The role of interpersonal recognition in learning: Case studies of tutoring interactions between university undergraduates and inner-city high school students

In this dissertation I conduct a micro-interactional discourse analysis of student learning in two tutoring sessions selected from a collection of 27 one hour long recordings of tutoring interactions which were part of 12 months of participant observation at two different tutoring programs. In analyzing these tutoring sessions, the dissertation seeks to understand, first, how students become involved in or alienated from the tutoring interactions, and, second, how the interactions facilitated small scale changes in the students, whether for better or for worse. In order to understand these processes, the dissertation proposes two interventions, one conceptual and one methodological. First, drawing on extant theories of recognition, the concept of interpersonal recognition is proposed as a heuristic for understanding the interpersonal work that leads students to become more or less involved in the moment to moment flow of the tutoring sessions. Second, and as a methodological complement to this concept, a particular method of analysis is introduced, what I call the Interactional Case study Method (ICSM), which takes the interaction as the unit of analysis, and is able to, as a result, shed light on the mutual constitution of persons and contexts as they emerge across interactional time.;The first tutoring session considered in the dissertation was one that went rather badly. The student appeared alienated from the interaction at one point, taking out her math homework in the middle of the tutor's history lesson. As the session progressed, the tutor and student became engaged in a heated argument. In the turn-by-turn analysis of this tutoring session, I argue that despite the fact that the student was initially engaged with the tutoring session, a misunderstanding between the tutor and student leads the tutor to treat the student's discourse as non sequitur, creating a moment of recognition of the student as someone who has difficulty maintaining a topic of conversation. This recognition of the student's discourse as disordered eventually leads to the recognition of the student as someone who has a deficit of attention. This then becomes consequential for the interaction as a justification for the student to "check out" of the tutoring session. Of course, the student does precisely this when she takes out her math homework during the tutor's history lesson -- an act that appears to be, somewhat tragically, understood by the tutor to be a justification of his understanding of her as having a deficit of attention.;The second tutoring session was much more productive, as evidenced by the apparent rapport between the tutor and student and the number of math problems that the student and tutor complete during the tutoring session (28) despite the fact that the student was unable to solve these problems when working on her own. In this session, the student is recognized by the tutor as being smarter than she thinks. The dissertation traces out the subtle and complex ways in which the student, first, is recognized as being smarter than she thinks and, second, is then changed into being someone who truly appears to have become smarter than she initially thought she was.;In concluding, the dissertation fleshes out the theory of interpersonal recognition that was proposed at the outset. The dissertation further proposes how this model for understanding the role of interpersonal interaction in learning can be a useful heuristic for teachers and others to better understand how learning is intimately caught up in the interpersonal contexts in which it occurs.