“Using observation as a basis for theorizing”

At the time of Sacks’ lectures, children were viewed predominantly through a developmental lens that conceptualised children on a life trajectory being socialised into adult worlds. Sacks’s perspective took a different turn, to recognise the active and agentic work of children and to propose their in situ social competence as they participated in the social orders of everyday life. Sacks’s methodology of “using observation as a basis of theorising” (Sacks, 1984a, p. 25) informed and inspired a body of work in childhood studies, including my own research. Sacks’s observations of kids’ culture and kids’ talk became a springboard for investigating children’s social interactions across a range of settings, including classroom talk. Sacks’s insights opened new ways for me to understand the interactional work and social worlds of children. “Picking apart” everyday social life made visible children’s accomplishments in ways that were not visible before. I had a new analytic toolbox of language concepts accompanied by a new set of methodological and analytic tools to observe and describe children’s everyday activities in order to understand how they accomplish social life.