Convergence of control and affection in classroom management: affectionate and disciplining touch and talk

Abstract

The present study examines mundane social interactions in a Swedish preschool where teachers use affectionate touch for the purposes of classroom management. The data consists of observations of everyday activities, video-recorded at a regular Swedish early childhood educational institution, involving three-to-five-year-old children. Video-recorded data were analysed using Multimodal Conversation Analysis (Goodwin, 2000). The teachers used embodied configurations of touch and talk as ways to organise and rearrange mutual participation frameworks and achieve children's attentive participation in an ongoing activity, or to put their unsolicited initiatives on hold while sustaining the flow of the main classroom activity. The analysis suggests that the teachers, by using multimodal practices, attended to multiple concerns: they remedied problems in the children's conduct, socialised the children's attentive participation and attended to their social and emotional concerns while sustaining close social relations within the classroom community. By focusing analysis on the bodily features of teacher–child interactions, the study contributes to a broader understanding of classroom management and how teachers' social influence is exerted and negotiated in mundane social interactions in early childhood education settings.