“Showing up”: The social accomplishment of skilled action and persistence in a community violin education program

• In Event: Dignity-ing: Magnifying the Social Construction and Consequences of Dignity-Affirming or Dignity-Denying Micro-Interactional Moments

Abstract

Overview: They're 5th graders and they're having hormones and they're tired and they show up and they're like, "Argh, I don't feel like doing anything today." I'm like, "I know. I have days like that. I'm human too." And then, halfway through class, they're a little bit challenged and suddenly, they're super engaged. And I know why they keep showing up even if they don't.

“Education is human work with human beings” (Rose, 2022, p. xi). This is the opening statement to Mike Rose’s treatise on educational possibility and the power of human connection. The quote alludes to the tremendous duty the educator assumes. A child’s life chances are at stake. Each educational encounter matters. And, within each encounter, the child’s dignity is implicated.

This Atlas task of holding up the nation’s imperfect educational system is voiced by a community-based music education teacher in the headnote. She explains how her singular goal of students “showing up” played out across the year with the result that students thrived on being challenged. In this lies my research focus.

Theoretical Perspectives: Two primary concepts frame this investigation. There, for one, are social-ecological perspectives based on Goffman’s (1961, p. 18) exposition of the encounter, which attend to how participants mutually monitor one another as part of achieving meaningful co-operative action (Goodwin, 2018). Secondly, there is scholarship which imagines educational dignity and pedagogical ethics as being achieved through interaction (Johnson, 2023; Espinoza et al., 2020). Together these frames illuminate the laminated meanings within an educational encounter.

Methods: The setting is a violin program in an elementary school in a rural Texas border town. I began studying “showing up” by examining information sources derived from a year of video-based ethnographic research. Interactional moments (from video) which illustrate this emic idea most poignantly were those where a child’s dignity is affirmed and brought forward as a central element in accomplishing skilled action. Within these, I selected instructional interactions with one student, who I call Jay, who often did not show up to class due to his growing disaffiliation with school. I attended to these interactions taking a micro-analytic approach (Erickson, 1992).

Findings and Significance: I present an example of the teacher helping Jay play a rhythmic scale. Within this encounter, we witness parallel efforts in instruction and motivation as the teacher attends to both technical skills and her often frustrated pupil. The perceptive features of skillful playing (e.g., finger placement) are pedagogically realized through multimodal gestalts of calibrated action. In tandem, the teacher motivates Jay by connecting instruction to important aspects of his identity as a Spanish speaker, a horseman, and a fan of ranchera music. Within such dignity-affirming encounters, there is evidence of evolving interactional synchrony of both musicianship and relationality between pupil and teacher. These findings offer novel insights into the association between embodied artistic practice, cognition, and emotion that are of significance across academic disciplines and humanistic educational practices (Fuhrer, 2024).

Author

• Sarah Jean Johnson, University of Texas - El Paso