Vanessa Torres
December 15, 2008
Eng 4070: Peer Tutoring
Final Essay: Eye Contact Observations
Eye contact is something that is very brief but very powerful. The eye contact made in a tutoring session can determine a lot from what the student comprehends throughout the session. It would seem obvious that students who make the most eye contact are the ones who understand the most. This conclusion is not always the correct one. There are many different reasons why students don’t make eye contact. If the student and tutor are different gender then there may be a difference to the amount of eye contact in the session. Also, pending the status of the tutor, as a peer or professor, the student might give more or less eye contact. The laptops students use today have a lot to do with the lack of eye contact. Technology has changed the amount of eye contact the students used to show comprehension. Although tutors still feel the need for eye contact from the students to equal understanding, the students might not feel the same way. In most tutoring sessions tutors feel like it is essential to make eye contact with their students. When there is a lack of eye contact, the tutor draws up many conclusions for what may be wrong with the student.
In A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One, Muriel Harris writes a chapter about a tutor and student who are in a session, but the student shows a lack of interest. This is an excellent example of how difficult it is for a tutor when a student doesn’t make any eye contact. In Harris’s example of a session between a considerate tutor and uncaring student, Harris shows a student who is reluctant in acknowledging her tutor’s help. To show the reader how the student is not engaging in the session, Harris states in her example how much negative body language the student has and the lack of eye contact. This goes to show how lack of eye contact is a sign that the student is not retaining any information, and is not giving the proper attention to the assignment. The tutor in this example can draw up many conclusions from the students’ behavior, and can go about handling this situation in many different ways. Muriel Harris writes about seven different measures a tutor can take to try and fix the lack of attention the student has. The tutor could talk to the student about some of the fears that might occur in writing the paper, or the tutor could try to empathize with the student for being forced to be at the writing lab. Minimalist tutoring is also an option for a tutor with an uncooperative student. Perhaps a sign of improvement for the tutor would be if the student would start making more eye contact.
To my knowledge there are no sources that discuss the way laptops in a tutoring lab affect the amount of eye contact the tutor and student make. If I would have found a source that discussed the way laptops influence the use of eye contact I could have made a strong conclusion to my observations. Electronics are changing the way eye contact is use in the tutoring lab in multiple ways. There is a strong use for eye contact as well as there is a strong use for laptops. The research could have helped me to come to a stronger conclusion.
As said in the literature, there are many factors to why a student does not show interest in the session at the writing center. There is an issue with lack of eye contact.
I five different situations in which eye contact served its significance. I was strictly an observer in these situations. I sat across and away from the tutor and student I observed. Also, I wrote in my notebook which was on my lap. I looked up very frequently to make sure I caught my main focus, which was eye contact between the tutor and student. In these observations I had differences for; stature, such as peer vs. professor, students and their essays, such as completed papers vs. uncompleted thoughts, gender, such as male vs. female tutors and students, and essays, such as laptops vs. paper.
Eye contact is a representative for understanding in many different ways. In different observations I saw that the tutor does not feel comfortable until there is a closure of eye contact to show that the student has comprehended what the tutor just stated. To begin with, the students who were working with female tutors opposed to the male tutor. There was a lot of eye contact with the female tutors. On November nineteenth, I observed one female student, Lucy, and a male tutor/peer, Hector, who hardly had any mutual eye contact. As Lucy and Hector met, Lucy only smiled at Hector when he first began the session. Lucy hardly made eye contact throughout the entire session. There were only a very few times when Lucy glanced at Hector. Hector constantly made eye contact with Lucy but she would just nod and write down different points on her paper. Throughout the session, Hector tries to make funny comments which grab Lucy’s attention, but this does not make her give Hector eye contact. Lucy begins to give eye contact to Hector when she needs him to answer a question. Then she goes back to looking at her essay, once he answers her. Even when Hector asks Lucy questions she either looks across the room or she stares at her paper. It could be concluded that this student is not getting anything out of this session because Lucy is uncomfortable with Hector since he is male. Yet there was a specific situation where Lucy shows that is getting help from Hector even though she is not looking at him. Hector tells Lucy, “I will give you some time, just write down everything”. Hector thought he was going to have some time alone because he put back his chair and sat forward with his arms on his knees. Lucy doesn’t just write down her list, but she speaks out everything, and the entire time she doesn’t make any eye contact with the tutor.
When I observed the same student again on December first, Lucy’s second tutor was female and also her professor. Lucy made eye contact with her professor for most of the session. She was discussing her paper with her professor and she looks confident and productive with all of the eye contact she is making. Lucy is doing most of the talking and eye contact since her professor has told her “I am acting as your secretary and at the end of the session I am going to give you this list and hopefully it will help you”. While Lucy talks, she is excited about how much her professor is listening to her. Lucy does not take her eye contact away for anything. Even when the professor asks her questions about her essay, Lucy looks interested in answering her professor.
Lucy made much more eye contact with the female professor. This could be due to a lot of different reasons. Lucy and Hector had a paper that both were looking at, and they were both sitting side by side. In Lucy and her professor’s situation, Lucy was sitting at the side of the table and her professor was at the head of the table. Also in Lucy and her professor’s situation, they did not have a written paper they were sharing. The fact that Lucy chose to make triple the eye contact with her female professor rather than her male peer is important. It is unknown why she chose to do so, but at the same time it could be due to many of these reasons.
Lack of eye contact is not necessarily meant to show that there is no understanding between the tutor and student. In an observation done on October twentieth, and two more observations done on November seventeenth, there were laptops involved in all of these observations. Both the tutors and students were women. First, on October twentieth there were two female peers doing a tutoring session on laptops. Jackie, the student, and Ana, the tutor, were both looking at Jackie’s essay on the laptop. Ana asked Jackie to read her essay to her and then they discussed what Jackie felt like she needed help on. There was minor use of eye contact, but both tutor and student mainly looked at the screen. Ana is taking notes as Jackie speaks about how she could improve her essay. Ana tries to take the mouse out of Jackie’s hand to help her fix a part of the essay, but Jackie stays in control. Jackie continues typing as Ana makes minor eye contact with her, almost in a reassuring way that she is on the right track. Although Ana and Jackie aren’t making a lot of eye contact, Jackie knows that she is doing a good job and Ana knows that Jackie is listening to her. This is because Jackie is nodding her head in an assuring way when Ana keeps giving Jackie positive feedback.
On November seventeenth, Paula and her professor were doing a tutoring session using laptops as well. In this observation I noticed just how important eye contact is to some people. The professor was very adamant to get Paula to look at her. Paula had her own laptop and the professor had her own laptop. Both laptops had a copy of the essay on it. Even though Paula would nod her head in accordance to what the professor said, Paula’s professor did not like it at all that she was looking at her laptop more than she was looking at her. Paula would occasionally look at her professor, but that was not enough. The professor would lean far on the table trying desperately for Paula to look at her. Paula’s professor also had very strong hand gestures and she would catch Paula’s attention with this occasionally. Paula mostly types down the points her professor makes and nods to make it clear that she understands. Paula’s professor still asks “Does that make sense” and Paula says “yes”. Then the professor/tutor wants to feel reassured that Paula understands her points, so the professor tells Paula to “tell me back what you understood”. I feel that the lack of eye contact from the student might have the tutor unconfident in whether or not her student really understood.
In the second observation I saw that day, I saw the same professor with a previous student that I observed with her peer, Jackie. Jackie and her professor both look at the essay which is on the professor’s laptop. Jackie is taking notes in her notebook since she doesn’t want to reach over the professor to get onto her laptop. The professor looks at Jackie as she does this, but does not interrupt since she knows that Jackie was just listening to her. Then after a short while, the professor starts to get impatient that Jackie is still not looking at her, and she moves closer to Jackie to catch her attention. Once they both move on to a new point, Jackie and the professor don’t make eye contact that much. They continue discussing the essay, and then the professor ask “how will you sum that up” and Jackie responds “I have no idea”. The professor looks like she is honestly trying to help Jackie and she continues asking Jackie questions that lead up to the answers Jackie needs. They both make semi eye contact, mostly looking at the computer and Jackie’s notebook. It is almost as if there were another person in the room with the way they both try to give the laptop enough eye contact.
To conclude on my laptop observations of only females in this study, the use of laptops take away eye contact between the student and the tutor. The laptop may act like a third party in the discussion, but it is to the students benefit. The tutor does feel like she is competing with the laptop at times, but then again the tutor uses the laptop to help the student. The tutor always seems to be trying to catch the student’s attention when the student is staring mostly at the laptop. The student is more reluctant to look at the tutor if she has her work on a laptop. Although the student makes head gestures, such as nodding occasionally to show that she is listening to her tutor, the tutor feels disconnected from the student. This is proven by the fact that the tutor always seems to bend forward and is constantly trying to make eye contact with the student. If and when the tutor stays quiet, then the student seems to look at the tutor in a way of “help me”. The student breaks the eye contact when the tutor begins giving feedback to the student. This is the way the student deals with the fact that they can write down fresh ideas quickly before the tutor goes onto a different point.
Overall, whenever the student is not making eye contact, the tutor is always trying to get the attention by leaning over or making a humorous comment to get the student to recapture eye contact. There has been several times where the student laughs at the joke the tutor makes and continues to stare at the laptop. Also, the student always makes eye contact when they ask the tutor a question. Once the tutor puts the student back on track, they loose the student’s eye contact, but this does not necessarily mean that they have lost the students attention.
Eye contact does follow understanding most of the time, but just because the student lacks eye contact does not mean that the student is not following what the tutor is saying. The tutor might be talking and trying to make the student look at him/her, but the student (especially if the student is on the laptop) nods and repeats back what the tutor is saying. The student keeps a connection with the tutor by either adding hand gestures, or nodding, or speaking aloud what is being added to the paper. When the student feels like the tutor is not responding to a question, the student always makes eye contact to make sure the tutor is paying attention. The tutor is always looking at the student, and in the case when the tutor was writing notes for the student, the student was constantly looking at the tutor.
For essays that are written on paper, the student tends to look at the tutor more because the student cannot write as fast as the tutor talks. This gives the tutor more control since the student has to pay more attention to the tutor to grasp the concept, rather than just grasp the answer. For a paper essay, the student and tutor have to sit directly next to each other. This would seem to make eye contact more difficult since the two people are tightly together, but really it doesn’t affect the amount of eye contact the two people have together. The fact that the same type of seating has to be had when the essay is on one computer screen has a huge effect on eye contact because the student seems glued to the screen. In the one observation where the tutor and student had their own separate laptops, they both took an interest in looking only at their screens for long periods of time. Then the tutor took notice of this and made a strong effort to make eye contact by leaning far over on the table to catch the students attention.
Eye contact is mostly given by the tutor at all times. The only time there is lack of eye contact is when the tutor is taking notes on what the student is saying. The student, however, makes eye contact with the tutor when the student is trying to get an answer to a question. In the cases of the students who were on the laptop, they make even less eye contact when they are asking a question because they are looking for a place to type in the answer the tutor gives. When there is a paper essay the student looks more at the tutor in asking questions, but then when the tutor starts talking, the student usually looks down as if they want to start writing the ideas the tutor is making. There is not much varying with the frequency of eye contact. The only time I observed a huge difference with the amount of eye contact given was when the tutor was male and the student was female. In this case, the tutor did not fail to give constant eye contact, but the student hardly looked at the tutor. The communication still seemed to flow well between the male tutor and the female student, even though there wasn’t nearly as much eye contact as in the other observations. This could mean that the student was uncomfortable with a male tutor, or it could have meant a number of different things.
To conclude, laptops do act like another person in the tutoring session. There are multiple ways laptops are convenient to the student, but the tutor has to get the student to connect with them in order to have a functioning session. If the tutor lets the student become overly interested in the laptop, then it would be as if the tutor weren’t even present. When the student is on the laptop there is a lot of hassle for the tutor to get the connection of eye contact, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the student is not paying attention to their tutor. Also there is a thought on male vs. female tutoring that was inconclusive. I saw only one gender different tutoring session which had a strong lack of eye contact. There must be more to this topic of how females and men tutors get eye contact across in the tutoring lab, with their students that are of the opposite sex, in order to keep the students focus.
The research between eye contact and laptops in the tutoring labs could have helped me come to a stronger conclusion. Also observing different tutoring sessions with the opposite gender could have showed me a conclusive point on how eye contact is affected. Overall, I would have liked to have had the benefit of observing different people other than my classmates. It would have been interesting to see how two people who have never met make eye contact in different situations at the tutoring lab.
Works Cited:
Harris, Muriel. "Talk to me: Engaging Reluctant Writers." A Tutor's Guide : Helping Writers One to One. By Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2000. 24-34.
Those of you who were not observing or conducting sessions talked through
your reflections on sessions in light of your proposed ideas for your
research pr...
2 days ago
