A Sociocultural Analysis of Social interaction, and Collaboration within the Cooking Practices of Children

This article applies sociocultural theorising as a tool through which to analyse children’s collaborative cooking practices through the key sociocultural concepts of ‘social interaction’, and ‘collaboration’ within a school cooking club.The ‘every day’ activity of cooking is examined via field-notes gathered through participant observations, diary entries and semi-structured interviews with child and adult participants. The fieldwork sample included 18 participants aged 9-11 years of age and 2 adult participants. The sociocultural nature of the children’s learning during cooking practices was tracked over a 14 week period. Observed incidences of ‘situated learning’, ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, and ‘guided participation’ were tracked throughout the fieldwork period. The analysis identifies the processes through which participants are able to contribute to and distribute shared knowledge to and through others. Through tracking the collaborative learning processes and the contrasting pedagogical practices, the research identified the learning trajectory of the ‘newbies’ via legitimate peripheral participation (as observers and silent contributors), and how through fractionally increasing participation the newbies become main members (masters) of this community of practice. The findings both confirm children’s collaborative cooking practices as a site through which social interaction and collaboration can be examined; whilst also highlighting the complexity of opposing pedagogical practices.