Choreographing young children’s participation in teacher-led activities through suspense practices

The study examines how teachers choreograph so called ‘suspense situations’ during group activities in early childhood education in a preschool in Sweden. It is suggested that suspenseful situations served to arrange and monitor children’s attentive participation in teacher-led activities. Video-recordings of everyday practices with 2–5-year-olds were collected in a regular Swedish preschool. Using Multimodal Interaction Analysis, verbal, embodied, and material features of social interactions were analyzed. The analysis shows that teachers exploited the affective content of preschool activities to awaken children’s interest and attention by inviting them to anticipate something noteworthy to respond to. Teachers displayed heightened affective stances (excitement) and invited the child audience to pay attention, followed by an affectively upgraded resolution as a ‘high point’ of the story, which made relevant collective excited responses. Teachers guided children’s participation in suspenseful situations and orchestrated the interactional affordances for children’s affective socialization and learning through attentive participation.