Tuning-in online: exploring the temporal dimension of teacher-student communication in video-based teaching

Tuning-in processes hold a central role in Alfred Schutz’s theory on social reality. Actors mirroring each other’s non-verbal cues and forming shared realities constitute the essence of the communicative interplay between humans. In this article, we will explore the pedagogical facets of tuning-in and focus on the interplay between teacher and students within the context of online teaching. Interview surveys with teachers have indicated that they experience major communicative problems when teaching online. When moving from the real classroom to Zoom or Teams, they find it difficult “to reach” their students and struggle to make themselves understood. However, very little research based on observational studies of online teaching has focussed on how these difficulties unfold temporally. This is the aim of this study. By using a social phenomenological approach, our analysis revolves around two video sequences of online interaction taken from a field study in a Danish seventh-grade class, conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown. Our study highlights tuning-in among teacher and students as the key challenge of online teaching. The processes of bodily exchange that should lead to synchronization of thought is truncated and the actors tend to stay in each their reality. Yet, teachers, who turn to activities characterized by a predefined interactional course can succeed in creating rhythmic processes of appeals and responses between themselves and their students.