Immigrant parent-child interactional dance duets during shared art-making experiences

The data for this article were derived from a larger three-year study enquiring into how immigrant preschool teachers, and the families and children with whom they work, explore their bicultural identities through aesthetic representations of their sense of place. Eleven first generation immigrant parents and their young children attending a multicultural Canadian preschool participated in shared art-making workshops. Framed by a qualitative arts-based research methodology, data were collected using ethnographic methods. A multimodal interactional analysis of the video data elucidated the participants' rich, complex, embodied modes of communicating with each other. While research on parent-child interactions typically privileges verbal, face-to-face communications in which partners take turns leading and following each other's movements, this analysis revealed two additional interactional 'dances'; mirroring the partner's movements and synchronising movements between partners. This research suggests new possibilities for discerning and including immigrant parents' culturally-influenced ways of interacting with their children in early childhood settings.