Paying Attention to Gesture when Students Talk Chemistry: Interactional Resources for Responsive Teaching

When students share and explore chemistry ideas with others, they use gestures and their bodies to perform their understanding. As a publicly visible, spatio–dynamic medium of expression, gestures and the body provide productive resources for imagining the submicroscopic, three-dimensional, and dynamic phenomena of chemistry together. In this paper, we analyze the role of gestures and the body as interactional resources in interactive spaces for collaborative meaning-making in chemistry. With our moment-by-moment analysis of video-recorded interviews, we demonstrate how creating spaces for, attending to, and interacting with students’ gestures and bodily performances generate opportunities for learning. Implications for teaching and assessment that are responsive to students’ ideas in chemistry are discussed.

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