Embodiment and asynchronous storytelling in science classrooms

ABSTRACT

Background

In science education asynchronous online interactions have increased dramatically during the recent pandemic and some of these practices will stay. One of the characteristics in asynchronous exchanges is the spacing and sequencing of online interaction. It means that dialogue partners do not necessarily receive immediate feedback as is the case in a face-to-face exchange. This article presents student produced stories in science education as part of asynchronous activities. When we communicate experiences with the world through stories, we also convey embodied information. The question arises what role the body may play in such exchanges.

Purpose

The article explores the role embodiment plays in science education when communication takes place asynchronously, specifically when students are tasked to share their science explorations with others.

Sample

Three examples (primary, secondary and tertiary science education) are presented. Data were ethnographically collected that include fieldnotes, videos (including video observations), photos, interviews, student and teacher prepared materials.

Design and methods

Using a storytelling method, the article presents how the materiality of the online asynchronous environment affords embodiment. Storytelling as a method was chosen to give participants a voice.

Results

Embodiment played an important role in all three examples. It helped students to share how they conducted experiments for others to follow or share their experiences or impressions about scientists’ work. Embodiment expressed students’ emotions associated with the topics that were presented. Embodiment personalized the students’ productions and was a deliberate choice for sharing information about inquiring about star constellations, e-mobility or the nature of scientists’ practices.

Discussion

In asynchronous online dialogue students can reflectively share through their stories how they perceive and inhabit the world. Embodiment plays an important part of meaning making and as exemplified here, allows to show and share understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• asynchronous
• storytelling
• body memory
• digital stories

Introduction

To be in, and interact with, the world shapes us as embodied beings. Our bodies are the openings to the world and form our understanding and interpretations about the world (Merleau-Ponty 2012). We respond in embodied ways to situations and involve our bodies reliably through our emotional responses in situations that are interpreted through our personal history (Hufendiek 2017). For instance, we may feel anxious and fearful when we face a dog, if we had earlier bad experiences with dogs/animals or quite the opposite if we associate joyful memories with dogs or no fearful experiences with dogs or animals. However, embodied experiences are much more than responses to sensory stimulus since they are complementary to the environment in which they occur and share relational properties with the environment (Hufendiek 2015). These relational properties of a given environment are also known as what Gibson James (2014) calls, affordances.

In societies that operate more and more through digital technologies, one may get the impression that this could render the embodied presence (almost) obsolete. This could be problematic for science education since learning about new and abstract concepts (for example through metaphors or analogies) need the support of embodied experiences (Niebert, Marsch, and Treagust 2012). Shusterman (2008) reminds his readers that the increase of digitalized communication has only reaffirmed how urgently we need the body to experience and perceive the world in order to communicate these perceptions. The draining virtual interactions, that many experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic have perhaps re-sensitized our awareness of the need for embodiment and bodily perception.

Digitalized video lectures or explanatory videos in science that can supplement science teaching and learning (asynchronously) often focus on the presentation of facts to those who are assumed to have a knowledge gap and are not necessarily produced in ways that are engaging to the viewers (Kohler and Clara Dietrich 2021). Staying with the practices of digitalized formats of communication I want to examine the role of embodied experiences when stories by and for school students are shared in digital formats. Research has cautioned that successful online communication relies on a complex interplay of social, psychological, cultural and emotional factors that are often quite different from face-to-face settings (Bonk and Dennen 1999; Salmon 2011).

Before I continue here, I would like to briefly address two central ideas in this article: ‘asynchronous’ and ‘dialogue’. Asynchronous learning means that recipients do not need to be online at the same time to receive/exchange information. Varkey et al. (2022) conducted a literature review on this topic and explain that asynchronous learning is signified by spacing and sequencing. Spacing is for example when teachers provide question sets and allow students time to review them, while sequencing applies to the release of teaching material in a particular order. Varkey et al. (2022) explain that the value of spacing and sequencing is increased if students have unlimited amounts of attempts to solve questions. However, Varkey’s et al. (2022) analysis focused on asynchronous activities where learning materials are produced by the teachers, whereas in this article I refer to materials that are authored by students to then be shared with others.

Dialogue has been explored by a number of scholars, here I focus on Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding, that dialogue is lived exchange and not abstract, and that it is characterized by values and judgements too. Bakhtin (1993) refers to pravda or ‘truth as lived’ and istina ‘truth as abstract’. While the two may sound contradictory, for Bakhtin the generation of truth requires reflection of the ‘self’ (the author) to give value to the ‘other’ (the hero). It involves anticipation how the ‘other’ might expect to see the ‘self’. Bakhtin’s take on dialogue resonates also because of his emphasis on embodiment, which affords emotion and moral connections and for him dialogue invites also historical reflections (Sullivan 2012, 168). Bringing the two concepts together then means that spaced and sequenced asynchronous exchanges allow that dialogue is reflective, embodied and emotionally connected.

Aside from being temporally offset, asynchronous online dialogue has magnifying and distancing qualities. The content creators can orchestrate in their own time the details, they want their viewers or dialogue partners to focus on by zooming in on some aspects and neglecting others (Kuntz Aaron and Evely Gildersleeve 2012). As we are slowly moving towards a post-COVID era we can also observe a shift towards heightened expectations to merge classroom-based instruction and online learning activities (Lockee Barbara 2021). It is therefore evermore so important to interrogate the role of the body and embodied perceptions in asynchronous online exchanges to think about the possible consequences of such exchanges.

Questions that arise include, whether the role of the body stays the same, or if the body gets repositioned in asynchronous science stories, or whether the body fades out all together? I will approach these questions by examining digital stories as part of science education activities.

Digital storytelling has been described to be very useful for sharing more than facts since the medium and the formats that are available have the capacity to catch the attention of their viewers and share different layers of meaning (Truong-White and McLean 2015). More than that, stories stick, they have the potential to be remembered and create points of wonder (Neal 2001). Put into context, in this article I examine the idea of embodiment in digital asynchronous settings by looking into different examples of storytelling in science education. Embodied aspects of interaction are examined in several ways, highlighting different phases and formats: planning and collaboration phases (synchronous interactions), students engaging with each other (real-time interaction), students with the researcher (real-time) as they reflect upon their experiences (in some cases through photo elicitation), and then within the videos they (co-)create (real-time recording and asynchronous viewing). All of these involve embodied interactions and embodied connection making.

I will begin this exploration with some considerations from the literature on sensory experiences and embodiment to then connect with the topic of digitally mediated stories.

Sensory experiences expressed through stories

We perceive the world around us through the senses of our bodies. It is precisely through this way of being in the world that we can situate ourselves and other constituents of this world. Our bodies provide us with a lived dimensionality, that allows us to understand ourselves and articulate how we imagine others (humans and non-humans) to be in this world. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) explain it as an:

‘Opening and clearing, in the multidimensional field of Being, for it articulates the embodiment-character of our responsiveness and elicits its potential for development on the basis of our initial, most primordial sense of Being-in-the-world’. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 62)

Feminist writer, Butler (2011) points out that an exploration of the body involves exploring its discursive possibilities. Butler stresses however, that our access to matter never takes place unmediated and that it is a product of the mode of conceptualization. Matter is thus ‘a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity … we call matter’ (2011).

Continuing from here, storytelling can be seen as one of the discursive formats the body can use to share our conceptualizations of the world as matter. Storytelling may involve the use of different media and materials, one format being a piece of paper containing words and our embodied reflections that we may share with others. Stories and story productions can also take on formats that are greatly enhanced through the use of digital tools (Truong-White and McLean 2015). For example, video recording a narration of a story gives it some permanency, illustrating, and capturing illustrations that mediate the intentions of the storyteller may also allow that intentions are enhanced and amplified through the body. These material decisions shape what and how we convey a story, sense others or are sensed by others.

When we then share sensory, embodied experiences through our stories, that have for example emotional qualities, we allow others to make connections with their own body memories (Du Toit and Morgan Swer 2021). Body memory has been described in the field of cognitive psychology, where it is more commonly referred to as implicit or tacit memory (explicit memory in contrast, are the recollections that can be explicitly recalled and described) (Fuchs 2012). Fuchs (2012, 9) describes it as ‘an essential basis of our experience of self and identity’.

Storytelling and the sharing of lived experiences is a format that has been picked up methodologically in research because of its richness and also because it gives space to individual voices (Irwin Stacey 2014). For example, Pink (2015) explored a sensory methodology in her work when she examined people’s everyday practices with electricity at home. One of the outcomes she produced with her participants, were video tours where Pink was shown around in people’s homes, when they were guiding her through their lived experiences at home, switching lights on and off to demonstrate their daily routines, moving furniture, touching walls etc. Pink explains that as a researcher her focus was ‘to re-think both established and new participatory and collaborative ethnographic research techniques in terms of sensory perception, categories, meanings and values, ways of knowing and practices’ (Pink 2015, 10). The deliberate choice to create stories that allow the sharing of sensory, embodied experiences may not necessarily be the primary focus when young people are asked to prepare stories at school, in their science lessons. Nor is it common to refer to the often observational, and reflective narratives that are being produced as part of students’ work in science as ‘stories’ due to the traditional focus on objectivity in this subject (Davis James and Bellocchi 2018; Kampourakis 2016). In science education these narratives are called reports, accounts, studies, presentations, but seldom stories since that emphasizes subjectiveness. In earlier work (Otrel-Cass 2018) I highlighted how to apply a sensory pedagogy in science classrooms. A central pedagogical idea was to give space for ‘individual, subjective and emotional experiences’ since they allow us to ‘create complex “pictures” in our minds’ (192). Sharing these experiences through stories allows to (re-)experience our own and other people’s stories so that “our embodied consciousness pays attention’ (Vannini, Waskul, and Gotschalk 2011, 8) especially when stories are digitally produced as videos or animated stories (Bissonnette 2019).

Digital storytelling, multi-media stories and embodiment

Digital storytelling is still an underused pedagogical approach, yet one with much potential to support young people to critically reflect on issues that become relevant to their lives through this form of engagement (Truong-White and McLean 2015). Using different multi-media, including photos, drawings, videos, music, text, and/or narration, information is shaped with a personal take that sometimes involves the sharing of the authors’ own experiences. Story telling taken this way becomes ‘language in action’ (Gee 2004) that ‘involves the expression of an embodied subjectivity’ (Sullivan 2012, 43). Sullivan bases his argument on the ideas of the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin to point out that this kind of discourse makes space for texture and intonations, giving it authenticity because it is of personal relevance. Sullivan (2012, 44) uses the example of defending a position we would normally feel indifferent about, where we share expressions of attitude and subjectivity.

This is possible through digital storytelling since it affords ways to contrast and show different layers of information (e.g. through multi-media) (Brushwood Rose and Brushwood Rose Chloë 2009), to give it more depth or colour and this help others to experience the world observed and lived through the story. Our encounters with stories-created also involve our bodies and the connection of our bodies with the world. For instance, the story of a person walking through a forest may evoke body memory of walking in nature, bounded to experiences and the affordances of an environment a person may be familiar with (Hufendiek 2017). The reader of a story engages with a story told, to re-evaluate his/her own sensory boundaries. When the story expands the boundaries of what is humanly possible, so does the reader’s imagination. This is for instance the case when stories include animations, where characters and scenes stretch the space-time limits and/or become metaphorical (Bissonnette 2019). Bissonnette points out that the encounters with animations ‘incite us to reevaluate what we know about our sensory boundaries and the limits of the human’ (15). In an animated story the author can overstretch, overemphasize situations, and sometimes alienate characters. There is the possibility to utilize powerful images or ideas and choose empowered characters that defy stereotypes. It evokes motor mimicry or the copying of posture or expressions of another person, when people view real or fictional persons for instance in videos or when listening to stories (Bavelas et al. 1987). This means (digital) stories intentionally evoke these embodied responses. Research on embodiment in education recognizes that we learn with and through our bodies (Otrel-Cass 2018; Shapiro 2007), that learning is shaped by the materials we engage with (Kalthoff and Röhl 2011; Otrel-Cass and Cowie 2019) and the social configurations with other human actors (Cowie, Moreland, and Otrel-Cass 2013).

In face-to-face classroom settings, storytelling and sharing might take place through oral performances or materially mediated forms of communication, that take place between the teacher and students. Digital formats of interactions have expanded this traditional format allowing educational interactions to breach the physical walls of the classroom. Ihde and Selinger (2003) point out that it is important to examine the nature of connection between the embodied being and the world, which he calls the interface. This interface shapes our contextual embodied presence and how we synchronize ourselves with the world (Merleau-Ponty 2012).

What is of interest here is how we relate and share ideas and experiences via asynchronous digital materials. Crome et al. (2021, 207) identify some of the characteristics of asynchronous learning that include: individual time management; arbitrary access/flexibility; indirect interaction possible; promotion of self-study; learning diversification; self-paced study; considered communication; no multilayer interaction; responses delayed; and time investment increased. The immediacy of reactions is not necessarily given in asynchronous interactions while real-time responses (verbal and/or no-verbal) are guaranteed in face-to-face exchanges.

What role does embodiment play when we are communicating or looking through a monitor or screen to try and experience the temporally offset phenomenon of connecting and sensing others? Communication through media produces an extension of the self (McLuhan 1964). However, the computer adds a never-before-seen logic and layers to this communication (Manovich 2002), a realization that we had to come to terms with especially, after COVID-19 prohibited face-to-face education and changed our relationship with computer-assisted forms of interaction and teaching and learning (Crome et al. 2021).

The digital medium changes how we produce ourselves and reflect on those productions. Irwin Stacey (2014) expands on Ihde’s emphasis and says that the digital surface adds an ‘inter-face … where the body face and computer face meet’ (43). A question that arises for this article is whether the digital inter-face has created a distancing where the body (in its previous form) gets lost in translations?

To bridge from the theoretical explorations above to what this may mean in practice, I present examples in this article. I will begin by detailing the method and data next.

Method and data

In this contribution I present examinations of asynchronous digital story sharing in the context of science lessons. These examples will be presented as stories. The examples will start by identifying approaches, practices and big ideas before detailing the stories. I have chosen storytelling as a method to present this research consciously since ‘stories allow us freedom of ideas’ (Costello, Tiziana, and Girme 2022, 520) and because stories allow the author to ‘recollect … experiences and share them’ (Lewis Patrick 2011, 505). Storytelling is more than information sharing, it preserves and strengthens knowledge, it gives voice to those who may otherwise kept voiceless or marginalized in educational research (Hendry 2007) and telling stories brings these voices to life. Furthermore, the examples I am referring to are from the classes that I worked with who presented student work in form of stories. The stories were intended to be viewed or read by each other in class, the teacher as well as communities external to the class. The stories I share here are based on two ethnographic classroom studies and one university course where I collected data about my own teaching intervention. I refer to the stories also as examples 1–3 (see also Table 1, data overview). In each case I collected field notes during classroom observations, that include the materials that were produced by students as part of their lessons. In all three studies, informed consent was provided by the participants and the studies were approved by the ethics boards at the University of Waikato (example 1) and the ethics committees at the University of Graz (example 2) and University of Aalborg (example 3). In the first example I knew the two teachers in Austria and in New Zealand and had connected them. I had met and visited the Austrian teacher previously during a sabbatical visit and had worked with the New Zealand teacher for several years in a project (Cowie et al., 2011). In the add-on project where this data stems from I was working with the New Zealand teacher and her class while communicating with the Austrian teacher electronically (via video conference or by written online communication)

Table 1. Data overview.

	Name of story	Participants	Data
Example 1	The virtual sensual human	Austria: 12 primary school students and their teacher, year 3, ages: 8–9. New Zealand: 20 primary school students, year 3, year 3, ages: 8–9.	Website data from both teachers, who granted each other access to their class pages. Included short stories and pictures. Data shared here are the stories from Austrian students. Interviews with teachers. Classroom observations in New Zealand (fieldnotes, photos, videos, student-teacher produced material).
Example 2	Biking, bus or e-moped	Three Austrian secondary school students, year 9, ages: 15–16	Publicly shared video produced by students. Classroom observations, online and face to face. Interviews with teachers and students
Example 3	Waiting The material scientist	University students, BA, Techno-Anthropology	Videos produced as course work to be shared asynchronously via a learning platform to explain scientific work.

Embodiment and asynchronous storytelling.

The second example was collected as part of the Erasmus+ project Change the Story, funded through the European Commission (https://www.changethestory.eu/austria/). I worked with a school during the COVID-19 pandemic. On rare occasions I was allowed to visit the school, typically wandering around the class watching the students and chatting with them about their plans while their teacher gave me brief updates on how the different groups had progressed. On other occasions I joined them online while they had online discussions in chatrooms and at other times I joined the class virtually through a video call, while the teacher would share her phone and put us on a video call so I could ‘virtually’ sit next to the students when they were discussing their plans (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Online ethnography during times of the pandemic.

The figure shows a screenshot of a videorecording during an online discussion. You can see one person with a mask looking into the camera and another person without a mask in the second window. The first person with the mask is sitting in a classroom at his computer explaining details of his work.

The third example was a university course where students had to investigate the practices of scientists and engineers. The students had to produce videos about the practices of scientists and engineers and post these learning products online. They spend a week accompanying researchers, video recording what they witnessed followed by editing to create their own video story about ‘their’ scientist or engineer.

Aside of the fieldnotes, video recordings, photographs and student-produced materials, I included also student reflections and feedback I received in interviews, that were semi-structured and on the fly during the teaching activities that the protagonists of my stories, the students, offered. The names used in example 1 and 3 are fictional, names in example 2 are real names, since the stories the students produced were published on an open and publicly accessible website.

The following table gives an overview of the data used in the three examples.

In the first example students from classrooms in Austria and New Zealand communicated asynchronously with each other when they were engaging in an astronomy unit. In the second example, students (from Austria) produced digital stories about the climate crises with the intention to share them with a (potentially) global audience on a website. Example three stems from a university course where students had to produce videos about the practices of scientists and engineers and post these learning products online. For the purpose of this article, the digital stories and online communications were analyzed as well as interviews and post reflections of the students. In both examples I intend to show different facets of how digital materiality reframed (usual) embodied performances.

The analytical procedure of the data in the three examples were the same and based on approaches to video analysis described by Heath et al. (2010). Although the examples included also still images and fieldnotes, the general principles still applied. The analysis was a three-step process and started with the reviewing of the visual data and the cataloguing of the data corpus (see, how this was done in example 3).

Example 3

Preliminary review and cataloguing of data

Tapes VTA 20,142,015–10 clip folders, 01–10

Table

Clip No	student name (pseudonym)	science focus	notes
Clip 01	Anne	nanotechnology	films scientist waiting
Clip 02	Jens	material science	includes himself

The second step involved more substantive reviewing of the data corpus, with the intention ‘to find further instances of events of phenomena’ (Heath, Jon, and Luff 2010, 64). This is exemplified in example 2.

Example 2

Substantive catalogue of e-mobility video

Table

Position	verbal	non-verbal	preceding event	notes
00:18	dialogue	gesturing	introduction	talk about mopeds
00:24	voice over	driving moped	discussion	showing moped driving

Finally, it was necessary to refine the analysis through the transcriptions of selected moments and the analysis of visible verbal and non-verbal conduct. This is shown in example 1:

Example 1

Activity Michael and teacher

Description of image: Photo taken by Michael’s mother, showing him lying in the grass, with his arms behind his back and looking up. The photo is choreographed by the student and later in class narrated to explain what it is supposed to show.

Example of the fragment of conversation from observational video.

The student stands next to the teacher who is writing on her laptop. He tells her:

00:00:00 Vielleicht können wir schreiben: Unsere Hausübung diese Woche hieß: warte, bis es dunkel ist. (Let’s start by writing: This week’s homework was called: wait until it gets dark.)

The teacher writes in German, she translates it later to English. She types as he speaks. The student continues.

00.07:66 Leg dich ins Gras, am Balkon oder draußen auf der Terrasse, überall dort wo es nett ist. Dann schau ganz genau in den Himmel. Welche Sternenbilder siehst du?

(You have to lie down in the grass, on a balcony or terrace outside your house, anywhere where it is nice. Now look up into the sky and focus. What constellations can you find?)

Notes

The photo he chooses to share shows how to view the stars. He doesn’t show the starry sky but himself.

Next, I present the results.

Results

Story 1- the virtual sensual human

Figure 2. Wait until its dark.

The figure shows a young person lying in the grass, with his hands behind his head. He has been photographed from above, so the viewer gets an idea that he intends to look into the sky.

The third-grade class from Sunshine School, an Austrian urban primary school, has 12 students. The big idea in this science unit was on astronomy with a specific focus on star constellations. The number of students in this class was rather small and perhaps the reason why Susanna, the teacher, felt confident to interact with June’s class in New Zealand. Susanna is an experienced teacher, and she explains her choice while we talk together on video.

You know, the class is pleasant and friendly, and I think it is easier to accommodate activities like this one with a smaller class.

June and Susanna had met via videocall earlier on. They agreed on their approach in this unit to include an interaction between the children in their classes however, it needed to be asynchronous, since they had to have time to translate what was to be communicated with the other class, orchestrate activities with the class and put this into a format that could be shared. Susanna, June and I, decided that a focus on astronomy could allow for a meaningful exchange between the classes. I had worked with June for two years already on the topic of culturally responsive pedagogy in the context of science (Glynn et al. 2010) and we wanted to apply a culturally responsive approach. This meant, the classroom practices should involve that the classes explored not only scientific facts about the solar system but that the students should also exchange cultural practices and traditions, stories and observations with each other. The two teachers granted access to each other’s class websites so that their students could follow the other class’ postings asynchronously. The students were excited hearing about each other’s stories, seeing photos and trying out observations and activities. Because of differences in the seasons (autumn in NZ and spring in Austria), differences in day and night and the visible constellations, each student group had something new, interesting and surprising to contribute and discuss in relation to the science explanations of these phenomena. The Austrian students ‘tried out’ activities that the New Zealand students mentioned and shared how they experienced or adapted them and vice versa.

In Austria, Susanna had collected stories for the website with her class where they explored and shared the results of their different investigations. The children prepared their stories and included photos they took either at home with their families or at school with the help of Susanna. One of them is of Michael. His mum had sent the photo to Susanna by email.

In the photo (Figure 2) he is lying in the grass with his head propped up on his arms crossed behind his back. He looks comfortable, the grass, being a little bit taller, caresses Michael. He is looking up. He explains to Susanna what he wants her to write to the children in New Zealand. Susanna listens and writes his words down. It is her intention to translate his explanation together with the messages from the other children in her class later in the evening and post it on the website for June. Michael dictates to Susanna:

Let’s start by writing: This week’s homework was called: wait until it gets dark.

You have to lie down in the grass, on a balcony or terrace outside your house, anywhere where it is nice.

Now look up into the sky and focus.

What constellations can you find?

In the photo you can see me.

I am getting ready.

I found the constellation called Draco.

It is very close to the Big Bear and the little Bear.

Susanna stops writing.

Michael, this is a great story and I love your photo lying in the grass. Maybe we can also share this photo that I took in class the other day?

Susanna shows him the photo (Figure 3) on her camera.

Figure 3. Florian has a torch.

The figure shows one boy in a classroom sitting on the floor holding a torch that projects something on the floor. Other children are around him. He looks happy and faces the camera.

Yes Miss, Michael replies, but then we need to write the following to the children in New Zealand

If you don’t want to wait until it is dark, you can do it like Florian.

Florian has a great torch.

You can see the northern night sky with it.

You can even set the night sky for the different months of the year. The two constellations everyone knows here are the Great Bear and the Little Bear.

Michael pauses for a moment and continues.

Florian knows a lot. He even knows a constellation called the snake, and the one called Draco (the dragon) and one called Cassiopeia.

I even know a movie that features a Cassiopeia. Do you know that one?

Susanna stops writing.

Really, you know a movie? What movie is that Michael?

It’s called: Clash of the titans.

Michael pauses again, then he says:

Miss, when you showed me the photo of Florian you also had a photo of the torch shining on the floor?

Yes, true, let’s have a look.

They both look at her digital camera, it’s one of the next photos (Figure 4) after the one showing Florian holding the torch.

Figure 4. A torch showing the night sky.

The figure shows the projection of the torch the boy from Figure 3. Only the projection can be seen. It shows star constellations.

We should show them this, says Michael. They might have a torch like that in New Zealand too, or they can watch the night sky lying in the grass.

Later, Susanna and June talk via a video call. June tells Susanna how excited her class of 20 children had been. As a class they had just discussed again how amazing it was to think that it was nighttime in Austria when they were in class together in New Zealand. She tells Susanna about her conversation with Braden, a boy in her class, who she had asked what he had enjoyed the most that day.

Braden was so excited. He told me that he found out that when it is daytime in New Zealand it is nighttime in Austria.

He spoke about the photo you had sent about the constellations with the torch.

He said that he found it so cool that he could share his stories on the computer and make new friends.

The teachers agreed that the exchange had required a lot of planning and coordination from them and the students. They felt it was precisely the planning the students had to do that had turned into a reflective learning experience. They imagined the ‘other’ children and how they could explain things they observed and knew about.

Coda

The set up for this science activity included that the teachers provided books and information for the students to utilize, the students worked on their own, in pairs or teams of three to accommodate different learning styles. They had to explore and find out about facts and stories to do with stars and star constellations. To connect two classes on opposing sides of the earth added depth of learning in regard to Earth being a sphere, its position in space and in relation to other astronomical bodies. To Michael, learning about the night sky and constellations included his embodied knowledge that he had acquired through the activities that included lying in the grass or watching his friend holding a torch shining light on the floor. Sharing his learning by retelling embodied experiences to other children ‘on the other side of the world’ was exciting and made sense. He imagined that the children would be able to understand his explanations, perhaps even be able to re-enact them. To share his ideas with children he would, in all likelihood never meet, needed to be explained in such a way that it could be re-experienced through the body. The story Susanna was asked to write down in combination with the photos should evoke body memory. He included body memory to imagine and remember how it feels to lie in the grass and gaze back up into the sky, it required body memory to watch one of the students demonstrate something and observing them doing so, as was the case for Michael observing Florian and being reminded of that experience when he looked with Susanna at the photos.

Story 2- biking, bus or e-moped

During the pandemic years I was working, together with my own team and colleagues from the UK, Italy, Hungary and Turkey, on the Change the Story project (https://stories.changethestory.eu), where we explored with teachers and their students the pedagogical implications of digital storytelling to address concerns and propose ways forward on the topic of climate change. Several primary and secondary school classes participated in this three-year project and created different digital stories. The big idea was to explore a climate change issue that was of relevance to the students’ lives and approach this by exploring the past and present situation of the issue, to then work out how a desirable future situation could be achieved. These explorations were then transformed into stories that were shared through an open access platform (https://www.changethestory.eu/). One of the stories I liked from the very beginning was the one produced by Jan, Lukas and Stefan (their finished digital story can be accessed on: https://stories.changethestory.eu/austria/nachhaltige-mobilitat/). I was working with the school during the repeated times of school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There was no doubt that the on-off experience of interacting online and face-to-face impacted on how the three storyboarded their ideas for their video.

Jan, Lukas and Stefan were sitting together in the computer room, discussing their plans. The teacher had booked this room so that the students could easily research on the internet, besides, the project was focused on digital storytelling and the different groups needed access to all kinds of digital tools (e.g. video editing software).

‘We got hold of an energy expert and made an interview on video with him’, explains Jan.

Lukas moves a bit to the side to share his screen with me to show me the video conversation. I am watching the video interview the three had recorded via the school’s video conferencing platform. While I am listening to the recording, Jan says:

We discussed everything in German, but do you think do we need to translate it?

I think if you share the video in English, you can potentially talk with more people, but it depends really on who your main target audience is.

They decide to produce their story in German, in parts because the interview with the expert was in German and had already been recorded. Jan, Lukas and Stefan tell me about their story board and the idea of their story.

We want to film ourselves having a discussion about using public transport, the bike or coming to school by moped, because these are the three ways we come to school. Filming a discussion between ourselves is just like on TV when scientists or reporters are discussing things.

I reply.

Now I am curious, what was it you figured out in your research, what did you find out, do you have a solution or suggestion for others?

Jan says.

Well, it is not that easy. See, for me going to school by public transport makes the most sense, it is very convenient for me but Lukas for example comes to school by moped. He lives further away.

Me.

And what about you?

Stefan looks at me.

I like biking, and I do not mind cycling in any weather condition. I like being in the open air and moving.

For me being on the moped is also about freeing my mind, says Lukas. Going by bus would mean I have to get up earlier and I am stuck on a bus with lots of people. This is why, we wanted to ask an expert about e-mopeds as an alternative and e-mobility in general.

The plan they share with me makes sense.

I ask them:

So how will you include the energy expert into your story?

Jan explains.

Well, we decided that we would set it up like a conversation between the three of us and at certain points we will cut the video from the interview with the expert in.

Yes, our plan is also that we film each other biking or being on the moped or the bus to make it livelier and so that other students like us can quickly get a feeling for what we are talking about.

Their plan reminded me of an activity I had conducted with students at university where I instructed students to produce sensory postcards. Sensory postcards are images that are accompanied with soundscapes to heighten visual impressions through aural input (see also Uimonen 2010). In this story the students showed a moped driving on the road without sound. Perhaps, had they added the soundscape it would have connected better with a comment the energy expert made, that moped ownership had an emotional dimension associated with the sound of a two-stroke engine (moped owners like it).

The main format of sharing their investigation was to set up a dialogue scenario where they talk to each other, posing questions and giving answers (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Talking to each other.

The figure shows three boys sitting in a smaller room around a table. They look at each other and the observer gets the impression that they talk to each other.

The three students included movement into their presentation in different ways. The dialogue they presented was orchestrated yet was greatly enhanced through their embodied expressions, their gaze and embodied dialogical interactions. They also filmed each other cycling or riding a moped. It was important to them to not only talk about the embodied experiences but to show this visually. To show what it means to have fun riding a bike or a moped (see Figures 6 and 7).

Figure 6. Biking.

The figure shows a boy cycling along a path with trees.

Figure 7. Riding a moped.

The figure shows a boy riding his moped in a suburban street.

In the video Lukas explains:

Yes, especially on beautiful summer days, when the sun is shining, it is fun to ride a bike. You’re out in the fresh air, you’re moving. It is wonderful to cycle. A cold winter day, where it might be snowing or raining, it’s not always quite so much fun. But I live by the motto: There is no bad weather, only bad equipment, you just put a plastic bag over the school bag, wear some rain pants and you can still ride your bike.

In his explanation Lukas emphasizes how he feels when he is riding a bike, he refers to cycling being fun and his enjoyment to be moving.

In the video Jan responds to Lukas and explains why he is using a bus:

In the summer, of course, it’s not as hot for me as it is for you. But maybe also in winter I am not as cold as you. That’s why I’m quite satisfied with using the bus. Of course, I have to get up a little earlier, follow the bus timetable, and this is particularly important for me since I live further away. This can be at times difficult, because the bus doesn’t go that often to where I live.

Coda

Jan talks about how he feels, and that he is neither too hot nor too cold using the bus. I am reminded by his description of my own body memory. I know what it feels like to be waiting for a bus or just having missed one. The thought generates memories of emotions of regret not having reached a bus or train, or the anticipation to be arriving on time while still being unsure and doubtful whose time-keeping to trust or walking towards a bus stop and repeatedly turning around in response to the sounds of oncoming traffic.

The three students orchestrated their presentation of the climate change issue sustainable transport options thematically. They emphasized presenting their investigation in a professional way, by organizing their video about e-mobility logically and based on facts. It seems at times even a bit mechanistic and didactic, akin to traditional classroom assignments (Matusov 2015). Yet, the stories they shared included deeply private insights that were clearly connected to their emotions and how they were connected through their embodied mobility experiences. The three told an embodied story where they connected scientific information with their experiences and their lives.

Story 3- waiting and mucking-in

The third story is from a university course with the big idea to understand the practices and cultures of scientists. The approach in this course involved story telling through film making. The students were partnered up with scientists to film the scientists’ practices and retell their stories back in class through a video. The course started with a theoretical introduction (e.g. Latour 2004). They learned some key details about anthropology and filmmaking (e.g. Henley 2013) before meeting ‘their’ scientist.

I was excited to watch the videos the students had posted. One of the first videos I watched was Anne’s. She worked alongside a nanotechnologist. Anne’s video was subtitled, and at one point the subtitle said, ‘Working while waiting for the machine to finish’ (see Figure 8).

Figure 8. Waiting 1.

She had posted the video and commented it for the class. She shared that it was her impression that waiting was what the scientist was doing a lot of the time. Waiting for materials to be measured, waiting for machines that took half the day to complete their calculations and measurements. So she filmed him, sitting and checking instrument displays, his embodiment captured on film, for everyone to watch and be reminded how it feels to be waiting (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. Waiting 2.

Another story was produced by Jens who was partnered up with a material scientist. The scientist soon invited him to switch roles from being an observer to learning some of her practices. Instead, she took the camera and filmed Jens doing some of her asks and ‘mucking-in’. Jens’ portrayal of the scientists’ practices was embodied by Jens and captured on film to be shared with the rest of the class (see Figure 10).

Figure 10. Jens is filmed by the scientist preparing a sample.

The video story included subtleties such as Jens doing something and turning back to the scientist to be reassured, he was doing things right. Jens included scenes where the scientist demonstrated how to operate different machines such as the vacuum pump (see Figure 11).

Figure 11. Jens’ scientist is demonstrating how to use the vacuum pump.

His presentation back in class was a selection of episodes that shared the scientists’ work that included his own embodiment captured on film.

Coda

The students were studying a science-technology-society degree underpinned by anthropological approaches (called Techno-Anthropology). It meant that they had to learn how to study culture by studying identities (Carlone Heidi 2012, 9). The big idea here was the nestedness of scientists’ cultures and associated practices. The two stories-turned-to-video told much about the relationship of the students with the scientists and how much they learned about their culture. It was a reflection-of-a-reflection since the video recordings collected by students were later, in reflection choreographed to tell a story, their story about embodied science activities. They were able to apply „pedagogy as methodology“ (Otrel-Cass 2022, 7) to learn about the contextualized nature of science. Tala and Vesterinen (2015, 437) explain that such an approach has merits since: ‘ … this kind of interaction helps to bridge three important viewpoints on the nature of science (NOS): students’ viewpoints on science, scientists’ views about their own enterprise and teachers’ viewpoints on what should be taught about NOS’. They foregrounded things the scientists may have not necessarily shared (e.g. waiting) or deemed at significant. Jens portrayed in his story his embodied excitement and emotions (e.g. he could be seen smiling when he turned to the scientist, happy to have followed her steps correctly). His story included the story of the relationship that formed during this assignment when has was invited to leave the position of the observer and change roles with the scientist. His ‘scientist’ wanted him to gain an embodied experience about the nature of her work.

Discussion

This article presented an argument on the relevance of embodiment and asynchronous storytelling in science classrooms. Two of the stories were from primary and secondary schools and the third story-shared was from a university classroom. In each presented story different aspects of science learning were central, astronomy concepts and practices, e-mobility and climate change and learning about scientists’ practices and the nature of science in context. Each of the examples included some form of asynchronous storytelling. The significance of storytelling is that it allows the author/s to string together and orchestrate an argument, a perception, an embodiment to do with science, science practices.

The sharing of those stories took place asynchronously. The nature of exchanges in asynchronous online learning activities are different from those that take place face-to-face and they require a specific kind of pedagogy mindful of the different elements that come to play with the asynchronous interaction, especially the possibility to plan and orchestrate the different elements of a story. Being present in the world through their stories and communications in the asynchronous format distorts the temporality we have in face-to-face exchanges, akin to the concepts of spacing and sequencing (Crome et al. 2021). As exemplified here, the asynchronous settings gave the students time and space to produce and reflect on their online productions, one of the key features in asynchronous online exchanges (Bonk and Khoo 2014). Asynchronous activities are also defined by the technology that is being used or provided. In the examples referred to here, the students produced or viewed digital stories as videos (examples 2 and 3) or written accounts with images (example 1). The students were able to orchestrate what they wanted to share with their real or imagined dialogue partners. It required being reflective of their ‘selves’ and imagine their audiences (Bakhtin 1993). The video production of the three boys in example 2 afforded communication, problem solving, critical and creative thinking skills (Hakkarainen 2011) essential components in science education. Storytelling through video and the text/image productions provided opportunities to share personalized learning (Towndrow and Kogut 2020). The three cases showcased that with an anticipated (known or unknown) audience in mind, the learning products fostered an emotional involvement with the topics and the three examples exemplify also how the students learned about what it means to be part of a science community. The community of teenage boys and their thoughts on mobility or the classes partnered across two hemispheres engaging in the same tasks, and the university students trying to understand what scientists do. In the three examples the students explored scientific topics and in both cases the presentations around factual information were nestled in personalized accounts that included very specific embodied references.

Embodiment was central in all three examples to communicate science ideas and concepts, as well as experiences and emotions, in ways that evoked body memory for the dialogue partners. For instance, students referred to how things feel. Michael shared an instruction on how to observe the night sky by focusing on the act of lying in the grass at night or holding a specialized torch that projects constellations onto the floor. The three boys showed and spoke about how it feels to bike or ride a moped or sit on a bus. The students’ story productions were meant to engage the recipients through these embodied personal accounts. Jens, the university student shared his embodied experience working with a scientist and Anne shared the scientist‘s embodied feeling to wait for things to happen. The digital material the students used allowed them to share and show stories and messages, the stories showed how information was perceived or transformed by themselves and others and redefined how their bodies inhabited space and time (Merleau-Ponty 2012). The affordances (Gibson James 2014) of the environments with their object constituents (digital and analogous) constituted relational properties that shaped the ‘interplay between a skillful body and a structured environment as an intelligent process’ (Hufendiek 2017, 4474).

The asynchronous mode of interaction meant also that all students had time to plan how they wanted to tell their story. The reflections that were part of the planning meant that they were able to orchestrate their intended message for their audiences. When asynchronous online interactions cause bodies to fade into the background, it may be when bodies are primarily instrumental, for example to talk, point etc. The three students telling their story about e-mobility may at first sight show the body fading, however, when they gaze at the camera and point to themselves when they are referring to their transport experiences, their bodies gain presence and relevance in respect to the sharing of their science learning. The example of the digital stories on astronomy featured embodied science experiences quite prominently and embodiment made the science experiences relatable. The examples I referred to in this article focus on student stories that were intentionally produced to be shared with others. The examples showed how the authors of the stories anticipated their audience’s ideas and perhaps even judgements. Sensual modalities and emotions were foregrounded and choreographed. Embodiment gave voice and intonations to the lived experiences they were sharing (Sullivan 2012). This means that the students’ usual embodied classroom responses (Biesta 2004) were now re-defined by asynchronous digital materiality. The digital inter-face created distance that allowed considered communication (Crome et al. 2021) including embodied communication. This space allowed the students also to foreground their story’s relevance to science (astronomy, e-mobility or nature of science). This process of foregrounding was based on reflecting on their embodied experiences.

Finally, I return to the ideas by Merleau-Ponty (2012) who reminds us that to be in the world and interact with the world shapes us as embodied beings. Merleau-Ponty writes:’ I do not see it according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is around me, not in front of me.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 12). Embodiment in those stories opened the world up and formed the students’ understanding and interpretations about the world, and they were able to reflectively share their science experiences through asynchronous digital stories.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the financial support by the University of Graz and the European Commission.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European Commission.