Pursuing suggestions (Ekberg at al, 2017)

Ekberg, S., Danby, S. Houen, S., Davidson, C. & Thorpe, K. (2017). Soliciting and pursuing suggestions: Practices for contemporaneously managing student-centred and curriculum focused activities., Linguistics and Education 42, 65-73.

In this paper, Stuart Ekberg and his colleagues explore how teacher-solicited suggestions can enable children to contribute to the topic trajectory of a sequence, but with guidance provided in the teacher’s subsequent (third) turn. The emphasis here is on a child-centred approach, as the teacher invites contributions from children during group time (ie all gathered, sitting together).  Specifically, the teacher solicits suggestions, from an ‘unknowing’ stance, from a small group of kindergarten children on how they can use the computer to source information. The interactional project (teacher intention) emerges as although all suggestions are acknowledged and positively received, they are not taken up until the children suggest the target activity (ie ‘we could look it up on the internet’).