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A small private university in rural Indiana has connected itself irrevocably to the protracted Syrian conflict. Through the efforts of committed students, faculty, and community members – stupefied by the endless violence – this cohort of kindred souls has committed itself to creating solace and support for Syrian students, their families, and their countrymen everywhere. Inspired by a story of torture and displacement, a professor, along with her Syrian students and their American allies, have implemented outreach education programs, campus and community initiatives, local business partnerships, and social media support, creating agency for displaced Syrians, not as passive beneficiaries but as co-partners for change and solidarity.

Joanne Abbey

Purpose – This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground duty asks two boys to each give an account of their actions over an incident that had just occurred on some climbing equipment in the playground.

Methodology – This chapter employs an ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. The data are taken from a corpus of video recorded interactions of children, aged 7–9 years, and the teacher, in school playgrounds during the lunch recess.

Findings – The findings show the ways that children work up accounts of their playground practices when asked by the teacher. The teacher initially provided interactional space for each child to give their version of the events. Ultimately, the teacher's version of how to act in the playground became the sanctioned one. The children and the teacher formulated particular social orders of behavior in the playground through multimodal devices, direct reported speech, and scripts. Such public displays of talk work as socialization practices that frame teacher-sanctioned morally appropriate actions in the playground.

Value of chapter – This chapter shows the pervasiveness of the teacher's social order, as she presented an institutional social order of how to interact in the playground, showing clearly the disjunction of adult–child orders between the teacher and children.