10 October 2017: Seminar by Chloe Grace Fogarty-Bourget, Carleton University, Ottawa, "More than chalk and talk: The use of gestures and movement in university mathematics lecturing"

More than chalk and talk: The use of gestures and movement in university mathematics lecturing

Chloe Grace Fogarty-Bourget

STEMTEC Lunchtime Seminar Series, 2017

Where:  WT121

When: Tuesday 10 October 2017, 12-1pm

University mathematics lecturing includes different modes of communication that co-occur: writing on the board, articulating what is being written, moving, and gesturing. These modes, which are integral to the teaching of university mathematics, are used by instructors to promote student-instructor interaction and students' active engagement in learning. We draw on a genre-based conceptual framework (e.g., Miller, 1984) and gesture theories (e.g., Kendon, 2004) to show that, in addition to pragmatic gesturing, instructors are able to combine episodes of non-gesturing, or what we call gestural silence with speech, movement, and other resources to engage students in doing mathematics. Findings reveal that gestural silence is used by instructors to make evident that they are listening attentively to students, and to initiate dialogue in the classroom. Findings also show subtle differences in the ways that novice and experienced instructors employ certain communicative resources while teaching. The study has important implications for future research on engaging features of undergraduate mathematics instruction and for training novice university mathematics instructors and teaching assistants.

Chloë Grace Fogarty-Bourget is a PhD candidate within the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She is a multimodal researcher in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies whose study of language includes gesture, movement, facial display, spatial orientation, image, and sound as well as speech and writing. Her research focuses on university mathematics lecturing, student-instructor interaction, and engagement.

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