Embodied spatial learning in the mobile preschool: the sociospatial organization of meals as interactional achievement.

• 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.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Embodied spatial learning

meal practices

mobile preschools

socio-spatial organization

video- ethnography

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)