Keynotes > Martha Alibali

Gesture in Teaching and Learning Interactions: Representing, Highlighting and Linking Ideas

Many mathematical and scientific concepts are intangible or abstract, and such concepts often reflect relations that are not immediately salient to learners. Children learn such concepts through interactions with other people, such as teachers, parents, and peers, in both formal educational settings and informal interactions. In this talk, I focus on teaching and learning interactions about mathematical and scientific concepts, with consideration of behavior in naturalistic settings. I argue that, in such interactions, people use their bodies in communicating in three key ways that can support understanding and foster learning. First, people use gestures to represent ideas, and specifically, to make intangible ideas concrete and to connect them to familiar actions and experiences. Second, people use gestures to highlight structure in objects, inscriptions, and situations. Third, people use gestures to connect exemplars or representations, often by highlighting structural relations or correspondences. I present both illustrative examples from naturalistic settings and experimental studies that demonstrate the impact of these communication practices on encoding and learning of mathematical concepts. This perspective highlights the importance of communication and the body in learning abstract and relational concepts, and it provides a new lens for analyzing and understanding teaching and learning interactions.