Learning Tacit Classroom Participation

This article examines tacit participation in an adult art class. Drawing on video excerpts from an extensive 4 month video ethnographic study of an art school, I elucidate how a new student tacitly learns to participate in the group dynamics of the art school. Through video analysis, and using a mediated discourse theoretical (Scollon, 1998, 2011) and multimodal (inter)action analytical lens (Norris, 2004, 2011), I illustrate how the learning of tacit practices is accomplished. I show how successful participation for a novice depends on the following three tenets: 1. the ability to gain focused attention (by the novice); 2. the ability to grant the novice access to shared focused attention (by expert participants); and 3. the ability and willingness of expert participants to relinquish their own focused interaction at times in order to allow the novice to learn successful participation. When these three abilities are present, a new student integrates successfully into a new classroom setting, even if the student is mediocre at art. While, if these abilities are missing, a new student will drop out of the class (in this art school), even if they are very good at art.