Arguing with objects and bodies: embodied reasoning and material entanglements in science learner interaction

ABSTRACT

How do people use objects and gestures to shape scientific argumentation? This paper engages the concept of “entanglement” as a heuristic for considering the potentials and constraints that gestures and materials create for interactants. Drawing on video recorded data from an academic-year-long linguistic ethnography of a high school science classroom in southern Arizona, USA, I examine the entanglement of discourse, bodies, and objects in one act sequence to reveal differences in the situated practices of high school students as opposed to professional scientists. The analysis reveals that objects and gestures allow scientific novices to engage in collaborative sense-making as they transform discourse and are transformed in discourse. At the same time, the flexibility and contingency of objects and gestures can be problematic for novices dealing with ambiguous understandings of natural phenomena, leading to interpretations that may or may not correspond to expert understandings. Reckoning with materiality in science argumentation must account for the limitations of objects and bodies as forms of evidence as well as their potential to afford forms of agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Science learning
• gesture
• objects
• expert-novice interaction
• linguistic ethnography

Acknowledgments

This project was approved by the University of Arizona Institutional Review Board (Project No. 10-0593-02). Many thanks to the participants in the 2016 CLIC Body Talk Symposium at UCLA who provided commentary on an early version of this paper. In addition to those whose specific contributions are acknowledged in the endnotes, I received helpful verbal feedback from Nick Enfield, John Heritage, and the late Charles Goodwin. Thanks especially to Norma Mendoza-Denton for inviting me to take part in the symposium and encouraging me to work through these ideas about entanglement and materiality in interaction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Thanks to Elinor Ochs for clarifying this.

2. It’s tempting to read a gendered element into Clara and Yesenia’s interactional work here, especially in Clara’s framing of her argument as indirect reported speech from Julia (“well ‘cause she said”), her consistent hedging (‘I think, I don’t know’) and Yesenia’s ratification at the end of the sequence (line 12). That being said, there isn’t enough evidence in this brief strip of interaction to justify such a reading. In other work with data from this project, I’ve looked across individual speech events over the course of an academic year to advance a reading of scientific knowledge claims as indexing cultural identity (not gender) (O’Connor, 2015).

3. Thanks to Jacob Foster for this observation and the Tunguska connection.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.