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.
About the author
Jesse Pirini is a PhD Candidate at AUT University in Auckland, New Zealand, and a member of the Multimodal Research Centre. He is currently investigating high school tutoring, building on an earlier project into business coaching. Jesse’s research applies and develops multimodal research methods, with a view to improving tutoring outcomes at high school level and making theoretical and methodological contributions to social interaction research.
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