Navigating Omnirelevant Asymmetry: Encouraging Children to Exercise Their Deontic Rights in Videoconferencing Music Lessons

Abstract

The educational community has long critiqued teacher-centered instruction, promoting student-centered learning. Yet, pre-assumed teacher-student category relevance may overlook momentary asymmetries and alternative categories in real-time learning. Drawing on video recordings of videoconferencing music lessons involving a teacher/great aunt, young children/students, and caregivers/teaching assistants during the COVID-19 pandemic, our data provide a novel opportunity to examine localized familial and educational practices between and within two environments. Informed by ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and the notions of “deontic rights” and “the developmental scheme,” we show how participants orient toward omnirelevant asymmetries to influence a course of action, (re)producing dynamic categorial pairs in situated moments. To enhance children's engagement within the video-mediated ecology, their rights need to be encouraged, permitted and claimed (but cannot be presupposed) to achieve a convergence of control and affection.