Volume 7, Issue s4 - Instructing embodied knowledge. Multimodal approaches to interactive practices for knowledge constitution; Editors: Oliver Ehmer and Geert Brône

In the introduction to the special issue on ‘Instructing embodied knowledge’, we present a general orientation into this growing field of research, providing the relevant background for the individual contributions. The starting point for the endeavor is the basic observation that practical knowledge or ‘knowing-how’ is typically of a procedural, implicit and embodied nature rather than explicit-conceptual. Given this specific nature, we highlight the fact that for transmitting this type of knowledge, instructors make use of specific multimodal practices that are adjusted to these characteristics. The notion of instructional practice furthermore emphasizes that instructing embodied knowledge is a highly collaborative process between learners and their instructors. In order to provide a broad take on the phenomenon, we review both social-interactional as well as cognitive approaches to embodied knowledge and discuss how the procedural and intercorporeal nature of this knowledge may challenge different views. Independent of the specific approach that is chosen, any account of the construction/instruction of embodied knowledge should emphasize that it is essentially (i) a social activity, (ii) involving the deployment of different semiotic resources, and (iii) using different techniques and devices, such as descriptions, directives and demonstrations. Based on a review of the literature and on the papers in the special issue, we identify a set of key questions that may help to shape the agenda for future studies in the field. The questions relate to the temporal-sequential organization of instructions, the continuum between demonstrations and performances, and the relationship between perceptual access, sensation and the acquisition of embodied knowledge.

The body is the singer’s musical instrument, and therefore it is impossible to teach singing without the instructor involving their own and the learner’s body in the process of instruction. The teacher’s challenge is to communicate physical skills but also artistic, musical and vocal concepts. The body is centrally involved in the performance of both; however, an analysis of vocal instruction shows that teachers differentiate between learning goals, or ‘learnables’, which they treat as primarily embodied (body-focused instruction) and learnables they treat as primarily conceptualised (concept-focused instruction). When teaching learnables as embodied skills, instructors foreground the body. They do so by referring to the body explicitly and using their own body for demonstrations. They also depict internal physical processes, manipulate the student’s body through touch, share the student’s embodied stance, make use of physical objects as tools for practicing skills and orient to the student’s body as visually assessable. In concept-focused instruction, teachers foreground mental engagement with concepts rather than the embodied aspects of their execution, even though embodied skills are required to perform the learnables in question. They do so by referencing concepts explicitly, demonstrating how the piece should be sung and physically depicting emotional states and musical concepts.

In this contribution, we investigate the transfer of embodied procedural knowledge in two cello master classes, zooming in on what we identify as speech-embedded nonverbal depictions — cases where meaning is communicated nonverbally, iconically, and without temporally co-occurring speech — an overlooked domain in the literature foregrounded by a critical reconceptualization of Clark’s (2016) framework of depicting. Examining such depictions in the cello classes, the curious pattern of multimodal iteration emerges, where the “same” meaning is communicated multiple times, but in multiple different combinations of modality and signaling method, and with different aspects of the meaning profiled. A brief discussion of such cases in relation to dialogic syntax then underlines the relevance of semiotic properties and dialogic resonance, revealing the rich communicative affordances of multimodal iteration in contexts of instruction.

Language is believed to be a central device for communicating meaning and knowledge between humans. It is superb in its capacity to code abstract ideas and displaced information, which can be conveyed from person to person, sometimes across centuries. When it comes to instructing a bodily skill in co-present situations, language is used along with other multimodal resources. This paper focuses on the role of vocalizations in dance teaching, syllables that express simultaneous body movement rather than abstract lexical content. While being essentially a vocal resource, the meaning of vocalizations arises in the simultaneously moving bodies. By carrying indexical and only partially conventionalized meaning, vocalizations constitute a puzzle for linguistic theory that preferably targets the arbitrary, symbolic and conventionalized aspects of human vocal production. The meanings conveyed from one body to another through a vocalization are experiential rather than intellectual. Vocalizations provide a solution to the problem of transferring body knowledge from one autonomous organism to another, and can even be embedded in syntax. The analysis is based on an occasion of teaching a jazz routine to a larger group of students.

Demonstrations are a central resource for instructing body knowledge. They allow instructors to provide learners with a structured perceptual access to the performance of an activity. The present paper considers demonstrations as inherently social activities, in which not only the instructor but also the learners may participate. A particular form of co-participation is that learners synchronize their own bodily actions with the demonstration of the instructor. The paper examines two practices of synchronization in demonstrations. In emergent synchronizations the instructor invites the student(s) to synchronize, rather than request them to do so. In orchestrated synchronizations teachers actively pursue the students’ bodily synchronization. The two practices are typically used for different instructional purposes. While emergent synchronizations are typically used in corrective instructions, orchestrated synchronizations are typically used to instruct new knowledge. Based on a large corpus of instructions in dancing Argentine Tango, the paper uses multimodal interaction analysis to characterize both practices regarding their interactional organization, their functional properties and the resources used by the participants to establish synchronization.

This article investigates action plans not as mental but as situated and observable activities in social interactions. I argue that projections and action plans can be understood as complex embodied practices through which actors prepare and coordinate further actions as part of a trajectory of a “communicative project”. “Projections” within ‘talk-in-interaction’ are a central topic of conversation analysis (CA), e.g. for the micro analysis of the organization of turn-taking or for the identification of turn-constructional units. Aside from former CA-studies on syntactic and prosodic features, current research using CA from a multimodal perspective shows how embodied resources, such as gestures, serve as “premonitory components” of communicative actions. Using video data of communications in sports training in trampolining, I will show how communicatively situated “embodied action plans” are applied within pre-enactments and instructions for the production of embodied knowledge. Pre-enactments not only serve the production of an ideal imagination to corporally produce intersubjectivity. Pre-enactments are also used temporally for the multimodal and visibly situating of embodied action plans, to which actors can coordinate and orientate their current and prospective communicative actions.

This contribution examines how an expert musician teaches high pitch as an embodied practice in a digital instruction video. Musical meaning-making in this perspective calls for a naturalized phenomenology which deals with the practice of music teaching, which involves a performing body. The notion of high musical pitch in terms of an abstract embodied image schema is challenged in favor of a multidimensional body schema, conceptualized at the interface between multimodal language, i.e. in speech and gesture, and the affordances imposed on musical production by the human body and the instrument artefact. As a result, the traditional metaphorical take on upward verticality, movement and causal force in image schemata becomes a conceptual background which may lead to errors on behalf of the potential student, and needs to be further enriched by natural local corporeal dimensions: immobility, non-vertical change in the lips, mouth and air flow. Such body schemata can be used in teaching more dynamic concepts about enactive knowledge in the body in interactive contexts of knowledge transmission.

This paper examines music instrument teachers’ instructive use of noun metaphors and metonymies of behaviors related to the playing and handling of a musical instrument. Drawing on 10 video-recorded 30–40 min-long instrument lessons as data, and conversation analysis as a method, the paper examines the temporal location of these figurative turns (i.e., instruction turns including a noun metaphor or metonymy) within the instructional activities and in relation to the student’s behaviors. At the beginning of a new instructional sequence, a figurative turn allows the teacher to test and monitor the level of student’s knowledge, while the student orients to a need to demonstrate that knowledge. Figurative turns also enable the teacher to initiate correction in complex movement sequences, its organization as a series of metaphors or metonymies enabling an easy return to an earlier point in a sequence. Furthermore, the flexibility of metaphors and metonymies as interactional resources is evidenced by the ease by which a figurative instruction turn may be transformed into an affirmative evaluation of student conduct. The paper thus suggests that instructing body knowledge through metaphors and metonymies has significant pedagogical advantages, also providing a detailed account for why and how this is the case.

In various ways the movement and experience of the body is instructed by others. This may be in the dance class or on the playing field. In these interactions, one person claims knowledge of the other’s body and rights to instruct how that body functions, moves, and feels. By undertaking a close analysis of embodied and spoken interaction within performance training sessions from a multimodal conversation analytic perspective, this paper will identify one kind of broad sequential trajectory – from intimate contact to public display - that shows how an instructor claims rights over the internal workings of another’s body by traversing different levels of proximity and sensorial modalities.

Based on a large corpus of video and eye-tracking data and inspired by multimodal conversation analysis, this paper analyses how visitors discover natural phenomena during their use of hands-on exhibits in a science and technology centre (STC). In these discoveries, individual multisensorial experiences of natural phenomena are communicatively transferred from one visitor to another. This paper describes two contrasting sequential formats of joint discoveries in the STC. In the first and more frequent case, experiences are socially shared by focussing the co-visitors’ visual attention on one point in their interactional space, while in the second case perceptions are socially shared via reproduction sequences , i.e. by repeating the actions that have led to the discovery with exchanged roles. We will argue that in these reproduction sequences, sharing experiences can be understood via the concept of “intercorporeality” (Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2014 [1945]. Phenomenology of perception . London, New York: Routledge). Our paper contributes to the current debate on intercorporeality, as it empirically shows that it is analytically fruitful to extend the concept to situations without simultaneous perception.