Spatial and material resources in peer recruitment sequences: the co-operative and stepwise work behind young children’s mutual engagement in the preschool

The article explores children’s deployment of spatial and material resources to co-operatively construct recruitment sequences in the peer group. Data were collected during video-ethnographic research in a Swedish preschool and involve children aged 4.5 to 5.5 years. Adopting an approach informed by multimodal conversation analysis, the study illustrates that children aptly draw from the resources available in the local socio-material ecology to engage other peers in a shared activity. Specifically, children are shown to use embodied resources (e.g. bodily movements in space, gaze, environmentally coupled gestures) and material resources (e.g. photos depicting the children, or the symbolic arrangement of stones, sticks, flowers and dead worms) to give locally-relevant social meanings to space, thereby effectively recruiting peers into joint engagement over a shared focus of concern. It is argued that children’s contingent deployment and manipulation of the features of the spatio-material environment, along with bodily movements (and attention) in space, is instrumental in constructing and negotiating children’s peer relationships.