Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: An Introduction

Abstract

Understanding what children know and how they display knowledge is at the centre of education. Interactions with young children are not only central to learning in early childhood settings and schools, as interactions with parents, siblings, families and friends are the fundamental site for children’s learning about how to be in the world. We—the editors and authors in this collection—are most interested in how it is that children manage to navigate their social lives, including the classroom, and how they and others respond to their demonstrable knowledge of the world. The title of this collection Children’s knowledge-in-interaction captures our preoccupation with understanding what children know by paying close attention to the turn-by-turn, unfolding and collaborative, nature of talk. The illumination of intersubjectivity provided by talk-in-interaction is why we are all drawn to the methodology and method of conversation analysis in our research.