La mariposita ¿La recuerda?: the affective and moral dimensions of professional vision in learning to play the violin

ABSTRACT

This is a microanalytic study of a metaphorical story, which is co-constructed by a violin teacher and her emergent bilingual student as part of building the child’s professional vision within the art form. The findings center on the multi-functionality of the metaphorical story in facilitating participants’ evolving affective and moral alignments to knowledge within the interaction. This analytic locus also illuminates the ways in which the teacher’s ethical perception of her pupil’s embodied forms of responsiveness and resistance cultivates rich forms of joint activity. This research advances our understanding of cognition and learning in situ within humanizing pedagogies.

Acknowledgments

I presented these data in Marjorie (Candy) Harness Goodwin’s Co-Action Lab. The idea to focus on morality and affect within professional vision developed from conversations in this setting. Asta Cekaite and Leslie Moore provided constructive commentary as panel discussants at the meetings of, respectively, The American Anthropology Association and The American Educational Research Association. Frederick Erickson, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Amy Kyratzis, and Inma García Sanchez each provided helpful feedback on various versions of the paper. The thoughtful input from two anonymous peer reviewers was invaluable, as well. My research collaborators were María Teresa (Mayte) de la Piedra, Alejandra Sanmiguel López, Claudia Saldaña, and Margarita Mejía Rodriguez. These individuals additionally assisted with translations of the data. Lastly, I acknowledge the children, teachers, and administrators of Tocando who inspired this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. As argued by Ivaldi et al. (2021), in a systematic review of the literature on learning and teaching in the performing arts from a conversation analytic perspective, performing arts education possesses features that are distinctive to it as a larger categorical discipline thus making it worthwhile to aggregate findings rather than parsing those attributed to instruction within individual artistic forms (e.g., music education). While recognizing the variability of teaching and learning structures across disciplines and even within disciplines, I similarly find the benefit of including a larger corpus of literature is called for in such an emergent area of research. (Bamberger’s (2013) and Green’s (Narita & Green, 2015) analyses from, respectively, cognitive and sociocultural frameworks which examine learning music in the absence of direct instruction, for example, provide an alternative form of pedagogy from the literature discussed here in which direct instruction dominates.) Such an approach, further, can begin to develop a counterpart theory of “ensemble learning” (where one performs as a group) to that of “studio thinking” within visual arts (in which the artistic product is more often created by an individual) as provided from psychologists from the Studio Thinking Project at Harvard’s Project Zero (Sheridan, Veenema, Winner, & Hetland, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Federal Award ID Number (FAIN) is 1878484-38-21.