The tutoring activity at work: a situated and action-oriented approach
This paper sketches the outlines of an interactional perspective on the professional practices of early childhood educators. These practices are indexical to specific contexts and actions and they mobilise a variety of multimodal resources including gazes, gestures, body arrangements within space and so on. Drawing on a corpus of audiovisual recordings, we explore the principles of an ethnomethodological conversation analysis approach to describe interactional modalities of workplace tutoring. Detailed descriptions of tutor/ apprentice/ toddlers participation practices within interaction provide us access to the ways in which educators, assuming tutor’s responsability, share knowledge and develop professional skills at work.