Multimodal Revoicing as an Interactional Mechanism for Connecting Scientific and Everyday Concepts

Abstract

A perpetual problem learners face is identifying which aspects of embodied experiences are relevant for appreciating the world in culturally specific ways. Vygotsky argued that social interactions with more competent cultural members provide arenas for linking everyday and scientific concepts. However, the precise interactional mechanisms of how these linkages are forged remain underexamined. I argue that understanding these mechanisms requires examining how intersubjectivity is built and maintained. I propose that ethnomethodological conversation analysis and the co-operative action framework provide a uniquely suited analytic orientation for this project because they focus on the fine details of the actual practical methods people use to procedurally achieve intersubjectivity. To illustrate the utility of these approaches, I show how the fine details of multimodal revoicing interactions present semiotic challenges that allow learners to link everyday and scientific concepts. Specifically, I examine the role dialogic gesture plays in reformulating a multimodally expressed idea about what it means to “go faster.”

Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

“…For example, sign language may offer advantages for collaboratively discovering new mathematical relationships in its use of physical space and motion to capture and organize ideas as compared with the linear constraints of spoken American English. Flood (2018) has also demonstrated the beneficial effects that exchanging, recycling, and transforming multimodally expressed ideas through revoicing can have on advancing new mathematical understandings. In addition, the use of haptic and tactile ways of communicating (e.g., conveying an idea by tracing a pattern on another person's body-c.f.…”

“…Appreciating how mathematical understandings emerge in UDL-inspired fields of promoted action between sensorily heterogenous mathematics students will require careful attention to participants' practical, situated, embodied, multimodal methods and resources for building and maintaining intersubjectivity (Flood et al 2016;Flood 2018;Koschmann and Mori 2016;Wittmann et al 2013). As part of this process, participants reciprocally work to render their experiences publicly available to others, using novel resources and methods that are perceptually available to their collaborators.…”

“…Concepts implemented to date in the Trainer activity architecture include proportions (Abrahamson et al 2014; Fig. 1a), the Cartesian field (Duijzer et al 2017), speed (Flood 2018), geometrical area (Shvarts 2017), parabolas (Shvarts and Abrahamson 2018; Fig. 1c), and trigonometry 1 3 (Alberto 2018).…”

The Future of Embodied Design for Mathematics Teaching and Learning

“…Group members engaged in multimodal co-construction, such that the external nature of gestures allowed students to copy, extend, correct, and revise each other's conceptions through gesture. Flood (2018), through an analysis of a middle school student's interactions with tutors around concepts of speed and ratio, demonstrates how multimodal revoicing-using gesture in conjunction with speech to reproduce, elaborate, or selectively modify an idea presented by a learner-can be used by tutors to move students toward conventional or culturally appropriate forms of reasoning. Another line of work (Hall et al, 2015;Ma, 2017;Ma and Hall, 2018) has explored ensemble routines, in which high school students learn to position and orient their bodies and coordinate their perspectives to accomplish a collective goal (e.g., formulating marching band patterns or large-scale geometric constructions), sometimes with the assistance of GPS technologies.…”

Teaching with embodied learning technologies for mathematics: responsive teaching for embodied learning

“…From Goodwin's perspective, learners' technology-mediated embodied experiences and their first attempts at representing these experiences comprise a substrate (2018) that we believe can be cultivated into robust, disciplinary understandings of mathematics through guided reflection, negotiation, and signification with more-capable others (tutors, teachers, parents, museum educators, etc. ; (Abrahamson & Trninic, 2014;Flood, 2018;Shvarts & Abrahamson, 2019). When culturally-competent others and learners negotiate divergent interpretations of experiences (Wertsch, 1984), zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1986) emerge that make socialization-including mathematical socialization-possible.…”