Children’s Peer Cultures in Dialogue

Abstract

Contemporary schools are enlivened by a multitude of children with rather disparate linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. These children spend most of their school hours in interaction with other children, engaging in multifarious activities (conflict, gossip, play, humor, task-related activities) that gradually come to constitute the local culture and social organization of their peer group. The book illustrates the multimodal and sequential organization of these mundane peer choreographies, describing the resources through which children co-ordinate their social actions in the complex linguistic and socio-material landscape of diverse classrooms. Moving beyond the focus on teacher-led socialization in previous literature, the analyses shed light on the relevance of everyday peer practices to the negotiation of children’s social roles and identities and to their overall developmental trajectories in the community. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and addresses scholars from different academic fields, including sociology, linguistics, anthropology, social and developmental psychology, and education.