Cynthia Hicban

Email: cynthia.hicban@hdr.qut.edu.au

Cynthia Hicban is a PhD candidate, Educational Mentor in early childhood, and Sessional Academic in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice at QUT.

Cynthia’s primary research focus is investigating children’s participation rights in Early Childhood Education settings in Australia. Participatory approaches and high-quality interactions between educators and children support children’s rights to participate, but less is known about how this is achieved. The study employs Ethnomethodology Conversation Analysis (EMCA) and Lundy’s (2007) model of participation, to investigate educator-child and peer interactions to identify how members invite, cultivate, and encourage participation.

Cynthia is currently working on the beginning of a collection which looks at young children’s practice to claim participation rights. According to Goodwin & Goodwin (2004, 2006) participation frameworks can be co-constructed through body positioning, gaze, and gesture, as well as talk. Shared engagement with a particular focus within a participatory framework (Goffman, 1961, 1963) is how we formulate joint attention. Kidwell’s (2022) in-depth analysis of joint attention identifies how adults’ actions help children from birth build the capacity to formulate sequences of social action. Showing and offering objects to infants and young children, coined “object presentations” (p.40), can initiate “vocal and emotional exchanges” (Kidwell, 2022, p.39). Such actions are typically rewarded when the child reciprocates to show objects of their own (Tomasello, 1999). Cynthia’s ‘collection-in-the-making’ builds on Kidwell’s (2022) work on ‘object presentations’. The examples represent the mobilisation of joint attention using the ‘show’ practice (Kidwell, 2022) for children’s epistemic claims of know-that and know-how (Arminen & Simonen, 2021). The connection between children’s ‘show’ practice and the enactment of children’s participation rights needs to be better understood. How can deviant cases of the ‘show’ practice be identified? Which examples should be included in the collection? How does the ‘show’ practice lead to participation rights enactment?

Selected readings

Arminen, I., & Simonen, M. (2021). Expertise as a domain in interaction. Discourse Studies, 23(5), 577-596.

Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Bobbs-Merrill.

Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. Free Press.

Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. H. (2004). Participation. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 222-244). Blackwell.

Kidwell, M. (2022). Sequences. In A. Church & A. Bateman (Eds.), Talking with Children: A Handbook of Interaction in Early Childhood Education (pp. 38-54). Cambridge University Press.

Lundy, L. (2007). ‘Voice’ is not enough: Conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal, 33(6), 927-942.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation, volumes I and II. Blackwell.

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematic for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 7-56). Academic Press.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tuncer, S., Licoppe, C., & Haddington, P. (2019). When Objects Become the Focus of Human Action and Activity: Object-centred Sequences in Social Interaction. Gesprächsforschung: Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 20, 384-398.

United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. Geneva: United Nations Human Rights. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.