Photographs in lectures: Gestures as meaning-making resources

Abstract

Photographs are the most frequent inscriptions in high school biology textbooks. However, little is known about how students make sense of and learn from photographs; even less is known about the different resources available for making sense of photographs when they appear in lectures. In this study, the use of photographs during lectures and lecture-type situations was analyzed with respect to the semiotic resources that speakers standing next to the projected photographs provided for understanding and learning from them. Our analysis identified eight types of gesture as semiotic resources that decreased the ambiguity inherent in photographs, and that have the potential to enhance the understanding of photographs and the scientific concepts embodied in them. We surmise that teachers can help their students learn to read and interpret photographs from lectures when they project them in such a way that it allows the use of gestures as additional meaning-making resources.

On performing concepts during science lectures

“…Together, these different types of gestures (i.e., beats, deictic, iconic, and metaphoric) are produced with high frequency during teaching (Pozzer-Ardenghi & Roth 2005). Spontaneous gestures not only are resources in themselves, carrying specific communicative information, as we show in the sections that follow, but also play a special role in integrating multiple resources that are copresent in the lecture situation.…”

“…Following a previous study that shows that lecturers achieve integration of multiple resources through the deployment of gestures and body orientation that function to connect the various resources used (Pozzer-Ardenghi & Roth, 2005), we contend that gestures not only constitute one of the resources employed during science classrooms, but that they are also the means through which integration is achieved among the various resources that constitute the meaning unit. That is, gestures provide the links between verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication, and material artifacts present in the classroom.…”

“…But to understand what if anything the audience can take away from a lecture, we need to better understand those resources that the teacher produces to assist listeners in making sense and learning. This article is entirely devoted to the nature of the meaning-making resources a lecturer produces and their internal relation, and therefore situates itself in a line of research concerned with the nature of science lectures (Pozzer-Ardenghi & Roth, 2005;Roth & Tobin, 1996;Roth, Tobin, & Shaw, 1997).…”

Photographs and Classroom Response Systems in Middle School Astronomy Classes

“…In addition, there are very few studies about photographs in science education (Gilbert 2008). For example, Pozzer and Roth distinguished functions of photographs in relation to captions and texts in high school biology textbooks Roth 2003, 2004), and they identified types of teacher gestures presented when lecturing with photographs (Pozzer-Ardenghi and Roth 2005).…”

Géneros en la enseñanza escolar: Configuraciones de significado en clases de historia y biología desde una perspectiva multimodal

“…Entre los estudios que han abierto camino en esta línea, destaca, en primer lugar, la investigación de Jewitt, Kress, Ogborn & Tsatsarelis (2001) sobre la retórica de la enseñanza de las ciencias en el aula, en el cual describen las explicaciones de los profesores que integran texto, dibujos y palabras. A partir de este, se encuentran aquellos sobre los gestos y el lenguaje visual utilizados en clases (Márquez et al, 2000;Pozzer-Ardenghi & Roth, 2005), y los textos escolares desde la multimodalidad (Martins, 2006;Unsworth, 2008;Oteíza, 2009;Bezemer & Kress, 2010), entre otros.…”