The data of this research includes video recordings involving Finnish school-aged children with ASD or autistic features, interacting with their adult co-participants (see section 5.3 for details of participants) in educational contexts. The data was collected during two larger research projects: Everyday Technologies for Children with Special Needs (EvTech) project (2009-2013) and Children with Autism Spectrum disorders as Creative Actors in a strength-based Technology-enhanced learning Environment (CASCATE) pro-ject (2011-2014). Both the propro-jects were built using a variety of technology-enhanced tasks with children with ASD. Such tasks reportedly have promise in teaching and supporting children with ASD (see Ploog, Scharf, Nelson, & Brooks, 2013; Wainer &
Ingersoll, 2011 for a review), which was the motivation behind their use in the EvTech and CASCATE projects. Both these projects aimed at supporting and bringing out the children’s skills, in contrast to the majority of studies that are interested in targeting and specifying the challenges in ASD.
The EvTech project was focused on designing, developing, and studying tech-nologies for everyday use with children with disabilities and their families. Its activi-ties took place during leisure time at a rehabilitation centre. The children, together with their parents and tutors (special education teacher students), played games and worked on educational tasks at ‘action stations’ using multiple technologies, while these activities were video-recorded. An activity would commonly last approximately 10 to 15 minutes, but the children were allowed to end the activity earlier if they wanted to. Original article I utilised material from the EvTech project.
In original article I, three action stations were included (see Figure 3). At the LEGO®
constructing station, the children assembled models presented on the computer screen using plastic LEGO or DUBLO® bricks. The activity could also be played as a memory game. The tutors often assembled their own model next to the children. At the symbol matching station, the children played games that were based on matching symbols presented on the screen, with the symbols on tiles on the table (e.g. the children had to match a red colour on the screen with the red heart on a tile). The difficulty of the game could be increased by decreasing the time available to produce a response. At the dance mat station, the children played games in which responses were produced by stepping on the correct tiles on the floor. More difficult versions of the game in-volved the children using both hands and feet to respond. The tutors and parents often observed children’s actions by sitting or standing close to the symbol matching and dance mat stations. All the game applications were developed in the EvTech project.
Figure 3: the evtech action stations that are present in original article i: lego constructing station (frame 1); symbol matching station (frame 2); dance mat station (frame 3)
Original articles II-IV utilised material collected in the CASCATE project at one special needs school and one mainstream school where there were classes for children with special needs. The project aimed at investigating children’s attention, communication, interaction, and creativity in a multiple-technology learning environment (Tuononen, Kiiskinen, & Kärnä, 2014; Vellonen, Kärnä, & Virnes, 2015). The learning environment was specifically designed to support the strengths of children with ASD by making the contents of the technology-enhanced activities modifiable to meet the children’s individual needs and interests (Voutilainen, Vellonen, & Kärnä, 2011). The learning environment was set up at the children’s schools on a weekly basis, and the children participated in so-called ‘activity group sessions’ with their teachers or special needs assistants. During the sessions, the children and their co-participants used multiple technologies in a similar manner to the EvTech project, and were allowed to discon-tinue playing when they wanted to.
In original articles II-IV of this thesis, three action stations with different technolo-gies were included (see Figure 4). The LEGO constructing station resembled the one in the EvTech project in many ways. However, in the CASCATE project the applica-tion ran on a touch screen computer allowing the children to view the models from different directions by turning them around using their finger. Furthermore, only the children assembled the models. At the storytelling station, the children created stories by using a touch screen to choose from ready-made pictures or by drawing or writing their own content. They were then able to use a microphone to narrate the stories. The application also allowed them to browse and re-listen to their own stories, as well as those of other children. At the Kinect® playing station, the children used their bodies to catch moving virtual objects on the screen, and were able to choose the objects they wanted to catch (e.g. a planet, a snow flake). The application instructed the children on which body parts to use (e.g. both hands, right hand, legs) to increase the difficulty of the game. All the game applications were developed in the CASCATE project.
Figure 4: the cascate action stations that are present in the original articles ii-iV: lego constructing station (frame 1); storytelling station (frame 2); Kinect playing station (frame 3)
5.2.1 data collection
Data was collected with digital video cameras and SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) mobile eye tracking glasses. For original article I, one tripod-mounted digital camera was used for each of the three action stations. For original articles II-IV, two tripod-mounted digital cameras were used for each action station to ensure that both the participants’ actions (including gaze, body movements etc.) and that the computer screens would be captured on camera. The video cameras were a visible part of the EvTech and CASCATE environments and there was no attempt to hide them from the participants. Some of the activities even explicitly involved interacting with the video cameras; for instance, the children were asked to provide feedback of their experi-ences in playing at the action stations by using picture symbols that they themselves showed to the video cameras.
To investigate interactions in context and as naturalistic phenomena, it was impor-tant to capture their richness: thus, the participants were allowed to act as they wished and no restrictions were placed upon them due to research taking place. Researchers, including myself, were present during the data collection at both the EvTech and CAS-CATE sessions, and were mostly in the role of ‘club tutors’ (i.e. helping the children and their co-participants to use the technology if needed). Each activity group session would typically last an hour, during which the children would work at each action station for 10 to 15 minutes, depending on a child’s willingness to work.
Eye tracking data was collected for original article IV. SMI mobile eye tracking glasses (sampling rate 30 Hz) were used when the children were playing Kinect body-movement games. The glasses were introduced to the children as ‘gaming glasses’ and were an integral part of the game-playing activity (see Figure 5). Some of the children were first introduced to plastic safety glasses to familiarise them with wearing glasses.
Wearing the glasses did not pose major challenges to most of the children. The chil-dren wore a small backpack that contained the lightweight data-recording unit. For recording the data, one-point calibration was used by asking the children to tap the screen of the recording unit with their index finger. This was not an ideal solution (i.e.
at least three-point calibration would be preferable), but proved to be useful when it came to the children’s short attention spans. Calibration was corrected manually after-wards using the SMI BeGaze software whenever needed (e.g. if the children touched or temporarily removed the glasses).
Figure 5: The SMI eye tracking glasses used in the study (frame 1); a child wearing the SMI eye tracking glasses and a backpack (frame 2); a child playing body movement games while wearing the eye tracking equipment (frame 3)
5.2.2 description of the data
During the data collection, the children and adults (parents, students, teachers, special needs assistants) were asked to behave as they would if no video recording was tak-ing place. Their actions were not controlled by the research projects. However, due to the fact that the interactions did take place during organised (research) activities, I describe them as ‘naturalistic’ rather than ‘naturally occurring’ (in line with CA terminology). To be considered fully naturally occurring, the interactions should not have been influenced by the researchers’ presence (Ten Have, 2007), which was not the case in this study. However, the interactions between the children with ASD and their adult social partners were not primarily generated through interacting with the researchers but could have taken place without the researchers’ influence. Yet, the aim was not to refrain from ‘contaminating’ the data by having researchers act passively;
rather they were allowed to interact with the participants as they wished (vs. the ‘dead social scientist approach’; Potter, 2002; Potter & Hepburn, 2007).
The interactions in the data can be described as educational and, thus, institutional.
While most of the early CA studies focused on ordinary, everyday interactions, more restricted environments, such as court rooms, medical settings, or schools, can shape the ways in which interactions unfold (see Heritage, 2005). The interactions in this thesis took place at a rehabilitation centre and children’s school, which constitute specific, restricted environments, although it should be stressed that both the EvTech and CASCATE projects enabled the participants to act relatively freely compared to more typical rehabilitation or school settings. Not only did the interactions occur in these environments but they were also organised in a manner typical to such en-vironments. For example, the participating tutors, parents, educators, and children commonly engaged in initiation-response-evaluation instructional sequences (Mehan, 1979), demonstrating that the participants showed orientation to the institutional con-text. This was evident in both the CASCATE and EvTech data, albeit to a lesser extent in the latter.
While educational interactions can be described as institutional, institutional CA research builds on ‘basic CA’ to describe how social institutions work (Heritage 2005).
However, while the interactions examined in this thesis can be seen as mostly educa-tional in nature, the objective is not so much to understand the educaeduca-tional context per se. Rather, the aim here is to examine how the participants organise their interac-tions through turn taking and the practices of repair, which can be seen as the basic resources in social interaction.