Children’s Right to Participate: How Can Teachers Extend Child-Initiated Learning Sequences?

Children’s participation is valued in early childhood education but how this is achieved in pedagogy is less obvious. The methodology of conversation analysis is used in this paper to show how specific interactional practices afford opportunities for children to initiate, explore, and assert their own perspectives in everyday activities. The analyses illustrate how teachers’ practices can encourage child participation through the ways in which teachers respond to and extend child-initiated sequences of learning. Data are drawn from research projects conducted in New Zealand and Australia that explore how teachers construct learning opportunities for children within talk-in-interactions. Three data excerpts of teachers and children, aged from 4 to 6 years, are analysed. The analyses of video-taped interactions reveal that teachers’ contributions to (or silences) in interactions and unfolding talk can create particular trajectories of action in early learning environments. Evidence provided by these analyses can inform professional learning for teachers to illustrate how teachers’ interactions with children can support children’s rights to participation in early childhood education.