Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: Studies in Conversation Analysis

This book is a collected volume that brings together research from authors working in cross-disciplinary academic areas including early childhood, linguistics and education, and draws on the shared interests of the authors, namely understanding children’s interactions and the co-production of knowledge in everyday communication. The collection of studies explores children’s interactions with teachers, families and peers, showing how knowledge and learning are co-created, constructed and evident in everyday experiences.

Amanda Bateman currently works at the University of Waikato, New Zealand as a senior lecturer in early childhood education. She has led various research projects using conversation analysis to explore peer-peer relationships and teacher-child interactions, and is currently Principal Investigator on a project exploring children’s storytelling in early childhood through to primary school. Her book Conversation Analysis and Early Childhood Education: The Co-Production of Knowledge and Relationships discusses findings from her project investigating teacher-child interactions in New Zealand early childhood education.

Amelia Church is a lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne, where she teaches courses in research methods in early childhood education and applied conversation analysis as well as qualitative research methods. She holds a PhD in linguistics from Monash University and published this research as part of the Ashgate series Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, which is included in the book Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes: How young children resolve conflict. Her current research involves children’s talk, classroom interactions, and how misunderstanding is resolved in talk-in-interaction.