| Analysis of social action incorporates talk in the context of social and cultural environments and social spaces (Goodwin, 2000). Within a shared social space, such as a school playground, social matters are seriously attended to by young children. The study reported here investigates the talk and interaction of a group of children, aged four to six years, as they decided whose idea to use for a playground activity. Using conversation analysis and an ethnomethodological approach, analysis of the children’s video-recorded interaction shows how the children used the multi modalities of physical actions, gaze and talk to invoke their own intellectual property as a valuable commodity. Drawing on Sacks’ (1992) notion of “possessables”, and Sharrock’s (1974) paper “on owning knowledge”, this paper demonstrates how children draw on the phrase, “that’s my idea”, to claim ownership. In so doing, they used their ideas as possessables to build a local social and moral order around ownership. Being the owner of the idea for the playground activity is an influential and highly sought after position and subsequent forms of interaction were dependent on how these ideas were invoked in interaction. Considerations of social interactions contribute to understandings of how young children manage and construct their local social orders in the playground. |
