Emerging learning ecologies: Mayan children's initiative and correctional directives in their everyday enskilment practices

The ethnographic and talk-in-interaction analysis of two everyday goal-oriented activities of a Mayan family presented here illustrates how enskilment (Ingold, 2000) practices depend in important ways on the child's own initiative to explore new tasks independently of an expert's explicit guidance. The learning event emerges when experts occasionally monitor the novice's actions and identify problems that require correction. Expert and novice thus engage in a process of fine-tuning perception and attention through a correctional directive trajectory that leads to a “professional vision” (C. Goodwin, 1994) of particular fields of activities (e.g., knitting and gardening activity).