Learning Professional Perception in Violin Performance Through Bilingual Storytelling and Touch

• In Event: Illuminating Sociality and Learning in Diverse Educational Environments by Interrogating Movement, Touch, and Affect

Abstract

We examine professional perception in children’s learning of the violin; that is, how teachers structure their pedagogy through the use of multiple and diverse semiotic channels to communicate the cognitive and embodied discriminations that are part of artistic practice. We focus on bilingual storytelling and touch with the intention of expanding on existing research, which has largely characterized embodied, artistic skill as being communicated through physical demonstration coupled with vocal explanation (e.g., Douglah, 2021). We further aim, through this focus, to enhance descriptions of asset-based pedagogies for students of non-dominant backgrounds (García-Sánchez and Orellana, 2019).

Two complementary frameworks are brought to bear on this study. One is research in the socio-cultural tradition, which elucidates how children acquire cultural competence through engagement in purposeful, goal directed interaction (Lave and Wegner, 1991; Rogoff, 1990). The second is Goodwin’s (1994, p. 606) notion of professional vision, which he defines as, “The ability to see relevant entities within a professional domain that is consistent with the vision held by experts within the discursive community of practice.”

Our method is microethnographic (Erickson, 1992), relying on multiple data sources including, videotaped classes taken over the course of the academic year of 2021-2022, artifact collection, and interviews with students, their families, and teachers. The research site is a community music education program held in an unincorporated, rural town bordering Mexico.

Our paper focuses on two teaching sequences. The first is with novice children who are learning the proper hold of a violin bow. For children to learn the quality of the hand position—which the teacher describes as “suave, separado, y circulo” (soft, separated, and circular)—the teacher engages children in a collaboratively told story about a family of gallinas (hens) while forming various participation frameworks, such as facing a child while tactilely moving her fingers to rest lightly on the bow.

In the second sequence the teacher is helping a more experienced (and older) student, Jay, with his hold of the violin neck. Noticing the tension in the child’s hand position, she touches lightly the underside of Jay’s hand, opening it, while asking him, “La mariposita. ¿Lo recuerda? ¿Y como se llama tu mariposa?” (The little butterfly. Remember it? And what is your butterfly’s name?) This question leads to both the teacher and child sharing stories in English and Spanish of their respective butterflies, named after her wife and his baby brother. These stories conclude with humor as the teacher reiterates the lesson (in English), “Okay so don’t squish your butterfly,” and the boy responds in Spanish with laughter, “ya se fue” (It already was (squished)).

Our findings demonstrate how story structure and its embodied enactments provide a format for elaborating on the perceptual discrimination children need to acquire for violin performance while also building on children’s linguistic strengths. In such, they make novel contributions to scholarship in social interaction and bilingual education while opening our vision to new understandings of cognition that avoid binaries between mental activity (thinking/conceptual) and physical activity (doing/applied).

Authors

• Sarah Jean Johnson, University of Texas - El Paso
  Presenting Author

• Maria Teresa de la Piedra, The University of Texas - El Paso
  Presenting Author

• Alejandra Sanmiguel-López, University of Texas - El Paso
  Non-Presenting Author

• Claudia Saldana Corral
  Non-Presenting Author