Visually monitoring the surrounding traffic is key to safe driving. This article examines howtrainee drivers (TDs) enrolled in a Swedish driving school practice checking the blind spot,i.e., the lateral field behind the car not covered by its mirrors. Using multimodal conversationanalysis to examine a collection of blind spot checks (BSCs) drawn from an extended longitudinalcorpus of video recorded driving sessions, we identify how visually oriented instructionsare adapted to TD's driving skills as well as to local traffic demands. The findingsshow that although the BSC instructions are routinely embedded in a systematic “mirrorroutine”, numerous contingencies may force instructors to scale down the visual instructionsto only include the BSC. Furthermore, it was found in line with previous studies that instructionswere fewer and less detailed as the TD's driving progressed, to the point where theinstructions were altogether withheld. In this mode of training, that we term “unassisteddriving”, instructors would reorient their focus to noticing and correcting TD's problematicdriving behaviour, drawing in different ways on their joint interactional experience of previoussessions. The findings contribute to the literature on instructions in mobile settings aswell as to more general discussions of learning as a members' concern in situated interaction.

Play has long been understood as an important pedagogical practice, particularly in early childhood education and care settings. Playing with food, however, has typically been overlooked, and very little is known about food play during mealtimes. The apparent dichotomy between rule-following and playfulness at mealtimes has led to a paucity of research on playing while eating. This paper raises the profile of food play and examines instances in which young children initiate pretend play with their food during shared mealtimes. Data are taken from a large corpus of video-recorded lunches in Swedish preschools, and episodes featuring pretend play with food were analysed using multimodal interaction analysis. The results illustrate how play signalling is multimodally achieved, directed first to teachers, often involves other children, and enables the multiactivity of playing and eating. Children invited teachers into their imaginary worlds and teacher’s responses enabled the play narrative to develop and co-exist with the institutional demands of eating lunch together. The paper provides empirical evidence that pretend play with food during meals offers affordances for generating and sharing imaginary worlds with teachers and peers.

Deploying an everyday life approach, this article focuses on the kindergarten meal, defined as a space in which humans, materials and discursive elements interact. The article identifies and discusses two co-existing perspectives on the everyday meals that emphasise children as future beings and here-and-now beings. Through the concepts of smoothing and striation the paper discusses how these perspectives produce different mechanisms of regulation and agency, and position the eaters differently. The paper emphasises kindergarten mealtime as an ambiguous space that does not offer simple discussions about good and bad meal situations. The paper thereby adds to the existing literature within children’s geographies which emphasise interactional, relational and material aspects of children’s lives. It does so by revisiting some concepts, striation and smoothing, that has been used to explore children’s spaces and child–adult relations, but argue that these concepts describe ambivalent and complex processes in children’s and adult’s everyday lives.

Play has long been understood as an important pedagogical practice, particularly in ECEC  settings, yet playing with food during mealtimes has been overlooked or undervalued. The apparent dichotomy between rule-following and playfulness at mealtimes has led to a paucity of research on food play. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach that seeks to describe social activities from the participants’ own perspectives, this paper examines instances in which young children initiate pretend play with their food during mealtimes. Data is taken from a large corpus of video-recorded lunches in Swedish preschools and a collection of pretend play sequences were analysed using multimodal conversation analysis. The results show that pretend play is multimodally achieved, directed first to teachers, often involves other children, and enables the multiactivity of playing and eating. Moreover, the analysis illustrates how food is handled to allow for the initiation of pretence scenarios and for sharing those imaginary worlds with other participants at the table, especially the teachers. Accepting the invitation, teacher’s responses were fitted to narratively build on and contribute to the imaginary events, while at the same time orienting towards the progression of the meal. The findings are discussed in terms of the pedagogical work of teachers, whose efforts to ratify the children’s perspectives and trigger their imagination co-exist with the institutional demands of eating lunch together.