Instructing in an object-centered activity: Chadō lessons as an interactional accomplishment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Central to our everyday lives, objects have been a prominent focus in interactional research, which has generated extensive insights into their essential and situated roles across mundane and workplace settings (Day & Wagner, 2019; Nevile et al., 2014; Weilenmann & Lymer, 2014). In contrast, instructional environments provide a distinct interactional ecology where participants’ orientations to objects might reflect their asymmetric epistemic access to the activity. Research on instructional interaction has shown, for instance, how instructors may perceive activity-relevant features of objects that remain opaque to novices (e.g., Nishizaka, 2006). Moreover, this line of study has demonstrated how the interactional processes, in which participants jointly reference, inspect, touch, handle, and transform objects, facilitate the achievement of shared understanding of the activity and its constitutive objects. Building on these insights, this dissertation examines Chadō (“tea ceremony”) lessons—an object-centered and embodied discipline organized around the performance of ritual procedures (Tuncer et al., 2019). Adopting multimodal conversation analysis (e.g., Deppermann, 2018; Mondada, 2019a) and drawing on research on the sociality of objects and embodied instruction (e.g., Ehmer & Brône, 2021; Koschmann et al., 2011), the study investigates how participants mobilize verbal and embodied practices in concert with material objects to achieve the bodily-and-material instructional goals of Chadō. Data consist of approximately 50 hours of naturally-occurring instructional interaction video-recorded in a Chadō club at a U.S. university. Participants included 18 students, learning beginning-level Chadō procedures, and one certified Chadō instructor. The analysis centered on three recurrent interactional phenomena: (a) environmentally coupled depictive gestures, (b) referencing action-implicative objects, and (c) instructional recipient design. The findings reveal how participants organized instructional practices in sequentially layered ways (De Stefani & Gazin, 2014). In demonstrations, depictive gestures—whether generic (Urbanik, 2024) or environmentally coupled (Goodwin, 2007)—serve as key resources for visually instructing various aspects of the activity. Object-referencing practices, accomplished through verbal or gestural means, provide a more implicit layer of instructional action by invoking the action-relevant categorial distinctions of objects (e.g., natsume versus hira natsume, or “tea caddy” versus “flat tea caddy”). Together, these practices contribute to recipient-designed instructional sequences, achieved through instructors’ ongoing monitoring of student performance and adaptive formatting of instructional actions. Central to these practices are objects and their relevant categorial status, which are a constitutive part of the ongoing procedure and invoked as a crucial resource for the situated production and recognition of the depictive and referential practices. This study contributes to a re-specification of Chadō instruction as an object-centered activity. It also advances interactional research on embodied instruction more broadly and affirms the socially constituted instructive roles of objects in these activities. Finally, the study provides empirical grounds for studies of interactional scaling (Bilmes, 2011) to move beyond a language-only account and incorporate multimodally formatted actions (e.g., Hauser, 2019). Pedagogical implications of the findings will also be discussed.