Doing 'teaching' (Björk-Willén & Cromdal, 2009)

Björk-Willén, P. & Cromdal, J. (2009) When education seeps into ‘free play’: How preschool children accomplish multilingual education. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 555-577.

In this paper, Polly Björk-Willén and Jacob Cromdal show how children use the typical educational activity frameworks in their own peer interactions. Rather than using these interactional devices for pedagogy, the learning involves ‘being socialized into school culture’ and an understanding of normative organization of the classroom as an institution. For children who are multilingual, these ‘classroom’ participation frameworks can provide a resource for managing and maintaining peer interactions.