Producing Shared Attention/Awareness in High School Tutoring

Abstract

During the activities of everyday life social actors always produce multiple simultaneous higher level actions. These necessarily operate at different levels of attention and awareness. Modal density is a methodological tool that can be used to analyse the attention/awareness of social actors in relation to higher level actions they produce, positioning actions in the foreground, midground and background of attention. Using modal density to analyse an opening and a closing in high school tutoring sessions, I show social actors transitioning into and out of producing the same higher level actions at the foreground of their attention/awareness. Through this analysis I identify two potentially unique aspects of one-to-one tutoring. Firstly I show one way that a tutor helps a student take on the practices of being a good student, and secondly I show the influence that students have over tutoring. I argue that movements into and out of a shared focus of attention are potentially useful sites for analysis of social interaction.

Communicating knowledge, getting attention, and negotiating disagreement via videoconferencing technology: A multimodal analysis

“…sport (Wertsch, 1998). Further, work in multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004(Norris, , 2009(Norris, , 2011Geenen, 2013Geenen, , 2014Pirini, 2013Pirini, , 2014Pirini, , 2015Pirini, , 2016Makboon, 2015;Matelau, 2014;Norris and Makboon 2015) uses various kinds of mediated action as the unit of analysis for the study of social action in many different settings. Norris (2004) delineates the mediated action into higher-and lower-level actions.…”

Fight for focus: attention and agency in sight-translated interaction

“…In addition to utilising the analytical tool of modal density to analyse attention/awareness towards simultaneous higher-level actions, Pirini has further developed this tool to analyse intersubjectivity (Pirini, 2016) and agency (Pirini, 2017). In his study of high school tutoring settings, Pirini (2014) shows how transitions mark changes in attention and how the social actors produce convergent and divergent actions. In the author's intersubjectivity study based on the same material, the modal density tool is extended to isolate three tiers of material intersubjectivity: stable, adjustable and fleeting.…”

“Everything Is in the Lab Book”: Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre Analysis of Symbolic Mediation in Medical Physics

“…Participants may, of course, attend to several actions, thus in MIA analysis the attention foreground/background continuum traces how attention might shift between lower level actions, which often occur on the backgrounded end of the continuum (e.g., gaze, posture, gestures, intonation), and higher level actions, which often occur on the foregrounded end of the continuum (e.g., the higher level action of a conversation that is made possible by backgrounded modes; cf. Norris, 2016;Pirini, 2014). To explore how attention is focused on this attention continuum, we turn to three analytical concepts emerging from MIA: modal intensity, modal complexity, and modal density.…”

“…An important concept in MIA is that of attention; that is, the degree of awareness that participants have of higher and lower level actions during a multimodal interaction (e.g., Norris, 2004Norris, , 2019Pirini et al, 2018). To trace how participants' attention to higher and lower level actions is mediated through modes, MIA uses an attention foreground/background continuum (Norris, 2019, Pirini, 2014. Participants may, of course, attend to several actions, thus in MIA analysis the attention foreground/background continuum traces how attention might shift between lower level actions, which often occur on the backgrounded end of the continuum (e.g., gaze, posture, gestures, intonation), and higher level actions, which often occur on the foregrounded end of the continuum (e.g., the higher level action of a conversation that is made possible by backgrounded modes; cf.…”