Children on the move: Guided participation in travel activities

摘要

The present article explores how children appropriate travel competence. The data material consists of 12 h of video recordings of five families prior to journeys where children travel by public transport without a known adult. Through analyses of adult-child interactions in an airport and a train station, we show how children become positioned and act as learners in busy and semiotically complex public spaces. Situated activities such as finding an airport gate and planning an upcoming train change became learning activities in which adults guided children in identifying, understanding and acting upon travel information. We show how adults highlight features in the environment as relevant for the task at hand, and in cooperation with children establish and sustain a joint focus of attention. The activities were organised as collaborative tasks that enabled children to develop and display competence in using such sources of information as signs, tickets and audible messages, and to identify and solve emerging problems.