Talk about a YouTube video in preschool: The mutual production of shared understanding for learning with digital technology

Abstract

MUCH OF WHAT IS WRITTEN about digital technologies in preschool contexts focuses on young children’s acquisition of skills rather than their meaning-making during use of technologies. In this paper, we consider how the viewing of aYouTube video was used by a teacher and children to produce shared understandings about it. Conversation analysis of talk and interaction during the viewing of the video establishes some of the ways that individual accounts of events were produced for others and then endorsed as shared understandings. The analysis establishes how adults and children made use of verbal and embodied actions during interactions to produce shared understandings of the YouTube video, the events it recorded and written commentary about those events.