Children’s interaction in an urban face-to-face society

The case of a South-American plaza

Bibliographic Data

ID21200969
AuthorsJürgen Streeck (0000-0002-4632-4786), Kathryn E Harrison
Year2015
Volume6
Issue3
Pages305-337
Publication date2015-10-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePragmatics and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1878-9714 • E-ISSN: 1878-9722
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/ps.6.3.01str
OpenAlexW2324456993
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited16

This paper reports on a micro-ethnography of social interaction in an urban plaza in Colombia, focusing on the plaza’s role as an arena for the acquisition of interaction skills. We investigate how children of different ages initiate and sustain interactions with same-age and older peers and the efforts they make to be recognized and ‘visible’. We interpret our data in light of three theories of socialization: Corsaro’s (1997) conception of childhood as “interpretive reproduction”, Vygotsky’s (1978) model of the “zone of proximal development”, and the “structural approach” to social cognition and development (Damon 1977; Younnis 1984). While a social form like the plaza, which is collectively enacted by members of all age groups of the local community, provides children with an extraordinarily rich array of opportunities to develop social communication skills by interacting with older and younger peers, our analysis also demonstrates that children, as they are building zones of proximal development for themselves, play a central role in assembling, integrating, and sustaining the neighborhood as a face-to-face society. In this fashion, the paper illustrates how the micro-analysis of social interaction can contribute to the analysis of social ‘macro’ forms

Developmental psychology · Ethnography · Macro · Social relation · Social science · Socialization · Sociology · Anthropology · Children's Rights and Participation · Computer Science · Early Childhood Education and Development · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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