic anthropology) to emotions to explore how affective stances are performed, responded to and accounted for in episodes of narrative accounts. The analysis is based on a case study that centers on how a child's walkout from a peer dispute is managed retrospectively in narrative constructions in teacher-child interaction. It is found that the targeted child uses heightened affect displays (crying, sobbing, and prosodic marking), to amplify feelings of distress and stance claims (incorporating reported speech and extreme case formulations) of being badly treated. The heightened stance claims work to justify an oppositional moral stance towards the reported events while projecting accountability to others. The child's escalated resistance provides a ground for the teacher's negative uptakes (negative person ascriptions, counter narratives, and third-party reports). The findings shed light on how narrative renderings of upsetting experiences easily become indexical of the teller's moral character and adds to dispositional features of being over-reactive and disorderly, in ways that undermine a child's social position.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork including video recordings, this study examines how pre-teen girls, in everyday peer interaction, deal with controversial issues on a social media network. Drawing on a multimodal interactional approach, we analyze the situated affective and collaborative embodied work through which a peer group unravels and remedies problematic online behaviors (cheating, scamming,stealing). The results show how the girls affectively align themselves to deal with online risks in ways that demand different social media skills as well as networks of supportive peers. The girls agentively draw upon the affordances (texting, images, social norms) of the social media network as well as their expertise and collective knowledge of similar online events. The creative power of the peer group plays an important role, in terms of how the girls nourish their peer culture while building mutual trust and collaborative competencies for interpreting and anticipating risky practices in their lives with peers.

Building on an ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analytic approach, this paper explores the normative character and interactional embodied organization of negative emotions, in particular displays of anger, in classroom situations in which a student refuses to comply with the teachers’ reproaches. We examine how embodied displays of negative affect and ascriptions of negative emotions work as procedures in teacher-student interactions for invoking issues of accountability and teacher authority for managing problematic classroom conduct. The analyses draw on a video ethnographic study in a special teaching class, tracing trajectories of reproach-response sequences in which a student repeatedly contests the moral ordering of classroom relations. It is found that non-compliant student responses are shaped as embodied affective stances through prosody, body postures, gestures, etc. that accentuate the student’s unwillingness to submit. The results show the dialogical organization of reproach-response sequences and the vulnerability of teacher reproaches to escalation of non-compliant student responses, here indexing aggressive acts as unjustifiable classroom conduct.

Purpose: Taking läxhjälp/homework support in Sweden as a case, this article aims to further explore shadow education, especially as a pedagogical object from curriculum theory perspective.

Design/Approach/Methods: Approaches including policy analyses, ethnomethodological work based on video-recorded interaction, and narratives have produced empirically grounded knowledge. We use examples from several substudies and analyze the reentry and regulation of supplementary education and how tutors and tutees interact in tutoring settings and negotiate identities in läxhjälp as well as the relation to regular schooling.

Findings: Läxhjälp is conditioned by the logic of equality and changes in the governance of läxhjälp. The proliferation of different kinds of tutoring practices provided by various organizations calls for a broad definition of shadow education. With curriculum as boundary object, equality and academic success are foundational. Different settings and spatiotemporal arrangements affect modes of interaction, distribution of epistemic authority, and negotiations of identities.

Originality/Value: With Sweden as a case, it is possible to explore shadow education in a new context, the Scandinavian welfare state, and its history of comprehensive education. Moreover, ethnomethodological interaction and narrative studies and curriculum perspectives are seldom employed within research on shadow education. A number of critical key boundary objects are identified.

This study explores preschool children's mathematizing in everyday block play activities. Building on an ethnomethodological and multimodal conversation analytic framework, we explore how geometry (i.e. spatiality, shape, and symmetry) is actualized in children's verbal and embodied interaction with their peers, pedagogues, and material environment. The selected data are drawn from a video ethnographic study in a Swedish preschool in which a boy and a girl play with a magnetic construction toy. The results of the study demonstrate how the participants orient to spatial locations, properties, dimensions, orientations, transformations, and shapes as they build a house. The children are shown to rely upon verbal and embodied resources such as deictics (e.g. here, there, these) and pointing gestures as geometrical aspects are actualized in their interaction. The study contributes with knowledge on preschool children'e everyday mathematizing, in particular, children's appropriation of geometric discourse as it emerges in the unfolding flow of interaction.

Föskoleklassen infördes i januari 1998. Konkret innebar det att förskolans verksamhet för sexåringar flyttades in i skolan. Bärande argument för reformen var att göra övergången mellan förskola och skola smidig samt att förändra skolans arbetssätt: förskolepedagogiken, med sin långa tradition av arbete i lärarlag och större inslag av barncentrerade aktiviteter, skulle integreras med skolans ämnescentrerade verksamhet och bidra till att förändra skolans traditionella arbetssätt.

Reformen nådde inte sin syften, menar bokens författare. Istället blev följden att barn idag i praktiken börjar skolan som sexåringar. Det är steget från förskola till förskoleklass som utgör skolstarten.

Boken har sin grund i ett flerårigt forskningsarbete vid Pedagogiska Institutionen vid Uppsala universitet. Författarnas ambition är att i boken belysa skolstarten utifrån olika vetenskapliga perspektiv.

Inledningsvis ges bakgrunden till reformen. Därefter görs en jämförelse mellan barns möte med bokstäver och siffror i förskola, förskoleklass och skola. Ett kapitel handlar om lärares berättelser om sitt arbete i förskoleklass och skola, ett annat om barns relationsarbete och de komplexa krav som ställs på sexåringarna i leken på skolgråden. I ett kapitel ger föräldrar olika aspekter på förskolans betydelse som skolförberedande verksamhet.

This article deals with the organisation of correction in mobile instructional settings. Five sets of video data (>250 h) documenting how learners were instructed to fly aeroplanes, drive cars and ride bicycles in real life traffic were examined to reveal some common features of correction exchanges. Through detailed multimodal analysis of participants' actions, it is shown how instructors systematically elaborate their corrective instructions to include relevant information about the trouble and relevant action - a practice we refer to as the unpacking of correction. It is proposed that the practice of unpacking the local particulars of corrections (i) provides for the instructional character of the interaction, and (ii) is highly sensitive to the relevant physical and mobile contingencies. These findings contribute to the existing literature on the interactional organisation of correction and mobility, as well as to ongoing work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis on teaching and learning as members' phenomena.

This study explores the instruction of equestrian feel as an interactional accomplishment. Equestrian feel is an embodied knowledge encompassing riders’ ability to feel the horse’s actions and to act appropriately. Building on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic analyses of video-recordings of riding lessons, we explore how equestrian feel is instructed in interaction between riding teachers and students. The results show how teachers use verbal resources, e.g. metaphors and similes, to describe embodied feel, as well as perceptual resources that are made relevant by orienting to the horse’s body as a semiotic field. Moreover, the teachers produce online instructions in the shape of directives, metaphorical vocal descriptions, and embodied demonstrations, thus molding the equipage by bringing attention to different aspects that together shape an embodied experience. In all, the study sheds light on communicative practices during riding lessons and on the interactional work involved in the art of instructing embodied knowledge.

Spel online utgör en central del av barns vardagsliv idag. I studien undersöks barns berättelser om spel, som de tar form i vardaglig interaktion i kamrat-gruppen. Studien anknyter till en definition av literacy som deltagande i en digital värld, där betydelsen av det sociala livet kring spelen betonas. Analyserna, som bygger på videoinspelningar av pojkars (10 år) samtal om Minecraft, utgår från en syn på berättelser som social och situerad praktik grundad i multimodal samtalsanalys, med fokus på hur narrativers innehåll och struktur framträder allt eftersom och kontinuerligt (om)förhandlas av deltagarna. Resultaten visar hur pojkarnas berättelser växer fram i ett komplext samspel där barnen agerar be-rättare, medberättare och åhörare. Språket utgör en central resurs, samtidigt visas betydelsen av kroppsliga och materiella resurser för hur berättelserna tar form. Berättelser om spel visas utgöra ett återkommande inslag i pojkarnas kamrat-gruppskulturer där de delar med sig av kunskaper och erfarenheter samt beskriver och gemensamt föreställer sig olika händelser och konstruktioner. Samtidigt synliggörs hur kamratgruppsrelationer är dynamiska och asymmetriska, där identiteter kopplas till kunskap och olika rättigheter att berätta. Studien bidrar sammanfattningsvis med kunskap om den roll som berättelser om spel har i pojkars sociala liv och som en del av deras digitala literacypraktiker.

This article explores children's development of problem-solving practices through multimodal engagements in digital activities. The study is based on analyses of a video recorded peer group activity in which two children, within the context of a project on computational thinking using the software Scratch, collaboratively work to solve a coding problem. Drawing on work on epistemics-in-interaction and the cooperative and transformative organization of human action and knowledge, the analyses focus on the interactional strategies that the children use to establish, sustain, and develop knowledge within the peer group and the role of affect in the unfolding organization of actions. By analyzing the multimodal cultural production in children's interaction with digital technologies, it is shown how children learn creative and artful skills, thus positioning them as consumers as well as producers of media.

This study explores situated practices of game design critique in a Swedish 4th grade classroom. The analyses are based on video recordings of peer feedback activities within the context of a project on computational thinking using the software Scratch. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the interactional and collaborative accomplishment of game design critique is examined, focusing on how the participants make relevant norms and values concerning what constitutes a ‘good’ game. The results of the study show that the children and teacher orient to different themes that concern aesthetic, functional, and ethical aspects of the games and the design process, at the same time as a moral order in and for the conduct of design critique is accomplished in interaction. The study sheds light on the emergence of a local culture of critique as the children learn to formulate and respond to peer feedback, thus negotiating and developing digital literacy.

Inom pedagogiken finns ett intresse för lärande och de formella och informella processer genom vilka människor formas och förändras inom såväl organiserad utbildning som i kamratkretsen och på fritiden. Frågor som ställs berör exempelvis hur människor tillägnar sig kunskaper, kompetenser och färdigheter samt hur utbildning bidrar till att forma kritiska och relfekterande samhällsmedborgare. De senaste decenniernas forskning betonar lärande som en kollektiv process knuten till hur vi (inter)agerar i sociala och kulturella sammanhang. Interaktionsanalys av pedagogiska praktiker har därmed kommit att bli ett väl etablerat forskningsområde.

This study explores meals as a locus for children’s socialization into the socio-spatial organization of a mobile preschool, i.e. a preschool in a bus. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with video-recordings, the analysis is informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to explore the everyday interactional organization of meal practices. Conceptualizing space as both a resource for interaction and as achieved in interaction, the study investigates how children and pedagogues create space for meals inside the bus and in outdoor spaces. The results demonstrate how the socio-spatial organization is made relevant as a learning object in interactions between pedagogues and children, and between peers. Knowledge of the socio-spatial organization is shown to constitute a critical aspect of competent participation in the mobile preschool. A trajectory in the children’s embodied spatial learning is discerned, from socio-spatial configurations as objects of instructions to embodied habits.

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this paper examines video-recorded sequences of interaction where ‘knowledge’ is made relevant in annual performance appraisal interviews (PAIs) in a Swedish bank. We examine how managers and employees collaboratively construct, define, and negotiate knowledge, and seek to understand what knowledge talk is recruited for accomplishing on individual and organizational levels. The study aims to add to the existing literature on management and leadership as situated practice by examining the interactional work accomplished through talk about individual and collective knowledge in the context of PAIs. Findings reveal how participants draw upon formulations of individual and collective knowledge in interactional projects negotiating professional identities, knowledge boundaries and expertise, the organization of work, and a distribution of work tasks. We discuss how the appraisal component of the PAIs has an impact on the employees’ epistemic positionings, and how knowledge talk is related to participants’ situated negotiation concerning a division of labor, relations to clients and colleagues, and individual and organizational goals for learning. While PAIs are generally seen as a cog in the wheel of organizational performance management, we argue that they can also be viewed as a site for the situated practice of organizational knowledge management.

Artikeln handlar om social mediering i en skolpraktik där barn återkommande engageras i undervisande aktiviteter. Syftet är att undersöka hur barn görs till medierande aktörer för elevgruppens lärande. En videoinspelad aktivitet från en blandad förskoleklass och årskurs ett i vilken en pojke på uppdrag av en pedagog berättar för några andra barn om hur de ska genomföra en skoluppgift utgör empiriskt underlag för studien. En samtalsanalytisk ansats används för att utforska de kommunikativa, materiella och visuella resurser som deltagarna drar nytta av för att etablera och upprätthålla ett barn som medpedagog. Genom epistemiska positioneringar konstitueras pojken som en länk mellan pedagog och elevgrupp där han ibland är pedagogens hjälpare, ibland ett av barnen i gruppen. Barnen blir genom deltagande i den här och liknande aktiviteter del av en lokal institutionell kultur där gränser mellan experter och noviser är uppluckrade och där klasskamraterna utgör en resurs till vilken man kan och ska vända sig för att få hjälp.

Within the profession of nursing, an intrinsic aspect of interactional competence is the nurses’ ability to manage interpersonal relations and to act in accordance with cultural and social norms of proper nurse conduct. The focus of this chapter is how student nurses are socialized into preferred modes of interacting with patients. The data consist of video recordings of a training session in which nursing students at a clinical training center learn to insert peripheral venous catheters. The results of the study show various ways in which the students and their teacher explore social norms of proper nurse conduct by mobilizing the category term patient, and how the notion of a ‘good nurse’ thus emerges in interaction between the participants.

In this study the relations between knowledge, affect, and social organization are explored using as data a video recording of a jump rope activity. The analyses focus on how epistemic and affective stance interplay in the constitution of social order. In the activity, the participants position themselves as knowing and unknowing through talk and embodied action. Knowing is tied to the handling of game-relevant artifacts, the spatial configuration of the game, as well as rules for turn-taking. Language use is indexical with frequent references to embodied actions and the material environment. When disputing over problematic moves the participants re-enact previous actions, thus displaying not only knowledge of how the game should be played, but also taking a forceful affective stance toward each other. This interplays with epistemic stance so that the participants and their actions are evaluated in different ways, thus leading to a local social hierarchy in which one participant is excluded from the game. Such phenomena shed light on epistemic and affective stances and how they figure into the organization of action and social order in the midst of children’s games.

This paper explores the co-construction and learning of a manoeuvre – recovery from unusual attitudes – as constituted in interaction between a student learning to fly and her teacher, in briefing and debriefing sessions in a classroom and in flight lessons in an actual airplane. Learning is approached from within a conversation analytic (CA) perspective, building on prior CA research on the organisation of human interaction. The empirical data consists of video recordings where a student was followed during three consecutive flight lessons. The paper investigates the resources – talk, embodied actions, and material structure in the environment – that are drawn upon by the participants in each situation, and how the different situations are tied together through the participants’ orientations to a shared content of learning. Building on a dynamic view of context as something that is invoked, managed, and upheld in interaction, issues of context and transfer are discussed. For example, it is demonstrated how experiences from the airplane are invoked in the classroom and vice versa. The results further show how there are micro-longitudinal changes in the student’s performance of the recovery from the unusual attitudes – both within the same flight lesson and over the course of the three lessons.

The aim of the paper is to study how three children interact while reading a book together. Using video recordings as data, I explore not only verbal but also non-verbal interaction – i.e. gaze, pointing, and body posture – and how the children use all these interactional resources when reading together. An important aspect of the study is the way I see the book as an artifact and I study how the children use the book as a resource in their interaction. To do this I use a conversation analytic (CA) approach, drawing on the work by Charles Goodwin (see for example 1980, 1999, 2000).

The video recordings are made within a research project studying the consequences of the introduction of the preschoolclass in Sweden.

This dissertation is about learning as changing understanding in social and situated activities. It takes part in the development of a reconceptualization of learning initiated within participationist perspectives. Multiparty interaction in situated activities is a primordial site for the exploration of human action and cognition. Through the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), a method for the analysis and description of trajectories of learning is proposed. Departing from a view of learning, interaction, and cognition as closely related, learning is argued as gradually changing understanding in situated activities.

The empirical material consists of video recordings from an elementary school and pilot training. The recordings are analyzed using CA methods, including detailed attention to embodied features of interaction.

The analyses focus the development of trajectories of learning through the participants’ orientations. The trajectories are based on topicalizations and co-constructions of contents of learning, where interactional organization and content are interrelated. Participants are shown to make relevant relations between past, present, and future actions and material settings, and their ways of aligning and resisting participation and change are explored. A framework for the analysis of learning as embodied interaction in change is developed.

The dissertation shows the fruitfulness of CA work for the understanding of learning processes. The results underline the importance of including embodied action, as constitutive of the co-constructions of contents, into learning studies. The value of highlighting learning as co-construction and of anchoring the analyses in the participants’ orientations is underscored. The results further the understanding of how people learn, and of how they make relevant knowledge and experiences in activity. The understanding of learning and change as action, which can be initiated, aligned with and resisted, opens up for future developments within CA, where learning researchers might be able to describe more precisely how human learning is constituted.

The aim of this study is to explore knowing and learning as constitutive aspects of the evolving organization of action in situated activity. Using as data a video recording of a peer group where one child is teaching the others Japanese the analyses focus on (1) how local epistemic identities as knowing and unknowing are established, sustained, and contested through talk and embodied action and (2) how the dynamics between knowing and unknowing participants change over time. A learning trajectory is constructed through tracing the transformations of knowledge and the changing distribution of knowledge within the peer group and the material environment. To have learned in the activity means knowing some Japanese and having written down signs on a paper but it also includes being ratified as a knowing participant within the group. Overall, the findings shed light on micro-processes of learning in interaction.

An influential trend in contemporary theories on learning is what could be referred to as the socio-cultural trend. Within this line of thinking, the social nature of learning is emphasised, as expressed by for example Jean Lave (1993) who argues that learning can be understood as changing participation in situated interaction. In other words, learning is considered to be something that takes place between people in interaction. As a consequence, it is by examining the situated interaction between people that we are able to understand and analyse the learning process and how knowledge is created. Then the question arises as to what we need to know about interaction to be able to locate and understand learning. What in interaction between people is of relevance for the understanding of the learning process, and what is it that we are able to capture and understand when we study learning in terms of changes in interaction patterns?

This article aims at taking part in the development of conversation analysis approaches to studying learning in interaction. In focus is the learning of a small group of children doing child-initiated reading. We examine how a topic - the size of the blue whale - is constituted and developed over time in interaction, and how this development can be understood as learning. The analysis is based on a video recording of three 7-year-old children reading a picture book together, where the children explicitly orient to the topic of blue whales. The results of the analysis show that, when content is considered an intrinsic aspect of participation, there are changes over time in the organisation of participation in relation to, in this case, the topic of blue whales. In particular, this concerns how the children relate to the size of the blue whale. Thus, the results show that learning occurs, and how this learning is accomplished. This is made possible through the fine-grained participant perspective-based conversation analysis. The reported work also demonstrates how issues of topic and content can be integrated into micro-analyses of learning.

This paper investigates how situational awareness is constituted in the moment-to-moment interaction between a student learning to fly an airplane and her teacher, and how the student learns situational awareness, i.e. the ability to analyse a situation so as to provide ground for informed decisions about next actions. In the paper, a view of situational awareness as an interactional on-going accomplishment is proposed. The paper demonstrates how situational awareness is socially established and learned in briefing sessions, in flight lessons in the actual airplane, and in debriefing sessions. Learning is approached from within a conversation analytic (CA) perspective, building on prior CA research on the organisation of human interaction. The empirical material consists of video recordings of flight lessons. Three students were followed and recorded during a series of briefing sessions, flight lessons and debriefing sessions. The studied task concerns situational awareness in recovering from abnormal attitudes.The results show that in the moment-to-moment constitution of situational awareness the participants rely both on information provided from the instruments, and on how it should “feel” when recovering. Further, the results show how there are micro-longitudinal changes in the student’s performance of the recovery from the abnormal attitudes – both within the same flight lesson and over the course of the three lessons. These changes are socially established and upheld, in interaction between the student, the teacher and the airplane controls and instruments.Problems in the pilots’ situational awareness are often reported as a significant contributing factor to airplane accidents. This study furthers the understanding of situational awareness as an interactional accomplishment and sheds light on how situational awareness is learned in the interaction between student and teacher, in the different educational contexts.

The aim of this article is to argue learning as interaction, and how processes of learning a content as constituted in interaction can be approached analytically and theoretically. Within aviation, the concept of situation awareness (SA) is used to describe a pilot’s capability of correctly perceiving and interpreting a situation, and of understanding what the implications are. We investigate how SA is constituted in interaction, through the theoretical and methodological perspective of conversation analysis (Schegloff, 1996; Goodwin, 2000). In the analysis, we focus how a student develops SA as an intrinsic part of learning how to fly an airplane.

An influential trend in contemporary theories on learning is what could be referred to as the socio-cultural trend. Within this line of thinking, the social nature of learning is emphasised, as expressed by for example Jean Lave (1993) who argues that learning can be understood as changing participation in situated interaction. In other words, learning is considered to be something that takes place between people in interaction. As a consequence, it is by examining the situated interaction between people that we are able to understand and analyse learning processes and how knowledge is created.

In our paper, we are taking a step towards this understanding. Departing from an analysis of a situation where three seven-year-old children are reading a picture book together, we discuss the concept of participation in a situated activity. Put simply, we pose the question what it is to participate in a book reading activity, and how we can understand the children’s use of different interaction resources in the constitution of a social practice of reading. Finally, we raise the question of how this is related to the understanding of the learning process, and what it is that we are able to capture and understand when we study learning in terms of changes in participation or, in other words, interaction patterns.

This multimodal conversation analysis study is part of a larger video ethnographic project that explores the media literacy practices that children develop as they use digital and mobile technologies. The study investigates how Swedish students in grades 3–4 make use of text to speech (TTS) technology as an interactional resource during collaborative writing on iPads in the classroom. The results show that students routinely make use of synthetic voicings to display and claim knowledge about the voiced written units and negotiate writing roles with differing epistemic rights and obligations to assess voicings and practice repair. 

This paper studies parsing as a practice used in mobile instruction. The findings build on ethnomethodological conversation analysis and on observations made on video data that have been collected from three settings: skiing, driving a car and flying a plane. In the data, novice learners are instructed by more experienced instructors to accomplish various mobile tasks. The paper shows how instructors use parsing to guide learners to carry out, step-by-step, the sub-actions that the ongoing mobile task (e.g. turning, landing) is composed of. The paper argues that parsing is a practice employed by instructors to highlight the sub-actions of a mobile task. Instructors may also use parsing to orient learners to emergent problems to do with the timing, quality and order of the sub-actions in the performance of a complex mobile task. Finally, the paper shows that sometimes there is not enough time to parse an ongoing task, in which case the parsing can be carried out afterwards.