Show Them or Involve Them? Two Organizations of Embodied Instruction

ABSTRACT

When instructors train people in physical actions, they often demonstrate what they want the learner to do. When basketball coaches use reenactments in training sessions, we find that they organize them in two ways: (a) as a performance treating the players as passive learners (what we call “demonstration as performance”); and (b) as active co-ordinated action among the players as involved coparticipants (what we call “demonstration as enactment”). It is through this ordering of cooperative organizations that, we argue, an enactment is achieved that is maximally coherent and followable as instructions for the observing audience of learners. Data are in Australian English.

In contexts of instruction in embodied practical activities where the cultivation of proficient embodied skill comprises the chief focus of instructional activity, demonstrations constitute a central pedagogical resource. While instructional demonstrations are deployed for the purpose of developing novices’ competence in the practical activities comprising some domain of expertise, demonstrations also are coordinated social activities in their own right, requiring competent participation for their concerted accomplishment as pedagogical events. In making this observation, we refer specifically to a certain, limited type of instructional demonstration: multiparty demonstrations in which the learners, under the leadership of a participating instructor, reenact an activity or technique they have previously performed.

Delimiting our object in this way removes from current consideration those demonstrations accomplished by an instructor performing a technique alone for observing learners, such as demonstrations of crochet techniques (Lindwall & Ekstrom, 2012). Further, since demonstrations involving reenactments require for their performance the capacity to suspend the performance of some activity in order to engage in demonstrational work, our analysis applies most directly to demonstrations performed during designated practice sessions, such as those conducted for the instruction of music (Nishizaka, 2006; Reed et al., 2013; Tolins, 2013; Weeks, 1996), sports (Evans & Reynolds, 2016; Okada, 2013; Råman & Haddington, 2018), and dance (Keevallik, 2010, 2013). Settings in which instructional demonstrations occur during the actual performance of the instructed activity—for instance, surgery (Koschmann et al., 2011; Lindwall et al., 2014; Mondada, 2011; Sanchez Svensson et al., 2009)—would seem to preclude or at least minimize the performance of reenactments. Our analytic points, then, are made with reference to demonstrations involving the reenactment of an activity or technique previously performed by the learners and where both the reenactment and the reenacted event involve the contributions of multiple interacting parties.

In such demonstrations, two distinct organizations of action can be discerned. The first consists of the organization of the produced demonstration, which is a reenactment made for an audience to see and ideally learn from, and where participants are acting as “characters” within the portrayed scene. Earlier studies have discussed how depictions and reenactments in ordinary conversations differ from the reenacted event as well as from descriptions of that event (Clark, 2016; Sidnell, 2006; Thompson & Suzuki, 2014), and when reenactments are embedded in instructional activities, certain features are typically emphasized for pedagogical purposes, such as the contrast between correct and incorrect (or more and less competent) performance (Ekström & Lindwall, 2014; Evans, 2017; Keevallik, 2010; Weeks, 1996). The second organization of action consists of the orchestration of the demonstration, which involves coordinating codemonstrators’ actions in order to assemble a coherent product visible as a demonstration of something. Although this organization is a necessary and constitutive part of the demonstration, the associated actions are not produced as parts of what the demonstration “officially” shows. This means that instructional demonstrations that involve multiple participants typically are produced through one interactional organization but designed to be viewed in terms of another.

In our analysis, which focuses on multiparty instructional demonstrations in basketball practice sessions, we show that the accomplishment of such demonstrations relies on two distinct organizational devices, each of which is linked to one of the aspects of demonstrations identified previously: The orchestration of the demonstration is achieved through a series of directive sequences between coaches and codemonstrators, while the demonstration as a visible reenactment is achieved through embodied actions produced to be seen as pairs of moves and countermoves performed by “player characters.” Our analysis further shows that these devices are not merely produced as separate parts of the activity but are methodically intertwined to achieve the overall objective of the demonstration. Specifically, we explicate how the directive sequences are produced so as to orchestrate the action while minimally disrupting the visibility of the enactments and the lessons the enactments are designed to show. It is through this ordering of organizations that, we argue, an enactment is achieved that is maximally coherent and followable as instructions for the observing audience of learners.

Data and research context

The data for this analysis are drawn from a corpus of approximately 50 hours of video recordings collected during training sessions of an elite under-23 Australian basketball team. All participants gave informed consent for data collection and presentation. The team trained twice a week for two hours each time, and the researcher recorded the sessions from beginning to end. Sessions usually followed a standard format, beginning with a warm-up period, then moving on to drills focusing on individual skills, and then on to multiparty activities usually involving the execution of offensive or defensive strategy. A recurrent method of organizing the multiparty activities in these sessions was to group the players into different teams and run drills within which each team was assigned a different role. The drills continued over multiple individual drill performances with teams shifting from one drill role to another between performances. During the drill performances the coach, prompted by something done by a player or players in the drill, would regularly intervene to initiate an instructional demonstration designed to make a particular pedagogical point.

In the main part of this article, we analyze a single case of a coaching intervention, which has its own unique history, organization, and trajectory. The aim, however, is to explicate some distinctive organizational features that are recurrent in demonstrational settings where the demonstrator recruits assistance from those he is instructing.¹ In order to introduce the research context and illustrate some recurring features of these demonstrations, and before we begin our analysis of the case comprising the focus of our study, we here briefly discuss a separate coaching excerpt drawn from a training session held by the same team on a different occasion. The excerpt involves the coach (COA) and three players: Sam, Jack, and Bob. The transcript begins with the coach intervening immediately following a drill performance.

Example excerpt²

1  COA   *°Fuck°

      *walks  from  halfcourt  into  play-space->

2      (0.4)

3  COA   Go  over  here (  ) ball©  to  him.

                    ©points  at  Jack->

4      (0.4)©(1.0)^(2.2)         ^(5.2)

       ->©

    sam         ^passes ball to Jack^

5  COA   I know y- I know we know it?* (0.4) and we all say we know it

                     ->*

6      but we’re not doing it we had (.) #four or five where we failed.

    fig                      #fig.1

7      (0.6)

8  COA   We down here *on the split line* now? (.) #We’re deep enough so we

              *bends knees and extends arms laterally*

   fig                          #fig.2

9      can shoot both of these guys at the same time.

10      (0.3)

11  COA   Ohkay?

12     (0.4)

13  COA   ©He makes a mo:ve,@

       ©LH points at Bob-@

14      ©#(0.2)Δ(0.1)©(0.2)#

    coa   ©beckons Bob©

    bob       Δwalks toward Coach->

    fig    #fig.3        #fig.4

15  COA   *I step in, #(0.3) and I block him out.*Δ

      *steps to L, turns rear to Bob--------*

    bob                        ->Δ

    fig          #fig.5

16  COA   @I see the ball, (.) and I@ #can feel @where he is.

       @BH grab Bob’s waist------@pat Bob---@grab Bob’s waist->

    fig                   #fig.6

17      (0.3)

18  COA   So© he goes up high, ©

        ©LH tugs Bob’s shirt©

19      (0.2)Δ(0.2)

    bob      Δsteps to left->

20  COA   I go *up high with him.

         *steps left in front of Bob->

21      (0.3)*Δ(0.4)

    coa     ->*

    bob     ->Δ

22  COA   Ohkay? (.) shot@ goes up, (.)  @I’m already boxing him out.

              ->@raises arms up-@drops arms and behind him->>

The previous excerpt illustrates two organizational properties that recurrently pertain to such demonstrations. First, the demonstrations involve an instructional orientation that ties the demonstration both retrospectively to the prior drill performance(s) in which a “correctable” aspect of technique has occurred and prospectively to a lesson to be presented. In this case, as the preceding drill performance comes to a close and transition to a next performance becomes prospectively relevant, the coach produces an invective displaying his frustration with the players’ previous performance (line 1) and simultaneously begins walking from the center-court position, where he had been observing the drill, into the play-space. His conduct works to suspend the players’ initiation of the next drill performance and to summon their attention, thereby marking some form of transition. The coach then states the existence of a problem with the players’ conduct (lines 5–6), which both projects a pedagogical intervention and ties this upcoming intervention to events that had taken place during the preceding drill performances. These actions provide the audience of players with some guidance for how to see and understand the subsequent activity as a demonstration.

Second, the demonstrations involve the transformation of participation framework and material configuration away from a drill performance-oriented structure, which depends on players’ unobstructed access to the court, and toward an embodied instructional organization. To produce demonstrations that involve multiple parties, the coach must not only perform embodied actions whose intelligibility is partly dependent on the spatial position where they are performed but also recruit codemonstrators and direct their actions. In this respect, the coach’s visibility to the players and access to their bodies can be crucial. As the coach walks from his viewing position at center-court toward the play-space, he issues a verbal directive to pass the ball and points to a particular player (line 3). The player with the ball responds by passing it, and other unaddressed players also take their cue: Four players stay on the court, and the rest move out of the play-space. At this point then a structure has been accomplished consisting of a projectable trajectory of instructional action with a framework of participation involving the coach as instructor, the four players on the court as participants in the demonstration, and the rest of the players watching from the sidelines. Following this, there is another shift in the participation framework, from one where the coach talks to the players about the mistakes they have made (lines 5–6), to one where he talks from the position of a defending player (line 8). The shift marks a transition to the actual reenactment and is partly accomplished through a change in posture and gaze (as seen in the distinction between the coach’s embodied position in Figure 1 with that in Figure 2).³

These two general features are shared by the demonstrations in our corpus, and they provide the organizational backdrop for the main topic of the article: How directives and enactments are cooperatively organized in instructional multiparty demonstrations. For now, we can note that the coach’s verbal directives in lines 13 and 18—“he makes a mo:ve” and “he goes up high”—have a declarative third-person format and are formulated as descriptions of movements that have not yet commenced. This formatting reflects a distinctive participation framework and a “split audience design” (Linell, 2009, p. 101), in which the codemonstrators are to listen to the coach’s utterances for directives, while at the same time these utterances are produced to be heard as descriptions of player conduct by the observing audience of learners. The directives in this example are followed by compliant moves by Bob, the player acting as a codemonstrator (lines 14 and 19). As an enacted and described order, however, it is Bob who makes the first move, which is followed by a responsive and defensive embodied move by the coach, which is timed to correspond with his next utterance, “I step in, (0.3) and I block him out.” As we will elaborate, the demonstrations are thus produced through a series of directive sequences between coaches and codemonstrators, whereas they are designed to be visible to the audience of players as the enacted actions and responses of players in two teams. The directive sequences and the enactments are produced to work cooperatively, but as we will show in the following sections, they are not designed to be visible in the same way.

Setting up the demonstration as cooperating organizations of action

Excerpt 1 depicts the opening phase of the focal coaching intervention. As outlined previously, an intervention’s intelligibility as a bounded unit of action distinctive from the ongoing drill performance is commonly achieved by suspending the drill and summoning attention, projecting an upcoming course of instructional activity, and tying this upcoming activity to the preceding performance. Here, we elaborate further on how this initial phase contributes to setting up an interactional environment within which the dual aspects of the demonstration—the actions involved in orchestrating it and the actions comprising the product-to-be-seen—will come to be organized. Besides the coach (COA), four players—Bob, Caleb, Mark, and Tony—participate in the overall event, and each is represented in at least one of the following transcripts.

Excerpt 1

01  COA     *Okay

            *>>walks from halfcourt into play-space->

02          (0.5)

03  COA     Gimme next fo:ur,

04          (1.4)

05  COA     Who is next fo:ur

06          (0.6)

07  COA     Just- I’ll just show you here @what-

                                             @RH points towards R side->

08          (0.6)@

    coa        ->@

09  COA     Bo*b- (.) ©Bob was a good example© here

            ->*

                       ©LH points toward Bob--©

10          (0.4)

11  COA     When we’re Δplaying *off the ball

                                   *walks toward Bob->

    bob                 Δbends and adjusts shorts->

12          (0.4)

13  COA     And +we wanna see @both*  our ma:n  @and the basket.+@

                                 ->*

                +turns head to face players----------------+

                                 @RH points at Bob@RH points at hoop@

14              +*Δ(0.6)     Δ

    coa         +turns to Bob->

                 *stoops and moves towards Bob->

    bob           Δadjust topΔ

15  COA     Ok@Δay?

              @tugs on shorts->

    bob        Δsteps toward coach and puts hands on hips->>

16          (0.7)*@

    coa        ->*

                 ->@

In parallel with the example excerpt described earlier, the coach here suspends the players’ progression into a next drill performance and summons their attention (“Okay,” line 1, and simultaneous movement into play-space), and in response the players begin to orient their gaze toward the coach. The coach’s subsequent actions accomplish the work of projecting the upcoming intervention more specifically as an instructional demonstration (“I’ll just show you here what-”, line 7) and tying it back to events that had taken place during the prior drill performance (“Bob- Bob was a good example here,” line 9).⁴ The participation framework is also transformed into an embodied instructional organization in a way similar to that shown previously. As touched on there, a central feature of such reconfiguration is the establishment of a differentiated recipiency structure amongst the players. Here, the coach instructs whichever players are next in line to play offense to take up their starting positions (lines 3–5), and four players respond by moving onto the court from the space beneath the baseline.⁵ As the coach says “Bob- Bob was a good example here” (line 9), he turns his body to Bob and extends his left hand toward him, while at the same time keeping his gaze directed toward the players not involved in the demonstration, who are assembled beneath the baseline to his right. The coach’s gaze direction orients to the cohort of observing players as recipients of his talk, while his direction of movement, gesture, and lower body orientation suggest Bob’s relevance to the upcoming instructional activity. The coach continues to look toward the players as he produces his next utterance (line 11) and walks toward Bob.

In terms of participation and recipiency, the players here become organized into two units, one consisting of the assembled players-at-large, who constitute an observing audience of learners, and the other consisting of players who have been recruited to be codemonstrators—most centrally Bob but also the other three players who have been established as members of the offensive team. These orientations are visible at this point in various players’ embodied displays: In response to the coach’s orientations and movements, Bob produces a series of movements that could be seen as preparatory for the upcoming physical activity and as thereby displaying a readiness to his prospective participation in it: He adjusts his shorts and jersey and then stands up straight and places his hands on his hips. Players standing on the baseline, by contrast, variously yawn, scratch, and wipe themselves, embodying an “off duty” mode more appropriate to members of a collective audience. As will be shown, throughout the subsequent demonstration the actions of the participants are oriented to the relevance of these two categories of recipiency, and this split audience design shapes the organization of the demonstration phase of the intervention in very fine-grained ways.

A further feature of the opening phase with relevance to the organization of the subsequent demonstration is the coach’s formulation of a “gloss” of the central topic of the coaching intervention and the competency to be demonstrated and instructed. The coach’s utterance “When we’re playing off the ball (0.4) and we wanna see both our ma:n and the basket”⁶ (lines 11–13) formulates a general maxim for playing defense in a certain situation, i.e., when the offensive player whom a player is assigned to defend does not have the ball. This maxim should be well known or self-evident to players at this level. With its grammatical incompleteness (a dependent clause), and in the absence of any accompanying instruction regarding how the maxim should be accomplished, the utterance has the sense of being a preliminary to a more developed explication. As such, the gloss further develops the prefacing work of lines 7–9 and provides an overarching goal orientation for the coaching intervention. As will be shown, the gloss, which recurs throughout the activity, functions as an important organizational device, contributing to the activity’s structuring: The episode is initiated with a gloss of the lesson-to-be-learned, the gloss is then “unpacked” (see Jefferson, 1985) in the form of embodied enactments, and the lesson is summed up by returning to the gloss at the end of the intervention.

Cooperating organizations of action

In this section we analyze the structural and sequential organization of the actions comprising the demonstration phase of a coaching intervention. The demonstration is produced both as a series of directive sequences between coaches and codemonstrators and as the enacted actions and responses of players in two teams. As will be shown, the directive sequences and the enactments are accomplished through distinct but cooperating organizations. In this section, we focus on the first part of the demonstration phase, which is comprised of a series of directive sequences and enactments (Excerpts 2 and 3) that share both a recurrent organizational structure and an orientation to explicating the coach’s gloss described previously (lines 11–13). Excerpt 2 shows the first directive sequence and the associated enactment (lines 19–25).

Excerpt 2

17  COA      *@©Say-* +say- (0.3) say ball is here in his hands here.

             *straightens posture*

              @RH points at Caleb->

               ©LH on Bob’s midsection->

                       +turns gaze to Mark (player with ball)->

18           ^(0.6)@©

   coa          ->@

                     ©

   mar      ^passes ball to Caleb->

19  COA      #Ok+ay? ^*so Bob is going #up,*

                +turns gaze toward Bob->>

                       *-points to R of Bob-*

   mar            ->^

   fig       #fig.7                      #fig.8

20           (0.4)#

   fig             #fig.9

21  COA      *SliΔght#ly up    *

             *points to R of Bob*

   bob          Δwalks backwards->

   fig                 #fig.10

22           *@©(0.*4)#

   coa      *drops into athletic stance and shuffles towards Bob->

              @extends RH to R of Bob->

               ©places LH on Bob’s midsection->

   fig                  #fig.11

23  COA      #I’m hereΔ

   bob              ->Δ

   fig       #fig.12

24           (0.3)

25  COA      I can see* both of it@©.

                    ->*

                                 ->@

                                  ->©

At the beginning of Excerpt 2, the coach produces the utterance “Say- say- (0.3) say ball is here in his hands here” (line 17). The utterance is combined with a shift of gaze toward the player holding the ball, Mark, and a pointing gesture toward another of the players on the court, Caleb. In response, Mark turns and passes the ball to Caleb, who simultaneously turns to the passer and raises his hands to receive the pass. Once the ball is in the air on its way to Caleb, the coach produces a next utterance, “so Bob is going up” (line 19), and points behind Bob as he does so (Figure 8). Not receiving any immediate response from Bob, the coach initiates repair with a modified partial repeat of his prior utterance (line 21) and a repeat of his prior gesture (Figure 10). In response, Bob starts to move backward in the direction of the coach’s point, performing the movement projected as relevant by the coach’s utterance and gesture, which Bob has oriented to as constituting a directive.

The trajectory of action initiated by the coach’s directive is not concluded by Bob’s embodied response. Rather, the directive-response sequence is itself one half of another structure whose form is recurrent within the demonstration. As Bob makes his move backward, the coach drops into an athletic stance, reaches both arms forward, and takes several shuffling steps in Bob’s direction (Figure 11), simultaneously uttering “I’m here” (line 23). The coach’s embodied conduct, in this sequential position (i.e., following Bob’s directed movement backwards) and spatial location (i.e., moving toward Bob’s body), is visible as a demonstrative enactment of a particular basketball event, namely, a defensive player’s attempt to stay close to his man. The intelligibility of this embodied conduct is further elaborated by the coach’s simultaneous verbal description of his action, “I’m here” (line 23). That is, through the verbal and embodied composition and sequential and spatial positioning of his conduct, the coach can be seen to be taking on and enacting the role of Bob’s defender in a recognizable course of basketball action. Furthermore, in constituting a visible defensive performance, the coach’s action retrospectively recasts the sense of Bob’s prior movement. Bob’s move backwards becomes intelligible not only as a compliant response to the coach’s earlier directive but further, within the frame of an instructional demonstration, as an enactment of a maneuver by an offensive player to try to create space between himself and a defender, which is then responded to by the coach-as-defender. We thus see in this excerpt an organization involving two sequentially organized pairs of actions. Within the first pair, the directive sequence, Bob’s movement backward comprises a second pair-part (SPP) response to the coach’s (descriptively formatted) first pair-part (FPP) directive. However, within the second organization, the enactment of the game play, these two components (Bob’s movement and the coach’s description) combine to constitute a single unit, a reenactment of a basketball move. That is, the conduct distributed across two turns, the FPP and the SPP, of the directive sequence, is visible as a single reenacted move within the enactment organization. Finally, within the enactment structure, the coach’s embodied enactment, accompanied by its overlaid verbal description, comprises a reenactment of countermove (see Figure 13).

Figure 13. The paired structure of the directive sequence and the enactment.

Before we further develop this point, some notes on terminology are in place. Schegloff (2007, p. 2) describes “sequence organization” as the “organization of courses of action enacted through turns-at-talk” and sequences as “the vehicle for getting some activity accomplished.” He continues by observing that a wide range of sequences in conversation are done through the practices of adjacency pairs—that is, through two turns, by different speakers, that are placed next to each other and where the constituent parts are related so that the first turn implicates a certain type of second turn. Although he points out that there is “no reliable empirical basis for treating physically realized actions as being in principle organized in adjacency pair terms” (p. 11), he also notes that there are exchanges that involve physical conduct and appear to map onto the adjacency pair organization. This, we argue, is the case of the directive sequences that are initiated in lines 19 and 21, where an initial action done in talk is responded to by an action that is physically embodied. Schegloff (2007, p. 2) contrasts “sequence organization” with the more encompassing notion “sequential organization,” which refers to “any kind of organization which concerns the relative positioning of utterances or actions.” What we here call enactments have sequential organization, in the sense that a move is followed by a countermove, but they are not sequences in the more restricted sense, and although these moves come in pairs, they do not share the features of an adjacency pair. The coach directs the actions of the codemonstrator, and the countermoves are therefore not responses in the same way as an answer to a question or an acceptance to a request would be.

The enacted game play does not only consist of embodied conduct but also verbal descriptions of this conduct. In fact, the sequential organization of game play performance into something that resembles a paired structure is partly an artifact of these descriptions: Moves in a basketball game are not produced as clearly bounded units, and players do not take turns to move. As part of an instructional demonstration, however, the enactment of the game play is produced to be seen in terms of moves and countermoves.

The organizations of the directive sequence and the enactment are produced to work cooperatively, but they are not designed to be visible in the same way, a feature that is grounded in the organization of participation operative in this activity. As discussed previously, the instructional demonstration here is characterized by a dual participation framework. To recap, one organization of participation is comprised of (a) the coach as director/orchestrator of the demonstration; and (b) the players, principal among them Bob, acting as codemonstrators. The second operative organization consists of (a) the group of demonstrators, including both the coach and Bob; and (b) the observing audience of players. These two participation orders are in turn organized in relation to the two sequentially organized orders described previously. The directive sequence, consisting of an initiating directive produced by the coach and a responding move by a codemonstrator, orients the first participation structure, the coach as director/orchestrator of the demonstration and the players as codemonstrators. The enactment, by contrast, is the product of the collective demonstrators and is designed for the observing audience of learners, thereby orienting the second participation structure.

Given that the encompassing activity within which these two organizations are lodged is fundamentally pedagogical in focus, it can further be argued that the primary recipients of the demonstration comprised of the two overlapping organizations are the audience of learners rather than the codemonstrating players (even the codemonstrators are also, and perhaps primarily, members of the audience of learners). The actions of Bob and the coach in the demonstration explicated previously are produced, first and foremost, to be viewed by the observing audience and to be viewed by them not primarily in terms of the coach directing a player to move in certain ways but rather as a defensive player (played by the coach) responding to the actions and movements of an offensive player (played by Bob). However, since within the dual organization of participation operative here the coach is acting as both the action-initiating “director” of the demonstration and as the action-responding defensive player in the demonstration, interactional work must be performed to accomplish a perceived order of events whereby the offensive player’s actions can be seen as sequence-initiating moves to which the coach-as-defender’s actions are responsive.

The participants’ orientation to this order is visible in the way the coach’s utterance in line 19, “so Bob is going up,” is produced. As touched on previously, the utterance is produced in the third-person declarative format “He does X,” and the utterance references a state of affairs that is not, at the time of its speaking, matched by the visible circumstances on the court. This very specific design⁷ allows the coach’s utterance simultaneously to perform different actions for each of the two audiences it addresses respectively. Bob is here targeted as the referenced person, but the third person pronoun makes the utterance formally addressed to the audience (see Levinson, 1988). For Bob, the utterance is hearable as a directive to produce an action that will achieve the described set of circumstances (i.e., to move backwards), while for the observing audience members, it is available as a description of what is happening within the demonstration. The design of the directive has the further utility of allowing for verbal and embodied components of the participants’ actions to be organized into two parallel sequential relationships. Within the directive sequence, the coach’s verbal description of the player’s embodied conduct, “so Bob is going up” (line 19), constitutes a sequence initiating action, to which Bob’s embodied movement constitutes a response. Within the enactment, by contrast, the coach’s talk does not constitute a sequentially prior move to the player’s action; rather, the coach’s utterance and the player’s conduct are designed to be seen and heard as a single composite unit or gestalt consisting of an embodied action (produced by Bob) and its overlaid description (produced by the coach). The design of the coach’s directive thus accomplishes a welding together of the two pair-parts of the directive sequence into a single unit that is designed to be seen as a move within the enactment, to which the coach’s subsequent embodied conduct and simultaneous utterance “I’m here” (line 23) is visible as a response. It is through this practice that the enactment is produced to be the “official” work being done through the participants’ conduct, while the directive sequence is produced so as to minimally intrude on the enactment.

The demonstration sequence concludes with a final utterance: As the coach holds the defensive position he took up in his previous turn, he says “I can see both of it” (line 24). This utterance highlights the relevance of the demonstration for the purposes of this instructional activity by tying it back to his earlier gloss of the intervention’s lesson, “we wanna see both our man and the basket” (line 13). The pedagogical goal of the intervention is thus reiterated at the end of the demonstration sequence, which, through this formulation, is characterized as an enactment dedicated to fleshing out the sense of the coach’s gloss.

Following this initial part of the instructional intervention, the demonstration continues with the production of three further sets of directive sequences and enactments that exhibit a similar organization to the one that has been outlined. We here briefly discuss the reuse of these organizational formats, before showing a contrastive case in which the actual pedagogical point of the demonstration is made.

Excerpt 3

26  COA      He @©goes backdoo:r, Δ ©

                @RH grabs Bob’s jersey->l.30

                 ©LH points baseline©

    bob                              Δmoves in direction of point->

27           *(0.3)

    coa     *moves in direction of point->

28  COA     I switch my feet here an I can still see him.*Δ

                                                           ->*

    bob                                                     ->Δ

29          (0.3)

30  COA     Now as he ge©ts closer to Δthe bucket, © (.)* I wanna© make @sure

                                                           *turns to face midcourt->

                                                                          ->@

                         ©LH points in front of Bob-©              ©LH grab Bob->l.35

    bob                                 Δmoves forward

31          that my@* body  is in  Δ@between him (0.4) and the basket

                   ->*

                    @RH to own chest@-raises and stretches R arm out->

    bob                            ->Δ

32  COA     so I’m here@

                      ->@

33          (0.5)

34  COA     Now he starts coming (0.4) @away from the ball @so the ball

                                          @RH points at ball--@RH points at Tony->

35  COA     %goes over there @Now *he’s one% pass away, (.)°

                                     *shuffles to his R->

                             ->@

                                                              ->°

    cal     %------passes ball to Tony----%

36  COA     Now I’m helping,

37          (0.4)

38  COA     ©Now I see both,*

            ©LH points at Bob->

                            ->*

39          (0.3)©

                ->©

In line 26, the coach produces a pointing gesture along with an utterance that is formatted as a description of his codemonstrator’s conduct. As in the previous example, the coach’s descriptive account here initiates a directive sequence that is completed by Bob’s embodied response. When Bob makes his move, the coach turns his head further to his left so that he is facing the baseline and begins to slide his feet to keep alongside Bob while extending his left arm. As he moves, the coach describes his own enactment, “I switch my feet here” (line 28). Once again, the player’s embodied movement along with the coach’s descriptive account constitute a move in the enactment of the game play, to which the coach’s movement and his overlaid verbal description form a response. While still sliding, the coach says “I can still see him” (line 28), completing this segment of the demonstration by highlighting the instructional relevance of the demonstration in terms of the gloss. The structures characterizing the first segment of the demonstration (see Figure 13)—the overlapping organization of the directive sequence and the enactment, and the subsequent characterization of the enactment in terms of the gloss—thus organize this second segment of the demonstration as well. This structure is quite closely repeated as the activity progresses. Without explicating the next stretch of interaction in detail here, we observe the occurrence of a third segment of the demonstration (lines 30–32, though this time absent the final gloss) and a fourth (lines 34–38), which both replicate the general structure of the first two. The accomplishment of the activity through the use of the dual organizations that we have outlined is thus an observably recurrent feature of the demonstration (see Figure 14).

Figure 14. An overview of the paired structure of the directive sequence and the enactment as found in Excerpt 2, lines 19–25, and Excerpt 3, lines 26–28, lines 30–32, and lines 34–38.

Even though the four segments of the demonstration represented in Figure 14 have several structural similarities, it would be incorrect to say that the coach and his codemonstrator simply repeat the same thing four times. In an important sense, each segment progresses the demonstration along a larger course of action: First Bob goes up, then he cuts, then he goes to the corner, and so on. This larger course of action matches, or at least resembles, the trajectory of events that occurred in the drill performance that preceded and precipitated the demonstration. The demonstration could perhaps be characterized as showing an idealized or simplified version of previous events through the outlined organizations. Thus, each of the segments are linked into this larger project by enacting the next bit of the course of action comprising the previous performance, and the sequential trajectory of the prior performance in this way constitutes an important source of coherence ordering the individual segments making up the demonstration. At the same time, and as will be further discussed in the next section, the point of the demonstration is not just to reenact a prior performance but to teach “a lesson.” The demonstration is produced to show what the audience of learners should do in certain situations, something that is accomplished and displayed in part through the recurrent practice of concluding each sequence by recapitulating a version of the gloss of the lesson: “I can see both of it” (line 25), “I can still see him” (line 28), and “now I see both” (line 38). The relevance of each demonstration sequence to the overall pedagogical goal is thereby repeatedly alluded to. Each discrete demonstration sequence thus has its own internal structure but is also organized by reference to the larger structures of (a) the (retrospective) course of action characterizing the prior play, and (b) the (unfolding) course of action characterizing the pedagogical intervention. This double embeddedness provides for the coherence of each segment of the demonstration as a component of an instructional demonstration showing how to play defense under a certain set of real-life circumstances.

Showing the lesson from within the reenactment

In this final section of the analysis, we investigate how the reenactments are produced to display a discernible “lesson.” In terms of the cooperating organizations of directives and enactments, the forthcoming segment of the demonstration is differently ordered and therefore constitutes a contrastive case in relation to the prior segments. The demonstration is still produced as a series of directives and designed to be seen in terms of moves and countermoves, but the sequential trajectory of the prior performance is no longer followed, there are additional commentaries and evaluations, and the audience of players is now addressed directly.

What has been demonstrated to the players so far are routine applications of a maxim they already know, but nothing that clearly would motivate the interruption of the drill and the launching of an instructional intervention. There is no real news and not yet a discernible point to the lesson. In this sense, the demonstration is still preliminary or incomplete, and it projects something more and different than what has been shown.⁸ The enactment in Excerpt 4, which occurs at the point where the previous excerpt left off, has a somewhat different organization from those previously described: Rather than producing a further enactment of correct technique, the coach now demonstrates a problematic performance (lines 40–43) before then showing a preferred one (lines 44–54).

Excerpt 4

40  COA      as ©he *starts com©Δing in. (0.3) +I beco#me w+@eaker* (.)on this.#   *

                                                                        *RF 1 step forward*

                                                          @extends R arm->l.43

                ©LH beckons Bob©

                                                   +looks to R-+

    bob                           Δmoves towards coach->

    fig                                                     #fig.15               fig.16#

41           ©(0.4)

    coa      ©LH reaches for Bob’s arm->

42  COA      ©’cause he #can always try to go &around© my #Δarm here.#      &

           ->©--LH grabs Bob’s arm and pulls him in--©

    bob                                                    ->Δ

                                                 &looks at ball, extends L arm&

    fig                   #fig.17                              #fig.18      #fig.19

43           (0.2) #*@ (0.2)     *

    coa             *LF step back*

                   ->@turns R hand over and pushes Bob back->

    fig              #fig.20

44  COA      ΔSo what #you *do when you’re# Δtwo @passes# @one- two# pa@sses away,*

                            *---------------walks forward-------------------*

                                                  ->@         @RH gestures-@tug shorts->

    bob      Δ------walks backwards------Δ

    fig                 #fig.21               #fig.22         #fig.23     #fig.24

45          (0.1)#(0.2)@

                       ->@

    fig            #fig.25

46  COA      >*@you’*re in a< stance #like @this,

              *drops into stance->

               @-----extends both arms------@

    fig                                  #fig.26

47           (0.2)#(0.1)

    fig.           #fig.27

48  COA      @He starts #coming @Δin

             @RH points in front@

    bob                            Δmoves towards coach->

    fig                   #fig.28

49           *(0.6)

    coa     *steps across Bob and turns rear to him->>

50  COA      @Full #frontΔ him

             @reaches both arms back and holds Bob->

    bob                 ->Δ

    fig              #fig.29

51          (0.3)#

    fig             #fig.30

52  COA      There.

53          (0.3)

54  COA      @So y-can #still see the ball@ and you can see your man. (.)

           ->@----RH points toward ball---@

    fig                  #fig.31

At the beginning of the excerpt, the coach launches a fifth directive sequence, saying “As he starts coming in” (line 40) and making a beckoning gesture toward Bob. Much like the four prior directive sequences, this sequence is initiated with a descriptively formulated directive, and again the coach’s actions are met with an acquiescing response by Bob, who walks toward the coach. With his production of “I become weaker on this” (line 40), the coach drops back into his defensive stance, extending his right arm to enact cutting off the passing lane between Bob, who is now standing close to him, and the ball (Figure 16). As in the prior enactments, the coach here demonstrates defensive conduct while overlaying a descriptive account of his embodied action. However, his description on this occasion departs from the previous ones in its formulation as a negative evaluation of the effectiveness of the defensive technique he is performing. The evaluation makes his simultaneous embodied conduct visible as a demonstration of poor defensive technique for these circumstances. In the next sequential position, a slot in which, in the preceding enactments, the coach had characterized his performance in terms of the gloss of the lesson, we find instead an explanation for the negative evaluation of the technique. The coach produces a verbal description of what the offensive player will be enabled to do if a defensive player precisely follows the instructions presented so far in the demonstration (“cause he can always try to go around my arm here,” line 42) under these circumstances. Simultaneously, he grabs Bob’s left arm with his own left hand and pulls Bob across his body and into his extended right arm (Figure 17). Bob responds by looking toward the player with the ball and extending his left arm, palm forward, effecting an embodied elaboration of what the coach is describing (Figure 18). It is clear that this part of the demonstration does not show what the players are expected to do but rather what might happen if they apply the approach demonstrated in the previous enactment sequences to a relevantly different situation. In the terminology of Weeks (1996), this part of the demonstration forms the first part of a contrast pair, where the “first pair-part is descriptive of the players’ version, while the second pair-part is the director’s prescribed version of the same” (p. 269).

The introduction of the contrast pair implies a shift in the progression of the demonstration and in the relation between the demonstration and the event that occasioned the intervention. Until this point, the demonstration has been designed to be seen as proceeding in line with the linear progression of the drill performance that it reenacts—that is, it is organized by reference to the order of the drill as well as to the order of the intervention. Even if the fluid character of the game has been transformed into discrete units of action for instructional purposes, the progression of these enactments has closely followed the trajectory of the original performance. Not only have the prior enactments demonstrated what to do in normal circumstances, they have also (re)produced a spatial and temporal position in the game play from which a problem and a suggested solution can be shown. After having demonstrated what might happen if the players too slavishly follow the maxim that has been demonstrated, rather than reproducing the next bit of the drill performance, the coach “rewinds” the demonstration to the point just before the enactment of the faulted actions. Just before saying “So what you do when you’re two passes” (line 44), the coach flips over the palm of his right hand (which had been facing toward the ball in position to enact the defensive action of cutting off the pass [Figure 19]), so that it now presses on Bob’s torso (Figure 20). As he produces the utterance, he uses the hand to push Bob back toward his previous position (Figure 21). The hand, which had moments ago comprised an embodied component of the enactment, now becomes deployed for the work of orchestrating the demonstration. The timing of the shift from using the hand as part of an enactment to using it for directing the codemonstrator is finely positioned relative to the talk, occurring immediately following the conclusion of the coach’s explanation of the problem with the technique and right as he begins an utterance which marks the “rewinding” of the demonstration to the moment before the mistake was made and projecting a next enactment. In this action performed by the coach, along with the grabbing and pulling movement described previously, we can see how the resources of the body can be coordinated with the directive and enactment organizations to perform relevant actions within them respectively.

As Bob walks backwards, the coach takes a couple of steps with him before he stops and removes his hands from Bob’s body (Figure 24). The coach and Bob have thus returned to a previous position situated at a particular point in the game play—“when you’re two passes away” (line 44). Through this resetting work, what is made relevant next is an enactment that, unlike the previous segments of the demonstration, will not demonstrate the sequentially next moment of the drill performance; rather, what is now projected is the enactment of a preferred alternative to the faulted performance—in other words, the second half of the contrast pair. There is also a notable shift in address here, as the coach now speaks directly to the audience of players. When the coach demonstrates this part, he formulates and shows what the onlooking players, or anyone playing in that position, should do: something that is reflected in his use of the second person “you” (line 44 and 46) rather than the first person “I” that was used previously.

With the assistance of Bob, the coach has demonstrated what “seeing your man and the basket” (i.e., the gloss of the lesson) might look like in terms of normal game play. The coach has also shown how the application of the gloss could result in poor defense under certain circumstances. What follows next, after the demonstration has been rewound and restarted, is an extension of the gloss, which, given its sequential position and design, comes across as the main lesson or climax of the demonstration. After Bob, responding to the coach’s utterance “he starts coming in” (line 48), has taken a step toward the coach, the coach says “full front him” (line 50) and steps in front of Bob, enacting the described action (Figure 29). The coach is now standing with his back turned against Bob, looking straight ahead at the player holding the ball, and standing close enough to touch Bob with his arms extended slightly backwards (Figure 30). It is notable that when the coach returns to the initial gloss “so y-can still see the ball and you can see your man” (line 54), he is not literally able to see him since he has his back turned toward Bob. Seeing must therefore be interpreted more figuratively, as “knowing where the man is,” since the coach still is able to sense with his body the position of the other player. The coach thus provides an embodied and local sense of what being able to “see your man” means here, and in this way, he extends what might otherwise be a too literal interpretation of the gloss.

Following the action in Excerpt 4, the coach continues to “full front” the offensive player two times using the same combination of directive sequences and enactments. We have chosen not to represent this part of the interaction here but instead end this section with the closing of the instructional intervention. In Excerpt 5, the demonstration is brought to an end, which is accomplished by explicitly tying back to the gloss and reverting the participation framework.

Excerpt 5

68  COA      So any weak side cutters,

69           (0.3)

70  COA      keep an eye on ‘em, (.) As they start getting to the bucket

71           (0.4)

72  COA      just full front ‘em

73           (0.4)

74  COA      so you can see where the ba:ll is and know where your man is.

75           (0.5)

76  COA      Y’gotta start on the baseline.

77           (1.0)

78  COA      Let’s go

This final stretch of talk is produced while the coach walks out of the play-space and eventually takes up position near center-court. His spatial repositioning, the exact inverse of his movement onto the court at the beginning of the intervention, restores the participation framework in place before the intervention and makes relevant the resumption of the drill. While the coach’s embodied movement here is concerned with establishing the participatory conditions for the drill’s resumption, pointing forward to the next stretch of activity, the first section of the talk and conduct he produces as he walks off the court points backward to the demonstration, recapitulating the central lesson to full front cutters as they approach the basket (lines 68–72), and then framing this as a method of accomplishing the basic maxim (line 74). The point of the lesson, which the coach summarizes here in the end, has been gradually built up throughout the demonstration. The intervention started with an initial formulation of a maxim and continued with series of embodied enactments and verbal descriptions of this maxim, which was then followed by a demonstration of problems that applications of the maxim might result in, after which a potential solution to this problem is demonstrated and the gloss is recapitulated—but this time in a way that emphasizes the point of the intervention. This format—the formulation of a rule, the application of the rule, the introduction of an exception, and the demonstration of how the exception is to be handled—is recurrent in the investigated material but also frequent in instructional settings more widely. Neither grammar nor surgery can exclusively be taught as maxims or rules of thumb. Proficiency is tied to competent ways of handling contingencies and exceptions, and practice, like the drill here, provides occasions for instructors to address such contingencies in the context of prior performance.

Conclusions

In this study, we have investigated the interactional organization of instructional multiparty demonstrations. A central observation is that such demonstrations are produced through one organization and designed to be seen in terms of another. In the initial part of the teacher intervention, which was preparatory to the upcoming demonstration, the coach uses the imperative form to recruit the assistance of the players. As soon as the actual enactment starts, however, the syntax and subject noun shift and the coach begins to direct his codemonstrators through third-person descriptions of player conduct. The actions of the coach are still produced to be heard and seen as directives by the players actively participating in the demonstration, but they are designed to minimally intrude on the demonstration and what it sets out to show. As part of a directive sequence, the coach’s description of player conduct constitutes a sequence-initiating action to which the player’s conduct is a response. As part of an enactment device, however, the description is not designed to be heard as sequentially prior to the player’s embodied conduct but as a commentary on, and component of, an action by an offensive player. It is this composite, of a performed and described offensive action, that is then followed by a performed and described defensive action.

There are parallels between instructional demonstrations and other activities that involve depictions, enactments, and reenactments. In a commentary on a recorded episode of make-believe play, Clark (2016) notes that the children were involved “in two types of activities: (a) as stage-managers outside the scene, they established what went into the scene; and (b) as actors within the scene, they played the roles of Mother, Father, and Baby” (p. 229). Using a theatrical metaphor, Clark highlights that there is a dual organization of the children’s play and that the two organizations are different with respect to participant roles as well as visibility. As actors, the children “enact characters inside the scenes, working on stage in plain sight” (p. 330), whereas as stage-managers, they organize the scene but do not belong to it, which means that they should be treated as invisible and inaudible even when they are seen and heard. Applying this set of metaphors, the directive sequences investigated here belong to the stage-management aspect of the demonstration; as actors within the scene, the coach and his codemonstrators play the roles of defensive and offensive players, and it is in terms of these roles that the demonstration should primarily be understood.

Although parallels with make-believe play, theater, or enactments in storytelling can be informative, there are also important features, with regards to how the demonstrations are produced and understood, that are distinctive to instructional demonstrations. As illustrated by the initial fragment, the relevance of the demonstration is tied to what just happened in the drill and, most importantly, to the lesson that the players should take away from the demonstration. The demonstration is not just produced as a reenactment of a particular game play but as a way to show and instruct how the assembled players should handle a particular situation when it arises. The point of the demonstration is gradually built up during the demonstration through: (a) an initial formulation of the maxim, (b) the enactments of playing in accordance with the maxim, (c) a demonstration of a problem emerging if players too slavishly follow the maxim, (d) the demonstration of a solution to the problem, and (e) the reformulation of the maxim in a way that includes the exception. Here, one can note that the coach is not just acting as a director of the actions of his codemonstrators or as an actor playing the role of a defensive player but also as an instructor who aims to teach the players in the training session a particular lesson. It is this orientation to the pedagogical objective of the intervention that shapes the design of the directive sequences, generating a format that minimizes their encroachment on the visibility of a coherent instructional demonstration.

This instructional orientation of the demonstration clearly can be seen in the latter part of the coach’s intervention, when the point of the lesson is produced as a contrast pair between correct and incorrect performance. There occurs here a shift in the temporal progression of the demonstration as the demonstrators, no longer reproducing the linear progression of the stretch of game play they have up until this point been reenacting, begin producing an alternative course of action. This movement away from the temporal structure of the prior drill performance into a contrast pair enactment highlights a central feature of the overall demonstration, which is that the form through which it is produced—the decomposition or segmentation of basketball play into discrete move-and-countermove units—is itself an artifact of the instructional orientation underpinning its production. Game-play here is given an almost conversational organization—an offensive player’s moves are formed up as first pair-parts, a defensive player’s moves as responding second pair-parts—a componentiality that contrasts with the fluid, simultaneous appearance of real-time basketball play (see Macbeth, 2012). It is the members’ practical analysis of real-time basketball play as something amenable to transformation into conversation-like sequential organization for instructional purposes that is visible in the work of the demonstration’s production. It is in turn these members’ own sequential analysis as exhibited in the demonstration that makes the activity available to our analytical description of the activity in terms of the sequential organizations we find here. The practical requirements of instruction thus can result in perspicuous cases for the analysis of embodied activity in conversation analytic terms.

Notes

¹ Given that this article takes an interest in how the coach elicits the assistance of others in performing the demonstration, recent work on recruitment (Kendrick & Drew, 2016) could potentially be relevant. From the analysis, however, it is clear that these are distinctively different organizational domains.

² While all talk occurring in this example excerpt has been transcribed, in order to save space some aspects of the embodied conduct have been left out and only aspects relevant to the current discussion have been included.

³ It can for instance, be noted that the uses of “we” on lines 5–6 refer to the players and their performance during the drill practice, whereas the uses of “we” on line 8 refer to the defensive team to which the coach belongs in the upcoming reenactments.

⁴ As research into instruction in classroom settings (e.g., Lee, 2007) has shown, students’ displays of what they do not know are frequently deployed by instructors as resources and justifications for launching pedagogical courses of action. Similarly, in the context of basketball training activities, coaching interventions are often launched following, and explicitly framed as responses to, player performances. In this case, Bob had been a member of the defensive group during the last drill performance, and by making reference to Bob’s prior conduct as having been a “good example,” the coach explicitly ties the upcoming demonstration to the previous performance.

⁵ With the coach positioned within the play-space and the four players assembled in drill-initial formation, a new participation framework is established. This new framework is not entirely distinct from the drill performance framework; indeed, as will be shown, it draws upon the drill’s existing participation structure for its sense. While the group of offensive players take up spatial positions that preserve aspects of the participation framework of the drill, these players are not joined on the court by a defensive team, as they would be for a drill performance, but are instead accompanied by the coach.

⁶ The coach probably means to say “ball” not “basket” at the end of line 13. See line 74 of the Excerpt 5 transcript, where he sums up the lesson.

⁷ As illustrated in Excerpt 1 and in the following.

⁸ In this sense, the demonstrations rely on what Garfinkel (2002, p. 202) glosses as a “willingness to wait” and Goodwin (1996) calls “prospective indexicals.”

Appendix

Transcription conventions model

Talk is transcribed with the conventions developed by Gail Jefferson. Embodied actions are transcribed based on the following conventions developed by Lorenza Mondada (2018).

Gestures and descriptions of embodied actions are delimited between two identical symbols and are synchronized with corresponding stretches of talk/lapses of time:

*  *  Delimits walking and changes of bodily orientations by coach.

@ @  Delimits right hand (RH) or both hand (BH) gestures and actions done by coach.

© ©  Delimits left hand (LH) gestures and actions done by coach.

+ +   Delimits gaze and head movements of coach.

Δ Δ   Delimits embodied actions done by Bob.

&  Delimits additional simultaneous embodied actions done by Bob, where necessary.

^ ^   Delimits embodied actions done by other players.

Additional notations:

*->   The action described continues across subsequent lines until the same symbol is ->* reached.

>>   The action described begins before the excerpt’s beginning.

->>   The action described continues after the excerpt’s end.

bob  Participant doing the embodied action is identified when not the speaker.

fig   The exact moment at which a screen shot has been taken is indicated with a hash

#    symbol showing its position within the talk.