Embodied teaching

Introduction

Watch Miss Gan in the classroom and one cannot help but be mesmerised by the way she teaches with such seemingly effortless flair and ease. Given that it was the beginning of the academic year, the class we observed was both newly formed and new to her. As such, the 14-year-old students were still settling in to the routines and a few were getting restless during the one-hour lesson. Any teacher, with unfamiliar visitors seated in the classroom, might be flustered. Miss Gan, however, was unfazed. In a calm and almost zen-like manner, she addresses the disciplinary issues, such as inattentiveness, minor disruptions, and distractions, during the lesson through a fluent use of pauses, gesture, and movement. Through these nonverbal ways of expression, she was able to address the misdemeanor of the students, without needing to use even a single negative word to reprimand students. What was remarkable was that the students understood her non-verbal cues effectively and responded positively to her silent communication. When she made a pregnant pause, the class promptly hushed and paid attention. When she gesticulated to a distracted student to focus on what she had written on the board, the child did, and nodded in response. When she moved towards a group of students that was inattentive, the students stopped what they were doing and gave her their attention. It was, to us, an impressive example of the orchestration of the students’ learning experience using embodied meaning-making.

Educational sociologist Basil Bernstein describes pedagogic discourse as comprising two discourses — regulative discourse and instructional discourse.The maintenance of control and discipline in the lesson is an aspect of regulative discourse, whereas the teaching of the content knowledge and skills of the curriculum is a part of the instructional discourse. A teacher, therefore expresses her pedagogy' through both the expression of instructional and regulative discourse. A case has been made in the example of Miss Gan, as well as others in the studies described in this book, that the regulative discourse can be expressed non-linguistically, that is through the use of non-verbal modes, such as gestures, positioning, and silences. This allows for the use of language to express the instructional discourse — that is on teaching the content knowledge and skills to be learnt, rather than on classroom management. An advantage of reserving language for teaching and learning, and using ‘silent discourses’ to address disciplinary issues, is that the learning experience and environment for the student is more positive — nary a harsh word needs to be spoken during the lesson, yet discipline and control are stealthily maintained.

While this may seem like new knowledge to some, many teachers teaching classes prone to disciplinary issues have developed such instincts intuitively through experience over the years. Many, like Miss Gan, might be slightly surprised when this ‘orchestration skill’ is pointed out to her and might self-deprecatingly brush it off as nothing significant. However, one distinguishing characteristic of a ‘good’ teacher is pedagogy — and pedagogy is often more than words.

Teaching and learning in the classroom is a multisensory experience. Embodied teaching is about applying the understanding from multimodal communication into the pedagogic situation. It is about sensitising the teacher to the fact that they are designing students’ learning experience literally in every move that they make. Whether the students feel safe to participate or are inhibited from speaking up are often a result of the meanings they perceive from their teachers’ embodied semi-osis.This book discusses, with examples drawn from case-studies, how teachers can use corporeal resources and (digital) tools to design learning experiences for their students. The central proposition is that as teachers develop a semiotic awareness of how the choices made in their use of various meaning-making resources express their unique pedagogy, they can use these multimodal resources with aptness and fluency to design meaningful learning experiences.

Educational semiotics

What makes a ‘good’ teacher? Is it in their capacity to inspire, their creativity to interest, or their capability to impart? If so, how are these intangibles embodied by the teacher and demonstrated in the lesson?

This book is about the ‘silent discourses’ in the classroom. We communicate, not only with words, but also with the ways we move, the ways we look, and the ways we use our body to signify, that is the use of embodied modes. The teacher orchestrates the various choices in these meaning-making or semiotic resources and design the learning experience for students. Students know this. They intuitively sense how to respond to a teacher — when to offer their views freely, challenge the teacher’s argument, or simply shrink back in silence. It is often not just what the teacher says, but the meanings made through a gesture of folding arms, a step back, or a shake of the head that can end talk.

This is of course not to suggest that language is unimportant. Education psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, observed that language is the chief means in which humans make meaning. Yet, we all do know that language is not the only means in which humans make meaning. In fact, as Jewitt, Bezemer & O’Halloran (2016: 3) state in their book on Introducing Multimodality, ‘multimodality marks a departure from the traditional opposition of “verbal” and “non-verbal” communication, which presumes that the verbal is primary and that all other means of making meaning can be dealt with by one and the same term’. While language has been the most well-studied mode of meaning-making, there is a growing interest and body of work that investigates multimodal communication.

Educational semiotics is the study of signs and meaning-making in the context of teaching and learning. It includes the study of knowledge representations in textbooks and learning resources, the development of multimodal literacy in students, that is critical viewing of multimodal texts and effective representing skills in the making of multimodal compositions, as well as the orchestration of embodied and multimedia resources to design positive learning experiences in the classroom. In other words, educational semiotics is about understanding how students learn through meaning-making with multimodal resources, and how teachers teach through designing learning with multimodal - embodied and digital resources.The latter is the focus in this book.

This book outlines the value of focusing on the teacher’s use of language, gesture, positioning, and movement in the classroom, described in this book as embodied semiotic modes. The thesis is that as teachers develop a deeper understanding of how the choices made in their use of corporeal resources can express various shades of meaning, and the possibilities and limitations of technological tools, described in this book as semiotic technologies, they can better design various learning experiences for their students. This book advances the argument that the role of the teacher today has evolved into that of a designer of learning. As such, there is a need to better understand how different semiotic resources — both embodied semiotic modes and semiotic technologies — can be used more appropriately in the teacher’s multimodal classroom orchestration to design students’ learning experiences.