Who’s laughing now? Humorous resolutions to conflict in preschoolers’ interactions
Knowing when a dispute has been resolved is hard for all of us. We’re looking at how very young children manage this.
Presented by
Description
School of Education's Professor Carmen Dalli, Post Doctoral Research Fellow Dr Ann Strycharz-Banas, and School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies Professor Miriam Meyerhoff have been looking at how children in a multicultural, multilingual preschool manage conflicts and disputes and how they resolve these conflicts, often harmoniously and without adult intervention.
Their hypothesis is that these strategies directly impact on children’s wellbeing and belonging in their early years. Their study, ‘War and Peace in the Nursery’, is based on 18 months of non-participant video observation in a community of children aged 2;6–4;11.
In this talk, the three academics give a short overview of the study, and focus particularly on how some children use humour (among several other strategies) as a cue of conflict resolution, and the implications it has for social hierarchies and social harmony in the centre.
For more information contact: Victoria Chen
victoria.chen@vuw.ac.nz