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This article uses a comparative case study to examine how a methodological approach called interaction geography provides alternative ways to animate space, movement, and affect within the context of early childhood education. We take animation to incorporate the methods for representing space, movement, and affect; the social-material environment which animates the people and things we study; and the lively, energetic talk-in-interaction that takes place as people and things move. Our first case uses interaction geography to animate what we call gestural energies and choreographies between a teacher, students, and materials in a bilingual kindergarten classroom activity. Our second case uses interaction geography to animate a young child’s excitement for learning and teaching through movement in a cultural heritage museum. Together, our analysis demonstrates how interaction geography provides alternative ways to conceptualize the multimodal nature of literacy practices and contributes to a recent turn to affect in literacy research. We discuss how this work has implications not only for literacy researchers, teachers, and teacher educators, but also for architects, administrators, and researchers concerned with the physical design of literacy spaces.

 

Purpose Much remains unknown about how young children orient to computational objects and how we as learning scientists can orient to young children as computational thinkers. While some research exists on how children learn programming, very little has been written about how they learn the technical skills needed to operate technologies or to fix breakdowns that occur in the code or the machine. The purpose of this study is to explore how children perform technical knowledge in tangible programming environments. Design/methodology/approach The current study examines the organization of young children’s technical knowledge in the context of a design-based study of Kindergarteners learning to code using robot coding toys, where groups of children collaboratively debugged programs. The authors conducted iterative rounds of qualitative coding of video recordings in kindergarten classrooms and interaction analysis of children using coding robots. Findings The authors found that as children repaired bugs at the level of the program and at the level of the physical apparatus, they were performing essential technical knowledge; the authors focus on how demonstrating technical knowledge was organized pedagogically and collectively achieved. Originality/value Drawing broadly from studies of the social organization of technical work in professional settings, we argue that technical knowledge is easy to overlook but essential for learning to repair programs. The authors suggest how tangible programming environments represent pedagogically important contexts for dis-embedding young children’s essential technical knowledge from the more abstract knowledge of programming. 

This symposium aims to build on the argument for viewing video recording as theory (Hall, 2000) by focusing on instances when participants intentionally engage with ongoing recording, move/interact with recording equipment, and (re)purpose video records. All four papers use example interactions to highlight how participants reorient data collection and use, reorganizing control over how their stories are recorded, shared, and analyzed in the future; we argue that these moves are attempts to further relationship building, countering the surveillance technologies cameras have become (Vossoughi & Escude, 2016). We discuss further the methodological implications for future research, asking video recording as whose theory?