13 - Talking Matters: Studying the Use of Interdependencies of Individual and Collective Action in Youthful Learning

Summary

Although my research is not directly focused on issues of learning and interaction in youth and adolescence, there are implications for the sort of research agenda that might be pursued in that area. My work examines how, in our interactions with others, we identify and use past experience, and in particular how we establish continuity and change in the social organization of our lives in social groupings and organizational settings. I am particularly interested in how we use interdependencies of experience as both individually and collectively relevant. For example, projects concerned with multiprofessional teamwork in hospital settings (Middleton, 1996) and with families talking about the significance of holiday photographs (Middleton & Edwards, 1990) examined what it is to be a “team” or a “family.” Such studies are both occasioned and made relevant in designating and claiming experience as individually and collectively accountable. Such an approach can be applied to a consideration of social interactions and learning in adolescence and youth. For example, we can examine how what-it-is-to-be-young is used as a conceptual resource in communicative activity concerning social interaction and learning in adolescence and youth. We do not need to describe a priori the conditions that define what it is like to be young. We can study how joining society is accomplished in terms of talk in which the topic of concern is what-it-is-to-be-young. We can examine possibilities of experience that may or may not be attributed to such a category.