Preschool Children’s Play and Alignments in a Bracketed Framing of a Music-technological Breakdown

The study investigates the communication and interaction of three children in an experimental activity in a kindergarten when music technology breaks down. A detailed analysis is carried out using the Goffman approach. The focus of the analysis is the introduction of the activity and the following interaction that develops when the technology does not work properly. The author asks the following questions: (1) How do children orientate themselves in the technological material in order to participate and engage in the situation? (2) How do children ally themselves in the staged situations in order to meet the challenges they are exposed to?

The findings of the study show that the children pay attention to the adult’s instructions on how to carry out the project, their interpretive framing of the instructions, and their orientation to the technology in order to make various adjustments and change their footing. The findings show that technology is important for and is part of the interactional order.

The children’s interpretive framing of the activity shows their competence in trying and exploring different resources to meet the challenges they encounter in a situation that is different from normal kindergarten activities. They recycle the adult’s instructions in various ways and use resources to orientate themselves in how they find meaning in the non-functioning technology.

The close analysis of the children’s social interaction shows how, through guiding each other during their developing play, they are active co-producers of their musical cultures rather than just individual expressions. The integration of technologies in the analysis shows that children’s cultural ideas are embedded in their social interactions. This shows the importance of monitoring children’s definitions of situations and of having children’s experiences of participation in popular media culture taken into account.

The respondents are three children aged 5-6 years old, all girls. The children are all from Swedish-speaking middle-class families. The sample is based on the fact that these children already knew the researcher and wanted to participate in the study.

The data collection for the study consists of video observations. The experiment involved the children playing on a keyboard, and when they stop playing, the system plays a version of what the children have played. The objective of this was to create a musical dialogue. This study analyses the activity that develops when the technology breaks down, while the teacher tries to fix the problem, and looks in detail at how the children perceive and frame the social situation.

Lagerlöf, P. & Peterson, L. (2018). “Preschool Children’s Play and Alignments in a Bracketed Framing of a Music-technological Breakdown”. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(1):120–142.