Manual Guiding in Peer Group Interaction: A Resource for Organizing a Practical Classroom Task

Abstract

How might someone carry out an educational task by moving an object or by guiding another person in doing so? This article describes the practical work of a group of school students as they work through an object-based physics task. It analyzes a recurrent practice whereby one student influences another's embodied conduct, either by manually guiding an object (a weight, a moveable plank, and so on) or by guiding the hand of another student as they manipulate an object. We show how the practices of manual guiding involve a range of embodied and contextual resources. They serve to maintain and restore the progressivity of the task in two environments: corrective sequences and local projects involving interactional teams.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Pentti Haddington for his critical and instructive comments on an earlier version of this article and Johannes Wagner for discussions on the role of objects in interaction. We are also grateful for Eleni Pantoudi, an Erasmus trainee, for her assistance with the data collection. We also thank three anonymous reviewers and Charles Antaki for their insightful comments that helped us clarify the focus of the article and develop the analysis.

Notes

By “task” we mean activities that have a recognizable goal, which, in the classroom context, is related to the pedagogical goals of the lesson and is often explicitly stated. Tasks unfold interactionally and typically have a discrete beginning and end (see, e.g., Hellermann & Pekarek Doehler [2010] for classroom tasks; Ford [1999] for laboratory tasks; and Lerner, Zimmerman, & Kidwell [2011] for everyday routine tasks). Laboratory tasks typically involve different phases or steps, which need to be completed before the next step can be taken. Since the balancing task in focus does not proceed through discrete steps, its configuration is here described in terms of local projects accomplished through a variety of sequentially ordered and concurrent actions involving multiple participants

²We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for instructive comments on the (sometimes misleading) use of the term tactile in the context of bodily actions.

³The small group size is related to the medium of instruction. The school offers selected courses in English alongside courses taught in the students’ mother tongue (Finnish). Choice of an English-medium course is voluntary.

⁴Liisa is not visible in the figure, as she is still sitting in her place at her desk.

⁵The teacher also confirms that the current position of the eraser under the center of the plank is not correct.