This study draws on a video ethnographic study of peer interactions in a Swedish preschool, exploring children's collaborative emotional engagements in playful performances (make-believe, humor, playful contests, teasing, clownery). The study draws on insights from Bateson's and Goffman's seminal work on the transformational power of playframes and uses multimodal conversation analysis to explore how children frame and sustain their interaction as playful, involving serious and non-serious interactional work.The findings demonstrate the improvisational and transformational power of play where everything can be framed as laughable and playful through transformations of embodied actions, affect and play materials. Our findings demonstrate the ambiguous character of playful actions and objects, indexing humorous incongruities and emotional tensions as the fun of the game. It is demonstrated how exaggerated playful actions and upgraded affect displays easily evolve into more serious aggressive actions (playful teasing, mocking, and ridicule) and non-affiliating relationships, that threaten the joyfulness, and how children manage to restore the playful framing and re-establish their mutual relationships on a turn-by-turn basis.Overall, the study highlights children's social competencies and flexibilities in managing and transforming unpredictable situations, contradicting affect displays, and ambiguous actions, and how their playfulness provides an important site for joint emotional sharing, amusement and (language) creativity, being important parts of peer group socialization and young children's cultural learning.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) in complex organisational contexts face multiple obstacles that limit their potential. This qualitative study analyses the barriers identified by participants in six CoPs within the Andalusian public administration, the strategies adopted to overcome them, and their subsequent impact on professional practice and service delivery. Using an interpretive phenomenological design based on focus groups (n = 21 participants across six CoPs with active membership ranging from two to five), four main categories of obstacles were identified: (1) time management and coordination, (2) resistance to change, (3) lack of institutional support, and (4) an inadequate definition of objectives. The most effective overcoming strategies were found to be external collaboration and adaptive time management, which directly contributed to significant transformations in professional competencies, improved organisational dynamics and the transfer of new skills. The study concludes that addressing such impediments requires a comprehensive, multi-level approach that combines institutional support, clarity of objectives, effective time management and the development of collaborative competencies, and highlights the need for specific institutional policies to strengthen CoPs as instruments of innovation in the public sector. Given its contextualisation in the Andalusian public administration, its cross-sectional self-report design and its small, purposive sample, these findings should be transferred to other settings with caution.
This study examines how the accountability of instructor interventions is interactionally established in smoke-diving simulation exercises. Drawing on video recordings of firefighters' training and adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, the analysis investigates how participants distinguish between interventions addressing circumstantial contingencies in the simulation environment and those addressing performance problems in trainees' embodied conduct. The findings show that interventions are not inherently instructional. Rather, their instructive character is achieved through their sequential positioning, linguistic design and participants' displayed understanding. When interventions are formulated as being occasioned by circumstantial contingencies, interventions are treated as guiding trainees around obstacles, without necessarily addressing competence. By contrast, interventions addressing performance problems render embodied conduct assessable through imperatives or by soliciting trainees to reflect about their conduct through questioning formats. When the rationale for the intervention is ambiguous, participants engage in repair and corrective work to establish the grounds and legitimacy of the interventions. By demonstrating how instructional relevance is locally constituted, the study contributes to research on instructional interaction and simulation-based training, highlighting how the intelligibility and instructive relevance of interventions emerge from situated interactional practices.
This study examined the micro-political mechanisms of participation and silence within one domestic Chinese banjiti (班集体, or fixed class collective) learning community, challenging the deficit framing of silence as an individual deficiency. Through a longitudinal narrative case study incorporating semi-structured interviews, reflection journals, and classroom observations, the analysis traced a four-stage participation trajectory: voluntary silence, observational participation, tentative participation, and strategic voice. A three-dimensional framework of speaking legitimacy (institutional, relational, and situational) emerged from the analysis, demonstrating that participation and silence function as mutually constitutive resources in ongoing micro-political negotiations of the right to speak, while students' cognition-practice separation reflects active legitimacy management calibrated to the field's capital distribution. These findings suggest that Chinese students' silence in international classrooms may reflect a transitional recalibration of habitus between communities of practice. For international education, the speaking-legitimacy mechanism of this banjiti case carries a bounded implication. Rather than pathologizing such silence as a problem to be solved quickly, mediation structures mirroring the relational brokerage and safe practice functions characteristic of banjiti socialization could support students during transition.
Adolescent girls with a migration background often navigate educational and cultural expectations that differ between the family and the school context, which can make it challenging to plan educational and professional futures. In this context, the present study, focusing on adolescent girls of Moroccan background in Italy, addressed three research questions: RQ1: To what extent do these girls report short- and long-term future time perspective (FTP) toward school and professional careers? RQ2: To what extent do they exhibit disjoint, conjoint, or combined forms of agency? RQ3: How are agency and economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS) related to FTP?Drawing on a mixed-methods design, the study combines quantitative and qualitative data to capture both patterns and the lived texture of these girls' experiences. t-tests indicated higher long-term than short-term FTP and a higher endorsement of independent than interdependent self-construal. The latter was interpreted as a prevalence of disjoint agency, with participants attributing choices mainly to personal control, achievement, and self-expression (conjoint agency was operationalized as interdependent self-construal). Regression analyses indicated that independent self-construal positively predicted long-term FTP, whereas interdependent self-construal negatively predicted it; ESCS and age were not significant predictors. The qualitative strand complicated and extended these findings, suggesting that disjoint and conjoint agency coexist in a hybrid configuration embedded in the relational context. In this sample, mothers were frequently described as supportive facilitators and fathers more often in terms of authority. Where family relationships were reciprocal, they appeared to support aspirations related to schooling and professional careers; where they were asymmetrical or hierarchical, personal goals were described as subordinated. These findings point to variability in how girls reconcile autonomy and relatedness, rather than to a uniform cultural pattern.
