Designing Learning with Embodied Teaching

Perspectives from Multimodality

Fei Victor Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000098464
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Teaching and learning involve more than just language. The teachers' use of gestures, the classroom spaces they occupy and the movements they make, as well as the tools they use, work together with language as a multimodal ensemble of meanings. Embodied teaching is about applying the understandings from multimodal communication to the classroom. It is about helping teachers recognise that the moves they make and the tools they use in the classroom are part of their pedagogy and contribute to the design of the students' learning experience.

In response to the changing profile and needs of learners in this digital age, pedagogic shifts are required. A shift is the evolving role of teachers from authority of knowledge to designers of learning. This book discusses how, using examples drawn from case studies, teachers can use corporeal resources and (digital) tools to design learning experiences for their students. It advances the argument that the study of the teachers' use of language, gestures, positioning, and movement in the classroom, from a multimodal perspective, can be productive.

This book is intended for educational researchers and teacher practitioners, as well as curriculum specialists and policy makers. The central proposition is that as teachers develop a semiotic awareness of how their use of various meaning-making resources express their unique pedagogy they can use these multimodal resources aptly and fluently to design meaningful learning experiences. This book also presents a case for further research in educational semiotics to understand the embodied ways of meaning-making in the pedagogic context.

1

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 non-verbal 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 semiosis. 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.

Teachers and teaching

In today’s digital age where information is just an Internet-connected device away, are teachers still relevant? As technology becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, there are pertinent questions asked on what jobs technology can displace. The teacher today cannot just be an authority and transmitter of knowledge but must grow in their role and understanding to become a designer of learning (Selander, 2008; Laurillard, 2012; Lim & Hung, 2016). As a designer of learning, the teacher has heightened ‘semiotic awareness’ (Towndrow, Nelson, & Yusoff, 2013), and demonstrates a fluency in orchestrating a multimodal ensemble (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Halloran, 2016; Lim, submitted for publication) of semiotic resources through embodied teaching. As a designer of learning, the teacher exploits the affordances in (digital) teaching resources to bring new possibilities into the classroom. From the perspective of embodied teaching, teachers, far from being ‘de-professionalised’ or made redundant, are in fact becoming more critical as designers of various meaningful learning experiences and environments for their students.

The importance of having ‘good’ teachers cannot be overstated. Earlier studies, such as ‘How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top’ by McKinsey & Company (2007), have since concluded that the main driver of learning and performance is in the quality of the teachers and that the quality of the education system cannot exceed the quality of its teaching force. Muller (2007: 26) describes the teacher as ‘an authoritative pedagogical agent’ and argues for sound teacher’s competency and strong knowledge expertise, opining that ‘the condition for teachers to be able to induct pupils into strong internal grammar subjects is that they themselves already stand on the shoulders of giants that they can speak with the disciplinary grammar’. Muller (2007: 26) also reports that in his survey of the global literature on successful learning, ‘teacher competence is by far the most important factor in learner attainment’.

This resonates with Macken-Horarik, Love, and Unsworth’s (2011) study of the English classroom. They argue that ‘[t]eachers are central… [as] teachers are the ones who will need to revise, or indeed establish, a grammar that relates purposefully to the texts of contemporary school English and builds knowledge about language progressively and cumulatively’ (Macken-Horarik et al., 2011: 10).

O’Halloran (2007) also highlights the importance of the teacher in her documentation of the difference in teaching and learning practices in Mathematics classrooms that are differentiated on the basis of socio-economic status. She observes that ‘as the divide grows between different types of schools, so do the experiences, qualifications and salary of the teaching staff’ (O’Halloran, 2007: 235). As such, O’Halloran (2007: 235) argues for the need to ‘develop theoretical and practical approaches for developing effective teaching strategies, particularly for teachers working with disadvantaged students’. O’Halloran (2007) emphasises the importance of teacher-training, crediting the teacher as a critical factor in the outcome of the students’ achievements.

Likewise, Allington and McGill-Franzen (2000: 149) explain that ‘we need to concentrate our efforts on enhancing the expertise of teachers… Happily, there seems to be growing recognition, among some policymakers, that it is teachers who teach, not materials.’ Undoubtedly, the teacher is central in the implementation of national curriculum objectives, examinations syllabi and the educational policies in the classroom.

Pedagogic discourse

Professor of Education Jay Lemke (2002: 75) argues that classroom learning is ‘an example of the general process of ecosocially-mediated development’. The meanings made by the teacher to the students represent the privileged form of knowledge that has been institutionalised through policy and syllabus, packaged into the curriculum, and expressed in the multimodal pedagogic discourse as the lesson experience.

Initiation of the students into the various specialised fields of disciplines takes place via an immensely complex ensemble of semiotic resources, including embodied semiotic modes and semiotic technologies. Semiotic technologies are tools and resources that teachers use to make knowledge representations in the lesson. They can include the use of whiteboards, PowerPoint slides, students’ computing devices, and learning management systems and digital platforms with analytics prowess. Instructional materials such as textbooks and worksheets, media of learning through computers and videos as well as pedagogical practices in the form of teaching methodologies and learning frameworks are semiotic choices that teachers would make and orchestrate in the design of the lesson experience for students. Pedagogic semiosis occurs through the use of modalities (such as visual, aural, and somatic) and semiotic modes (such as language, images, gestures, mathematical, and scientific symbolism). Given their unique functional affordances, the modalities and semiotic modes specialise in particular communicative load in the construction of the classroom experience for the student. Hence, the pedagogic work performed by the teacher in the classroom entails the joint co-deployment of embodied semiotic modes and semiotic technologies in a multimodal ensemble.

As mentioned earlier, sociologist Basil Bernstein developed the notion of ‘pedagogic discourse’ as part of an intricate set of proposals to explain the ‘production, reproduction, and transformation of culture’ (Bernstein, 1990: 180). Pedagogic discourse is not simply a general term to describe all communication in the classroom. Rather, it is used in the specialist sense in this study, following the work of Bernstein. Bernstein (1990: 183) elucidates:

We shall define pedagogic discourse as the rule which embeds a discourse of competence (skills of various kinds) into a discourse of social order in such a way that the latter always dominates the former. We shall call the discourse of transmitting specialized competences and their relation to each other instructional discourse, and the discourse creating specialized order, relation and identity regulative discourse.

Given the nature of pedagogic discourse as possessing both the aspects of instruction and regulation, Bernstein (2000: 184) notes that the pedagogic discourse is said to be ‘a discourse without a specific discourse’, for it has no discourse of its own. Rather, the pedagogic discourse is said to be ‘a principle for appropriating other discourses and bringing them into a special relation with each other for the purposes of their selective transmission and acquisition’.

The understanding of the nature of the pedagogic discourse in teaching and learning, as developed by Bernstein and adapted by others such as Christie (1995, 2002, 2007), Christie and Macken-Horarik (2007, 2011), O’Halloran (2004, 2011), and Wignell (2007) is extended to what is described as ‘multimodal pedagogic discourse’ in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Embodied teaching
• 2 Multimodal pedagogic discourse
• 3 Spatial pedagogy
• 4 Pedagogic gestures
• 5 Semiotic technologies
• 6 Multimodal classroom orchestration
• 7 Designing learning
• Index