Body, podium, school bell: devices for establishing a social tension at the pre-opening of the classroom interaction

Abstract

This study examines how classroom teachers’ spatial and material orientations within a routine classroom instructional activity generate social tensions in their classroom interaction. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, I demonstrate how teachers’ bodily orientations toward specific material spaces—such as the podium—and toward an institutional material sound—the school bell—function as devices for producing either the “tight occasion” or the “loose occasion” (Goffman, 1963) in their emerging classroom interaction. The analysis takes a comparative approach, focusing on the pre-opening phase of lessons delivered by two English teachers at a Japanese secondary school. The comparative analysis revealed that a teacher who positioned his body at the podium in a particular posture in response to the school bell created a relatively “tight” occasion, whereas another teacher did not. The students in the former class responded to the teacher with the designed body postures (i.e., standing upright, gazing at the teacher) during the opening (i.e., greeting exchanges). In contrast, the students in the latter class did not display comparable embodied conduct. These findings indicate that teachers’ material and spatial orientations in responding to the school bell contributed to varying levels of social tension. By highlighting its critical role in creating social tension, the study underscores teachers’ material and spatial orientations within classroom ecology in relation to their instructional practices.