This book is devoted to the investigation of the daily mundane activities co-produced by teachers and young children, adopting an integrated approach of an ethnomethodological perspective, conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis. It illustrates how knowledge is shared through the activities of talk-in-interaction during the teaching and learning process, such as pretend play, episodes, disputes, managing illness, and talking about the environment.

This volume is composed of eight chapters. The introductory chapter provides a brief account of what is investigated and discussed in this study, the rationale of the project, as well as the research approaches. Chapter 2 presents us with a review of early childhood literature from a sociocultural approach to teacher-child interactions in education, putting forward the significance of exploring the relatively under-examined literature on relational, emotional aspects of teacher-child interactions. Chapter 3 elaborates on the research process, together with accounts of ethical procedure, the participants, the role of the researcher, as well as transcriptions of teaching and learning episodes. Then, the subsequent four chapters constitute the empirical parts of the study.

By examining teacher-child interaction during pretend play, Chapter 4 illustrates how affiliation and alignment are co-produced through channels of verbal and nonverbal interactions between adults and children. Chapter 5 presents three successive types of dispute interactions that are attended to by teachers in seeking knowledge from the children about the incident, then sharing children's knowledge about the situation, and finally asserting a relational activity to reestablish the social equilibrium in the early childhood center. These episodes demonstrate how emotional upsets are given a priority within the everyday activities. With a focus on the environment, chapter 6 discusses how the environment is oriented to and utilized in knowledge exchange by teachers and children in their production of talk-in-interaction, as well as how relational activities are co-produced around the environment. Based on transcription of a single case analysis during morning teatime, chapter 7 presents how caring for an ill child is managed by early childhood teachers, revealing the way in which silence and close body contact are used by the child to communicate a problem to the teacher, and attempts are made by the teachers to know how she is feeling by asking a series of questions. In addition, it offers an analysis of how the interaction progresses for the teacher to gain medical knowledge, as well as how the child communicates being ill through her nonverbal actions. The concluding chapter incorporates all findings of the analyses of the mundane interactions that early childhood teachers and children engage in, thereafter providing an overview of how knowledge is co-produced between members, and highlighting the overriding importance of relational activities in everyday interaction between children and teachers in early childhood education.

In summary, through profound studies of child-teacher interactions, the book discusses young children's learning and knowledge production in multifaceted educational activities, including play, dispute, the outdoor environment, and caring for an ill child. This in-depth ethnography of peer and adult-child interaction provides a unique perspective into children's everyday lives in preschool settings. Therefore, this volume is of practical significance not only to scholars of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, but also to those dedicated to early childhood pedagogy; it makes a significant contribution to research on children's interactions and social worlds.