Children’s interaction in an urban face-to-face society
The case of a South-American plaza
This paper reports on a micro-ethnography of social interaction in an urban plaza in Colombia, focusing on the plaza’s role as an arena for the acquisition of interaction skills. We investigate how children of different ages initiate and sustain interactions with same-age and older peers and the efforts they make to be recognized and ‘visible’. We interpret our data in light of three theories of socialization: Corsaro’s (1997) conception of childhood as “interpretive reproduction”, Vygotsky’s (1978) model of the “zone of proximal development”, and the “structural approach” to social cognition and development (Damon 1977; Younnis 1984). While a social form like the plaza, which is collectively enacted by members of all age groups of the local community, provides children with an extraordinarily rich array of opportunities to develop social communication skills by interacting with older and younger peers, our analysis also demonstrates that children, as they are building zones of proximal development for themselves, play a central role in assembling, integrating, and sustaining the neighborhood as a face-to-face society. In this fashion, the paper illustrates how the micro-analysis of social interaction can contribute to the analysis of social ‘macro’ forms.
References
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein
1977 A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Auwärter, Manfred, and Edit Kirsch
1984 “
Zur Ontogenese der sozialen Interaktion. Eine strukturtheoretische Analyse.” In
Soziale Interaktion und soziales Verstehen, ed. by
Wolfgang Edelstein and
Jürgen Habermas, 167–219. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead
1942 Balinese Character. A Photographic Analysis. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean Claude Passeron
1977 Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London & Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Corsaro, William A
1997 The Sociology of Childhood. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press.
Corsaro, William, and Jürgen Streeck
1986 “
Studying Children’s Worlds: Methodological Issues”. In
Children’s Worlds and Children’s Language, ed. by
William Corsaro,
Jenny Cook-Gumperz, and
Jürgen Streeck, 13–36. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Damon, William
1977 The Social World of the Child. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Damon, William
1982 “
Zur Entwicklung der sozialen Kognition des Kindes. Zwei Zugänge zum Verständnis von sozialer Kognition.” In
Perspektivität und Interpretation, ed. by
Wolfgang Edelstein and
Monika Keller, 110–145. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Damon, William
1984 “
Struktur, Veränderlichkeit und Prozess in der sozialkognitiven Entwicklung des Kindes.” In
Soziale Interaktion und soziales Verstehen, ed. by
Wolfgang
Edelstein and
Jürgen Habermas, 63–112. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Erickson, Frederick, and Jeffrey Schultz
1982 The counselor as gatekeeper. New York: Academic Press.
Ervin-Tripp, Susan
1986 “
Activity Structure as Scaffolding for Children’s Second Language Acquisition.” In
Children’s Worlds and Children’s Language, ed. by
Jenny Cook-Gumperz,
William Corsaro, and
Jürgen Streeck, 327–358. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
García Márquez, Gabriel
1997 Love in the Time of Cholera. New York: Knopf.
García Márquez, Gabriel
2003 Living to Tell the Tale. New York: Knopf.
Goffman, Erving
1961 Encounters. Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Goffman, Erving
1963 Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York:
Prentice Hall.
Goffman, Erving
1964 “The Neglected Situation.” American Anthropologist66 (6, part 2): 133–136.
Goffman, Erving
1971 Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.
Goffman, Erving
1974 Frame Analysis. New York: Harper & Row.
Goffman, Erving
1976 Gender Advertisements. London: Macmillan.
Goffman, Erving
1983 “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review481: 1–17.
Goodwin, Marjorie H
1990 He-Said-She-Said. Talk as Social Organization. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Goodwin, Marjorie H
2002a “
Building Power Asymmetries in Girls’ Interaction.”
Discourse & Society 13(6): 715–730.
Goodwin, Marjorie H
2002b “
Exclusion in Girls’ Peer Groups: Ethnographic Analysis of Language Practices on the Playground.”
Human Development 451: 392–415.
Goodwin, Marjorie H
2006 The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goodwin, Marjorie H., and Amy Kyratzis
2007 “
Children Socializing Children: Practices for Negotiating the Social order Among Peers.”
Research on Language & Social Interaction50 (4): 279–289.
Kendon, Adam
1976 “The F-formation System: Spatial-orientational Relations in Face-to-face Interaction.” Man-Environment Systems61: 291–206.
Kendon, Adam
1990 Conducting Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Konner, Melvin
2005 “
Hunter-gatherer Infancy and Childhood: The !Kung and Others.” In
Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods. Evolutionary, Cultural, and Developmental Perspectives, ed. by
Barry S. Hewlett and
Michael E. Lamb, 19–64. New Brunswick, N.J.: Aldine Transaction.
Lave, Jean
1991 “
Situating Learning in Communities of Practice.” In
Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, ed, by
Lauren B. Resnick,
James M. Levine, and
Stephanie D. Teasley, 63–83. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Low, Setha M
2000 On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Mead, George Herbert
1934 Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Newman, Dennis, Peg Griffin, and Michael Cole
1989 The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in School. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Scheflen, Albert
1973 Communicational Structure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A
2006 Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schutz, Alfred
1967 (1932) The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Simmel, Georg
1983 (1903) “
Soziologie des Raumes.” In
Georg Simmel. Schriften zur Soziologie, ed. by
Hans-Jürgen Dahme and
Otthein Rammstedt, 221–242. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Streeck, Jürgen
1986 “
Towards Reciprocity: Gender, Rank and Politics in the Interaction of a Group of School-children.” In
Children’s Worlds and Children’s Language, ed. by
William Corsaro,
Jenny Cook-Gumperz, and
Jürgen Streeck, 295–326. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Streeck, Jürgen & Siri Mehus
2004 “
Microethnography: The Study of Practices”. In
Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, ed. by
Katherine Fitch and
Robert Sanders, 381–406. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Streeck, Jürgen
2013 “
Plaza: Space or Place?” In
Linguistic Perspectives on Space: Geography, Interaction, and Cognition, ed. by
Peter Auer,
Manfred Hilbert,
Benjamin Szmrecsanyi, and
Anja Stukenbrock, 303–333. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Vygotsky, Lev
1978 Mind in Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Younnis, James
1984 “
Moral, kommunikative Beziehungen und die Entwicklung der Reziprozität.” In
Soziale Interaktion und soziales Verstehen, ed. by
Wolfgang Edelstein and
Jürgen Habermas, 34–60. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Burdelski, Matthew & Asta Cekaite
2022.
Practices of peer inclusion.
Research on Children and Social Interaction 6:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.