Environmental noticings on the move: Interactional affordances and children’s engagement during preschool walks

This paper examines how preschool children and teachers engage in environmental noticings of mundane phenomena (e.g., bird, spider web) during group walks outdoors. Drawing on over 100 hours of audiovisual recordings from preschools in Sweden and Japan, it uses multimodal conversation analysis to examine how such noticings are accomplished through talk, gesture, and movement. Rather than treating noticing as an internal cognitive process, we conceptualize it as a publicly organized practice through which participants draw one another's attention to features of their surroundings. The analysis shows that environmental noticings involve several interactional practices, including descriptive elaboration, confirming that others perceive the same features, and extending the interaction beyond the immediate scene. Through these practices, children and teachers attend to, characterize, and make sense of both human and non-human elements of their surroundings. We argue that environmental noticings constitute an important interactional vehicle through which children's social and emotional engagement with the environment is accomplished in everyday pedagogical mobility. By foregrounding the interactional organization of noticing during preschool walks, the study contributes to children's geographies by demonstrating how relations to environments are produced in situ through embodied, mobile interaction.