In many societal contexts, the importance of listening to children is underscored, not seldom with reference to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and especially Article 12 on the right to be heard. But what does it mean to listen to children? A plethora of books on listening to children aimed at professionals and others who meet children in their daily lives are published on a regular basis. However, we miss a critical discussion of listening as such, and more specifically about (good) listening to children, framed within a larger theoretical context. The aim of this article is to discuss listening in relation to monological and dialogical perspectives on communication, as well as in relation to different notions of children as similar to or different from adults. Also discussed is how different theoretical perspectives on listening and listening to children tends to lead to different ethical conclusions regarded what constitutes good listening and listening to children.

I den här rapporten presenteras resultatet av projektet Uppdragsutbildning på distans på Tema Barn, som 2020 beviljades pedagogiska utvecklingsmedel för e-lärande av universitetsledningen för Linköpings universitet. Rapporten är skriven så att den ska kunna vara till nytta för andra miljöer på LiU som har planer på att utveckla uppdragsutbildning. Inom projektet har vi fokuserat på uppdragsutbildning relaterat till Barnkonventionen, men behandlar detta som ett exempel som man kan dra mer generella lärdomar av, som därför kan vara till nytta för andra. Genom hela rapporten pekar vi på olika överväganden som är relevanta att beakta för den som planerar erbjuda uppdragsutbildning på distans, samt även uppdragsutbildning generellt.

Rapporten beskriver först varför vi på Tema Barn ville undersöka uppdragsutbildning på distans, samt hur de allmänna förutsättningarna för uppdragsutbildning vid LiU ser ut. Sedan följer en beskrivning av arbetet med att identifiera och förankra vår uppdragsutbildning i omvärldens behov och efterfrågan, vilket leder vidare till en diskussion om pedagogiska överväganden. En väsentlig poäng här är att det finns skillnader mellan traditionell universitetsundervisning och uppdragsutbildning. Avslutningsvis presenterar vi den grundmodell för kursupplägg för e-lärande på distans och kursupplägg i modulform som vi utformat inom projektet, som är tänkt att kunna presenteras för potentiella beställare av uppdragsutbildning, för att förklara vad vi har att erbjuda och vilka möjligheter som finns för beställaren att utforma utbildningen efter sina önskemål.

I många samhälleliga sammanhang återkommer en uppmaning att lyssna på barn, inte sällan med hänvisning till FN:s barnkonvention och kanske särskilt artikel 12 om rätten att bli hörd. Men vad innebär det att lyssna på barn? Mängder av böcker om lyssnande till barn som riktar sig till yrkespraktiker och andra som möter barn i sitt vardagsliv publiceras kontinuerligt. Vi saknar emellertid en kritisk diskussion som sätter frågor om lyssnande, lyssnande på barn och det goda lyssnandet i en större teoretisk kontext. Mot den bakgrunden har föreliggande artikel tillkommit. Lyssnandets problematik diskuteras här primärt i relation till monologiska och dialogiska perspektiv på kommunikation samt i relation till olika synsätt på barn (barnsyn) som lika eller olika vuxna. Avslutningsvis pekar vi på etiska implikationer som följer i kölvattnet av olika teoretiska perspektiv på lyssnande och lyssnande på barn.

In many societal contexts, the importance of listening to children is underscored, not seldom with reference to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and especially Article 12 on the right to be heard. But what does it mean to listen to children? A plethora of books on listening to children aimed at professionals and others who meet children in their daily lives are published on a regular basis. However, we miss a critical discussion of listening as such, and more specifically about (good) listening to children, in relation to a larger theoretical context. The aim of this article is to discuss listening in relation to monological and dialogical perspectives on communication, as well as in relation to different notions of children as same or different from adults. Ethical implications following in the wake of different theoretical perspectives on listening and listening to children are also discussed.

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3-5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on childrens and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to childrens laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize childrens everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality, and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of childrens laughter in detail. It was found that childrens laughter tended to be directed to children and adults laughter tended to be directed to adults. Eighty seven percent of childrens laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2.7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and normsharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground.

The present study investigates the use of gestures by 18-, 24- and 30-month-old Swedish children, as well as their practical actions in coordination with verbs. Previous research on connections between children’s verbs and gestures has mainly focused only on iconic gestures and action verbs. We expand the research foci in two ways: we look both at gestures and at practical actions, examining how the two are coordinated with static verbs (e.g. sleep) and dynamic verbs (e.g. fall). Thanks to these additional distinctions, we have found that iconic gestures and iconic actions (the latter in particular) most commonly occurred with dynamic verbs. Static verbs were most commonly accompanied by deictic actions and deictic gestures (the latter in particular). At 30 months, deictic bodily expressions, including both gestures and actions, increased, whereas iconic expressions decreased. We suggest that this may reflect a transition to less redundant ways of using bodily expressions at 30 months, where bodily movement increasingly takes on the role of specifying verb arguments rather than expressing the semantics of the verb itself.

Theories of embodied interaction and environmental coupling have come a long way in their struggle with the slippery notions of mind, matter and sociality, but there is a need for systematic documentation of actual social practices to be carried out from this perspective, especially in relation to children. When parent- child interaction takes place in contexts where physical objects are involved, the handling of an object may suddenly stand out as having expressive (gestural) qualities over and above the instrumental aspects that may also be involved. What sort of expressive qualities may be found in such actions? What is it about these movements, in their context, that provide for their expressive qualities? In short, how do they come to mean (see also Cuffari & Streeck, this volume)? The aim is to provide a principled and systematic approach to address these questions, by focusing on micro-ecologies of expression that have their basis in how human bodies handle objects. The approach is applied to data from five Swedish children, recorded longitudinally between 18–30 months, in an attempt to begin answering the questions above. Asking such questions — empirically, theoretically, and conceptually — is a logical consequence of an approach to intersubjectivity that views it as emergent from embodied interaction. This view of intersubjectivity is a synthesis of, first and foremost, the work of Schutz, Mead and Merlau-Ponty.

Swedish children’s use of the headshake from 18 to 30 months shows a developmental progression from rote-learned and formulaic coordination with speech to increasingly more flexible and productive coordination with speech. To deal with these observations, I make use of the concept of multimodal constructions, to extend usage-based approaches to language learning and construction grammar by inclusion of the kinetic domain. These ideas have consequences for the (meta‑)theoretical question of whether gesture can be said to be part of language or not. I suggest that some speech-coordinated gestures, including the headshake, can be considered part of language, also in the traditional sense of language as a conventionalized system.