The many forms and functions of touch in educational settings: Shared attention and appropriate engagement

Although the significance of multimodal resources for the organization of human interaction is widely acknowledged, it is only more recently that touch practices have received systematic attention, by developing an interactional approach to touch as experienced in a distributed collective way (e.g., Cekaite & Mondada, 2021).The special issue represents a welcome contribution to this line of research by bringing together a selection of papers focusing on a variety of touch practices with the shared circumstance that they occur in educational contexts, in and out of classrooms.In the introduction to one of the articles, Burdelski sets what could as well be the agenda of the whole special issue in a telling way, stating that "[interpersonal touch] is central to processes of socialization, including the acquisition of language, knowledge, and skills, and the development of emotion, identity, and morality" (p. 1).In the following, I will discuss two themes that emerge from the collected papers that I find particularly relevant to the understanding of socialization and learning through interaction.First, the interactional work accomplished by touch practices for attention management, in light of the fundamental role of shared attention for teaching and learning.Second, some of the moral dimensions of touch within the social relations that are characteristic of educational settings.