The paper examines teachers’ “thinking faces” (Goodwin & Goodwin 1986) as an embodied resource for shaping epistemic ecologies in classroom discussions. From the perspective of conversation analysis and multimodal interaction research, such stylized facial displays are understood as a sedimented and socially shared interactional resource that can be used to index particular epistemic stances. In argumentative negotiations among peers, for example, they are used to indicate the speaker’s still uncertain epistemic stance and to invite the co-participants to jointly examine a proposal (Heller 2021).

Video recordings of classroom discussions indicate that thinking faces are also a regularly used resource by teachers. Given that teachers are typically assumed to be more knowledgeable than students (van der Meij et al. 2022), the question arises as to which functions this display fulfils for the construction of knowledge in classroom discourse. Addressing this question, I examine video-recorded whole-class discussions with teachers of different subjects. The analysis focuses on the ways in which teachers temporally align thinking displays with other bodily and verbal resources or silence and traces how these multimodal gestalts shape the subsequent course of interaction.

The analysis demonstrates that teachers’ embodied displays of ‘doing thinking’ have specific multimodal gestalts. Depending on the type of question or prompt they are used with and whether they are held over one or more student turns, they contribute to the shaping of particular epistemic ecologies in classroom discussions. The findings thus offer novel insights into the role of embodied resources for epistemic stance-taking in classroom interaction.

References

Goodwin, Marjorie Harness; Goodwin, Charles (1986): Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica 1/2 (62), 51–75.

van der Meij, Sofie; Gosen, Myrte; Willemsen, Annerose (2022): ‘Yes? I have no idea’: teacher turns containing epistemic disclaimers in upper primary school whole-class discussions. Classroom Discourse, 1–23.

Heller, Vivien (2021): Embodied Displays of ‘Doing Thinking’. Epistemic and Interactive Functions of Thinking Faces in Children's Argumentative Activities. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 636671.

This presentation investigates the mobilisation of peer assistance in smartphone trainings for adults. More specifically, it focuses on course participants’ embodied displays of trouble (Kendrick/Drew 2016) to which one of their co-participants then responds by offering assistance. Within a set of video recordings of basic smartphone trainings for adults in different adult education centres in Germany, instances of spontaneous peer teaching are frequent. These reveal how the participants position themselves as more or less knowledgeable with respect to handling a smartphone, and capable of providing, or, on the contrary, in need of assistance in order to implement the course leader’s instructions.

Within conversation analytic and interactional research, peer tutoring among adult participants has been mainly described as an institutionally framed form of relationship (e.g., Waring 2005, 2012, Wyatt/Dikilitas 2017), with a focus on how peers interact within collaborative tasks (e.g., Evnitskaya 2021, Jakonen/Morton 2015), and how they use shared tools and resources (Mlynář 2022, Nishino/Atkinson 2015). Spontaneous peer interaction and teaching (e.g., Gort 2008), especially related to digital skills or devices (e.g., Scriven 2017) and to how peers position themselves as experts (e.g., Back 2016, Melander 2012), has however not yet been investigated outside of compulsory school or foreign language education and in older adults.

In the digital skills courses under investigation, the course leader usually instructs the participants to individually handle their own smartphones. Given the course participants’ heterogeneous previous experience with mobile devices, these individual tasks are not always or immediately successfully accomplished. While requests for assistance or trouble reports are mainly handled by the course instructor, participants also seek for assistance among their peers, usually among the ones sitting next to them. This physical proximity allows for minimal and embodied-only displays of trouble, such as looking (Drew/Kendrick 2018) toward the other’s smartphone. Based on a sequential and multimodal approach to social interaction, the analyses illustrate how course participants recognize or even anticipate (Kendrick/Drew 2016) their peers’ subtle displays of trouble by then providing explanations, reformulating course tasks, or using their own phone for illustrative purposes. Moreover, as the recorded courses last several hours or even sessions, it is possible to observe how some of these peer relations emerge, and how even previously unacquainted participants can form expert/non-expert dyads over time.