Tangibles for Supporting Children's Conversations

This PhD thesis focuses on conversations in primary school classrooms and how to scaffold positive social norms for such conversations, such as turn-sharing and not overlapping in talking. Mastering these social norms is necessary for children's positive social interactions in general. However, the norms are abstract and difficult to master. Tangibles for conversations can best support them.  This PhD research adopts Meta-Design with Action-Research in order to realize tangibles for children's conversations in classroom. The main beneficiaries and users of the tangibles are 8--11 years old children and their teachers from primary schools. This research is done through actions in the field i.e, in primary school classrooms, over time, with actual users and relevant experts, e.g., of education or product design.  Tangibles evolve in a cyclic and incremental manner, according to actions in classrooms and follow-up reflections. In classrooms, teachers lead actions, children adopt tangibles, while designers focus on usages of tangibles. Usages over time enable designers and teachers to study the effects of tangibles for conversation in their context, e.g., whether they promote the scaffolding of positive social norms or not. Moreover, the usage of tangibles in their envisioned context, that is, in classroom, often highlights novel design directions which are not otherwise apparent to designers. Finally, designers profit from this research approach because it enables a rapid evolution of tangibles into improved versions or novel tangibles. This PhD thesis first presents the requirements and the relevant work for developing tangibles for conversations. It then focuses on the Action-Research Meta-Design adopted for tangibles for conversations in primary school classrooms.  Different tangibles for children's conversations are then presented one by one. Finally, the thesis reconsiders the developed tangibles in lights of actions with them in the field, and reflects on challenges for Meta-Design based on Action-Research in school contexts.