Multimodality and socio-materiality of lectures in global universities’ media: accounting for bodies and things

ABSTRACT

Lectures prevail as a ubiquitous teaching and learning method across universities worldwide. Whereas lectures have been conceptualized from language-centred perspectives, lectures' materiality as linked to their socio-cultural and historical meanings have been scarcely explored. To address this gap, we tackle the materiality of communication in ten live recorded lectures – collectively viewed more than 1,000,000 times – uploaded by ‘top-ranked’ universities in India, Japan, Russia, Egypt, Palestine, Spain, the USA, the UK, Italy and Canada, on their websites or YouTube media channels. The materiality we refer to comprises the key things/artefacts and bodies in the lectures. A multimodal semiotic analysis of non-verbal and material elements of a lecture is applied on the videos to first ‘map’ its material ingredients, and then explore associated meanings that form socio-material assemblages. The findings point at a few salient thing and body characteristics, such as the monofocal lecture platform, the omnipresent blackboard, the underrepresentation of female lecturers, and the low diversity and use of digital technology. We discuss these via the ‘body and thing idioms’ (Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press, 1963) that mediate lecture hierarchies, historicity, meaning making and engagement, calling for wider acknowledgement of multimodality and socio-materiality in university practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Media
• lecture
• higher education teaching
• multimodality
• socio-materiality

Introduction: conceptualizing the lecture

The lecture is still the most prevalent and standard form of teaching in higher education (Behr 1988; Bligh 2000; Friesen 2011; Jones 2007; Pale 2013). Yet, it is a contested concept. On the one hand, the proponents of the lecture emphasize that it is a unique educational event that consists of human contact, communication and cognitive engagement within the framework of disciplinary discourse (Behr 1988; Friesen 2011). On the other hand, lectures are seen negatively in terms of: ‘transference from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the students’ (Exley and Dennick 2009), the mode of teaching that emerged in the pre-Englightment era (Phillips 2005) in the context of ‘medieval-book-poor university’ (Perlman 1951), students considered ‘tabulas rasas’ (blank slates) (Jones 2007), and the repetition of the same didactic type of teaching when students’ reflections and prior knowledge is not accounted for. The critics of the lecture argue that it is outdated and no longer needed (Exley and Dennick 2009; Pale 2013; Danielson et al. 2014; Waymouth 2018; Waldrop 2015).

The view of the lecture as a mainly verbal instruction method prevails (e.g., Pale 2013; Postareff et al. 2008; Perlman 1951; McInnes 2013; Friesen 2011; Lindblom-Ylänne 2006; Behr 1988; Abrahamson 1998). It is fair to conclude that one of lecture’s characteristics is indeed the enculturation into the verbal discourse and concepts of the discipline. This enculturation has been explored by Goffman (1981) with regards to a lecturer’s role and performance, the latter aligned with the place where lectures commonly unravel – lecture theatre. The author sees the lecturer as engaging the ‘textual’, ‘dramaturgical’, and ‘animator’ self in a lecture. The first self is concerned with choosing the content of the lecture, the second is an ‘embodied’ self (Friesen 2014) through physical presence and behaviours, and the third self is the one that animates the verbal text. Such text animation, according to Goffman, happens in a form of ‘memorization, aloud reading (…), and fresh talk’ (Goffman 1981, 171). The fresh talk or, to be precise, an illusion of fresh talk is the ability of the lecturer to create a sense that the talk is ‘fresh’ and/or spontaneous information, rather than pre-thought or rehearsed. In the time when Goffman wrote, the lecture was largely mediated by written text – the lecturer would read or talk based on their written or typed notes or selected texts. Friesen (2014, 148) comments on how these lecture-mediating ‘technologies’ have changed over time:

Today, Goffman’s typewriter and ribbon have given way to a panoply of devices and media technologies, from a word-processor and printer, to PowerPoint with its speaker notes and bulleted lists.

Therefore, lecture performance today is expected to be mediated by new technologies that can embed a variety of non-verbal modes of communication. Recent developments in approaches such as sociomateriality (Fenwick 2015; Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2015; Gourlay 2015) and multimodality (Gourlay 2010; Breuer and Archer 2016) stress the important role of non-verbal and material modes in higher education. The movements of multimodality and multiliteracies that emerged from The New London group (Cazden et al. 1996) brought fresh and needed approaches to the knowledge of communication and the ways media are produced, developed, applied, and reproduced in the society and culture. All modes of communication, such as artefacts in the environment, postures, gestures (Sakr, Jewitt, and Price 2014) and multimedia – in its totality – offer different possibilities for meaning making (Kress and Selander 2012).

Sociomaterial and multimodal approaches in education are similar as they both acknowledge the importance of non-verbal modes in communication and representation. What is distinct for multimodality is that it focuses on different modes of communication (e.g., sound, pictures, gestures, web page, etc.) as semiotic resources that can be analysed individually or in multimodal ensembles (a combination of modes). Multimodality suggests a view of text beyond the verbal, which means that other modes such as images or sounds are resources that can be ‘read’ and interpreted but this needs to be introduced and practised (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). Semiotic resources have distinct affordances. The term affordances is adopted from Gibson (2014 [1979]) to identify what actions and meanings semiotic resources afford (or not).

Sociomateriality calls for a greater consideration of matter, things, environments and spaces to understand teaching-learning acts as types of embodied and material performances. The material and social interact to create sociomaterial assemblages, units that make meanings through the interactions between their social and material parts, observed as inseparable and entwined wholes. As Fenwick (2016, 250) states

‘Material’ is the everyday stuff of our lives that is organic and inorganic, technological and natural: bodies, settings, substances and devices. ‘Social’ is our symbols and desires, human interactions and communication. It is in the relations and entanglings between material and social forces that everyday practices – including practitioners’ activities, decisions, responsibilities, etc. – are produced.

Sociomateriality extends the concerns with the materiality of human life that is acknowledged in the field of material culture and disciplines such as anthropology and archeology. As Johnson (1980, 173) emphasizes, talking about the material culture of educational spaces,

In every culture, material artifacts are an integral part of the process of sociocultural transmission. Belief and value, as well as norm and role, can be conveyed through object and artifact as well as language and behaviour.

Customary and taken for granted, material artefacts and corporeal presence and movement in educational spaces constitute a mechanism for sociocultural and symbolic transmission of ideologies, mythologies, and core value orientations in societies (Johnson 1980). An acknowledgement of various material things and modes of communication in social interactions and meanings are key aspects of the (i) sociomaterial approach to higher education (Gourlay and Oliver 2018; Fenwick 2016; Mulcahy 2013; Fenwick 2015) and (ii) the approach to materiality in social practice theory (Schatzki 2019). Both ‘materiality’ approaches emphasize that the development of social structures, knowledge and meanings is in a relational flux with the material elements of the site of practice. In sociomaterial approaches, human and material agency tends to be more symmetrical, emergent and entangled (equal), whereas, in social practice theory, this relationship is more asymmetrical (humans are assigned distinct intentional agency and create material orders). Sociomaterial studies commonly adopt ethnographic approaches and thick descriptions of events as sociomaterial unraveling. The perspective we adopt here is beyond agency and entanglement divides and debates: teaching-learning happens with or via different interacting modes and their historical meaning making potential, where materiality plays a notable role. We focus on body and material things as lecture practice and performance elements or ‘material semiotic resources’ and mediators that account for a lecture’s multimodality. We first explore what kind of material modes are present in lectures and then how their characteristics and meanings relate to socio-culturally and historically constructed meanings of the lecture. By doing so, we are also applying a socio-material approach (from now on socio-material, with a hyphen), as we adopt the position that lecture performance can be analysed semiotically by first identifying its distinct material parts and then considering how these parts form socio-cultural assemblages. We do so through the concepts of the body idiom (Goffman 1963) and the thing idiom. These are our key theoretical concepts that we introduce in the following section.

Lectures as multimodal, socio-material performances: the body and the thing

Higher education environments, both physical and online, abound with a variety of communication modes (e.g., visual, verbal, aural, tactile) that affect how students and lecturers in those environments relate and act with and around it (Gourlay 2010). Including materiality in understanding learning and social interactions can challenge materialist values by taking materiality of life seriously and critically. The marginalization and invisibility of materiality in learning and research only give more power to its impact on society and education. Material properties and designs of any environment are deliberate; they represent, reinforce, frame, direct and afford social action and interaction. As Fenwick (2015, 84) emphasizes:

Materials – things that matter – are often missing from accounts of learning and practice. Materials tend to be ignored as part of the backdrop for human action, dismissed in a preoccupation with consciousness and cognition, or relegated to brute tools subordinated to human intention and design.

Therefore, more studies in this area are needed (Selwyn, Eynon, and Potter 2017). Bodies are specific types of living matter whose characteristics and movements shape social interactions. The work by Goffman (1963) is relevant with regards to ‘body idiom’ that tackles the role of bodies and body interactions in shaping social activity and meanings.

The body idiom (Scollon 2003) in the case of lectures is how bodies and their characteristics mediate the meanings and ideologies of lecture performance and ritual (Thesen 2007). Referring to Goffman’s (1963) work, Scollon (2003) explains that the body idiom is an important factor in the creation of social behaviour and norms, providing Goffman’s definition as follows:

Behaviour in public (…) is governed by a ‘common body idiom’ that ‘is one reason for calling an aggregate of individuals a society’ (Goffman 1963, 35). Body idiom includes both ‘bodily appearance and personal acts: dress, bearing, movement and position, sound level, physical gestures such as waving or saluting, facial decorations, and broad emotional expression’. (Goffman 1963, 33)

Therefore, lectures would have their own body idiom. The ‘body idiom’ also relates to the idea of a ‘historical body’ (Nishida 1998 [1937]), the ‘traces of all the life experience of the individual’ (Scollon 2003), which also includes a group or ‘collective body’ that refers to collectively shared, reproduced or distinct and alienating body practices in different groups and communities. The concept of ‘historical body’ means that what humans (and their bodies) do is a product of constantly reproduced and historically learnt behaviours, heritage, positioning (structure, agency) and experiences. A lecturer’s embodied presence and behaviours (pointing, writing, walking, gazing) and dress code are a part of the ‘body idiom’ that contributes to the building of a lecture’s ‘ritualised expression’ (Goffman 1963). According to Goffman (1981), lectures involve ‘rituals of performance’ stemming from the ‘embodied presence’ of the lecturer that carries ‘the symbolic access to authority offered by the lecture’ (Thesen 2007, 37). The verbalized lecture content (e.g., reflective and intriguing questions posed to the students) can be animated by the dynamics between body movements and mediating artefacts, such as provocative photographs on display, thus making a difference between a ‘boring’ and ‘engaged’ lecture (Thesen 2007).

Thesen (2009) offers further conceptualization of the lecture that links to the ‘body idiom’ by emphasizing that live lectures are sites of intense co-presence between lecturer and students. She argues that there is a special quality of experience in the shared presence, where the lecture discourse is always an engaged, dialogic discourse (building on the work by Bakhtin (1981)). This means that lecturers can accentuate their co-presence and the visceral side of learning by body movements, by inviting student reflection or disrupting the predictable flow of the lecture (Thesen 2009). Such views reaffirm the lecture’s potential as a shared experience and coexistence in body, mind and spirit, with a potential for both learners’ and lecturer’s engaged being.

In our study sample, half of the collected video recorded live lectures are in languages we do not speak, hence we will focus on the extent to which student voices are heard or how lecturers’ gesture and engagement with any presentation materials intensify embodied and material co-presence. A linguistic or discourse analysis would reveal language-based salient and liminal moments of co-presence (Thesen 2007), but we do not tackle these aspects here.

If the socio-historical meanings, functions and effects around the body inform the ‘body idiom’, the socio-historical meanings of things inform the ‘thing idiom’. Considering material culture, Woodward (2019) argues the importance of things in human construction of personal or collective biographies and practices. In a similar vein, Malafouris (2013) claims that physical things are critical for cognition and engagement with the world. Things can be solid material artefacts but also representational artefacts that instantiate some external materiality (Leonardi 2010), such as digital photographs on display in a lecture. Simply put, without communication-mediating materiality, it is difficult to imagine both physical and digital environments and university learning interactions. Therefore, alongside the same logic of Goffmanian ‘body idiom’ or ‘historical body’, we propose that ‘thing idiom’ or ‘historical things’ refer to historical development and uses of things (artefacts) over time, across societies and contexts. The ‘thing idiom’ is the term we introduce to expand on the body idiom and draw attention to the significance and signification of environmental materiality (of things, both physical and digitally presented) in mediating the meanings of practices and acts such as lectures. We further define the ‘thing idiom’ in lecture meaning making as the sensed (e.g., visible, audible, tactile) characteristics and histories of things whose meanings are contextually, historically and socio-culturally situated and conditioned. These things are always ‘imbued with history and values (Haas 1999, 209)’. This means that it is useful to consider which material things are present in lectures, and what they suggest about them through their characteristics and histories.

The mediating semiotic mode of technology in lectures

Digital technology is a distinct and crucial part of lectures within the contemporary ‘digital university’ (Sheail 2018; Johnston, MacNeill, and Smyth 2018). Via on-screen representations and programming languages, digital technology embeds representational materiality (Lacković 2020; Campbell, Lacković, and Olteanu 2021). Via its hardware, it has physical materiality. Lecture capture hardware allow for the recording of lectures so that they can be shared and viewed asynchronously, as in the case of our lecture sample. There is a wide range of possibilities for technological embededness in lectures, e.g., live streaming of current and relevant web pages content or Twitter feeds to link the lecture to everyday life and current affairs (Friesen 2014). New media provide new opportunities to support lecture’s impact as an interpretative, hermeneutic experience, as ‘the lecture, in short, transforms the artefact of the text into an event – an event in which the text is brought into conversational relationship with the audience and with the present’ (Friesen 2014, 150). The author reflects on the role of digital media as follows:

Pedagogical forms that are rooted in orality such as the lecture are not simply done away with because new media develop that are supposedly superior or more efficient (…) Instead of being replaced or rendered obsolete, the lecture with its oral roots is complemented, augmented and reconfigured through changes in textual technologies. (Friesen 2014, 150)

What the author means by ‘textual’ technologies are technologies that may be also defined as visual or multimodal, but their purpose is to mediate textual exchanges and orality in lectures.

The use of presentation slideware technologies such as PowerPoint at universities and schools is widely spread in the Western context, for example, in the UK, in both face to face and online learning. Many authors have criticized the use of this presentation technology, propelled by Tufte’s critique (2003). Yet, presentation technology such as Power Point can embed different media to support active exploration of meanings and interpretations in lectures (James, Burke, and Hutchins 2006; Amare 2006; Ivanovich, Nikiforova, and Ustinova 2012; Hallewell and Lackovic 2017). Materiality in visual representational forms can be harnessed in lectures by applying and engaging students in video or photograph analysis (Hallewell and Lackovic 2017).

Aligned with the idea of interactive lectures, Digital Ink allows for a ‘real life freehand annotation of PowerPoint presentations’ (Johnson 2008, 2) and Clickers technologies have been suggested as technologies that support a lecture’s engaging interactivity as they allow for students’ live feedback (Rossiter 2014; Lin, Liu, and Chu 2011; Egelandsdal and Krumsvik 2017; Kress and Selander 2012). However, there has been no wide or even modest adoption of either. The latest interactive presentation technologies such as Mentimeter or gamified environments such as Kahoot! offer a variety of ways to present data, interact with viewers/learners and include their opinions and feedback.

According to various technologies involved in lectures in relation to its digital format and presentation, a range of categorizations have emerged. These include: ‘chalkboard lectures’ (often labeled as ‘traditional lecture’ that include a blackboard as lecture technology) (Groskreutz, Logofatu, and Schott 2018; Sewasew, Mengestle, and Abate 2015), ‘PowerPoint lectures’ (Clark 2008; Rossiter 2014), ‘video lectures’ (Groskreutz, Logofatu, and Schott 2018; Crook and Schofield 2017), ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lectures (Crook and Schofield 2017), and various sub-categories suggested relating to digitally pre-recorded lectures, their video format, and different styles of presentation (see Crook and Schofield 2017).

All these new ways to understand lectures suggest that the conceptualization of the lecture would need to be expanded from a more traditional focus on verbal communication and text to include the non-verbal, multimodal and socio-material character of lectures. We focus on one lecture format in this article, the live video-recorded lecture (Crook and Schofield 2017), uploaded on university online media, to tackle the research gap in empirical studies on multimodality and materiality in global lectures, and to answer the following research questions:

1. What kind of materiality (ingredients) is there in sampled lectures and what is it like?

   • What are salient material elements (present in all contexts)?

2. What kind of socio-cultural meanings or ideologies are mediated by lectures’ salient material elements?

Methodology

To answer our research questions, we adopt a multimodal analytical approach that we root in pragmatic semiotic analysis that first acknowledges individual material elements of the observed and then digs into their meanings, histories and related conceptualizations, with considerations of how material-social interrelatedness (socio-materiality) can further illuminate the findings.

Sampling and data collection

We analysed uploaded videos of lectures in the official websites and YouTube channels of ten so-called ‘top’ (high-ranked) universities from ten diverse countries, randomly chosen for their belonging to different global regions and varied educational context: India, Japan, Russia, Egypt, Palestine, Spain, Italy, Canada, the USA and the UK. We chose the videos that were among the most viewed videos. The universities are anonymized for the purpose of ethical conduct of public media data, and for convenience are numbered. Some of these universities have numerous lectures uploaded onto their websites or YouTube channels, and some universities have displayed only a few video-recorded lectures. The number of viewers also need to be taken into consideration in terms of data generalizability. An uploaded publicly available video is a specific assemblage of what is presented in the video and the views of the video. Some videos had over 700,000 views, which means that the video views are a part of our data sets, signifying how frequently a particular lecture representation has been viewed. The higher the view count, the more significant the lecture is in its potential to promote a particular presentation and meaning of a lecture. It is important to reiterate that we only focus on one type of ‘video lecture’ (Crook and Schofield 2017), that is, a live video recorded lecture, which is uploaded to ‘showcase’ how the university in question chose to promote a representative face to face lecture in their context, the lecture that they are happy to show to the public.

In particular, we applied three selection principles in choosing the lectures: (1) first, we chose universities that are globally ‘recognized’, based on the universities’ rank in QS and Times Higher Education world ranking for the year 2018, or its high regional ranking; (2) second, we chose the most viewed (when page visit numbers were provided or we picked the first one listed when this was not the case twice), accessible, and visible videos; and (3) third, choosing subjects that sit along the diverse spectrum of ‘hard’ sciences and mathematics, social sciences and humanities (see Table 1 below).

Table 1. Lecture video sample description: university, country, discipline/subject, duration, video views on Jan 31st, 2021.

University	Country	Subject discipline	Duration of the lecture	Number of views
University 1	India	Quantum Mechanics	32 mins	28,322
University 2	Japan	Computer Sciences/Mathematics	55 mins	7266
University 3	Russia	Public Administration	87 mins	855
University 4	Egypt	Civil Engineering	72 mins	16,217
University 5	Palestine	Philosophy	37 mins	9100
University 6	Spain	Geography	160 mins	20,345
University 7	USA	Literature	40 mins	881,997
University 8	UK	Quantum Mechanics	44 mins	189,615
University 9	Italy	Calculus	57 mins	1789
University 10	Canada	Architecture	43 mins	7233

Data coding and analysis

We adapted a multimodal semiotic analysis (Lacković 2018, 2020) for the purposes of this study. The main methodological approach is qualitative with quantitative elements. The quantitative data arises from identifying and counting the occurrence of particular material elements in the video (singular material elements), focusing on visible material things and selected characteristics related to the things and bodies. Our analytical model therefore first identifies and numbers physical objects and the characteristics of body materiality in terms of body movements, gender, gesturing, and dress code (we also considered age), that constitute action in the videos. This is followed by descriptions of actions around these materials (denotation) as linked to selected elements (what is happening with these elements, what they look like) as part of our descriptive findings. We focused these descriptions on action, e.g., ‘the lecturer is pointing at the blackboard’ or ‘the camera is showing learners’. Finally, the collected data on material presence and related action-based descriptions was conceptualized as the Conceptual Object of the analysis, in relation to possible socio-cultural and theoretical meanings that these materials and actions entail and reproduce (addressing the thing and body idioms). This final analytical part is elaborated through Discussion.

Findings: the multimodal, socio-material lecture

Material things

The first part of the findings focuses on materiality elements and denotation, showing the presence (or absence) of things, and what is happening to them (see Tables 2 and 3 below). This part of the analysis shows several patterns that reveal what the lecture consists of as a totality of its ‘ingredients’ or elements, to answer research question 1 and provide some input for research question 2.

Table 2. Version a. Material things and technology across lectures.

Element	No.	Lectures and universities with the Element present:
Lecture hall	10	All universities/lectures
Lecturing platform	10	All universities/lectures
Blackboard	10	All universities/lectures
White Board	3	1. University 1: India/Quantum Mechanics 2. University 5:Palestine/Philosophy 3. University 6: Spain/Geography
Microphone	6	1. University 1: India/Quantum Mechanics 2. University 2: Japan/Computer Sciences/Mathematics 3. University 3: Russia/Public Administration 4. University 8: UK/Quantum Mechanics 5. University 9: Italy/Calculus 6. University 10: Canada/Architecture
Projector	5	1. University 2: Japan/Computer Sciences/Mathematics 2. University 3: Russia/Public Administration 3. University 5: Palestine/Philosophy 4. University 6: Spain/Geography 5. University 10: Canada/Architecture
Presentation slide ware (Power Point)	4	1. University 2: Japan/Computer Sciences/Mathematics 2. University 3: Russia/Public Administration 3. University 6: Spain/Geography 4. University 10: Canada/Architecture
Images in Power Point	3, 60 images in 3 lectures	Charts, Graphs and Tables	5	1. University 3: Russia (Public Administration) 2. University 6: Spain (Geography)
		Illustration, drawn graphic images	14	1. University 6: Spain (Geography) 2. University 10: Canada (Architecture)
		Photographs	41	1. University 6: Spain (Geography) 2. University 10: Canada (Architecture)
		Bullet points before text	0	None
Videos in Power Point	1 in one lecture	University 2: Japan (Computer Sciences/Mathematics)

Table 3. Version b. Material things and technology across lectures summary.

Element→	Hall	Plat	BB	WB	Mic	Pro	PT/PP	Im PP	Vid PP	BP in PP
University↓/Discipline
U1: India/Quantum Mechanics	√	√	√	√	√	–	–	–	–	–
U2: Japan/Computer Sciences/Mathematics	√	√	√	–	√	√	√	√	√	–
U3: Russia/Public Administration	√	√	√	–	√	√	√	√	–	–
U4: Egypt/Civil Engineering	√	√	√	–	–	–	–	–	–	–
U5: Palestine/Philosophy	√	√	√	√	–	√	–	–	–	–
U6: Spain/Geography	√	√	√	√	–	√	√	√	–	–
U7: USA/Literature	√	√	√	–	–	–	–	–	–	–
U8: UK/Quantum Mechanics	√	√	√	–	√	–	–	–	–	–
U9: Italy/Calculus	√	√	√	–	√	–	–	–	–	–
U10: Canada/Architecture	√	√	√	–	√	√	√	√	–	–
Total→	10	10	10	3	6	5	4	4	1	0

Hall: lecture hall/theatre; Plat: lecture platform; BB: Blackboard; WB: whiteboard; Mic: microphone; Pro: projector; PS/PP: Presentation technology/Power Point; Image PP: Image in Power Point; Video in PP (Power Point); Bullet points in PP (Power Point).

Our analysis emphasizes the visible presence of various ‘things’ in a lecture that are not spoken language. All lectures take place in what can be called a lecture hall or theatre with a designated speaker platform place/space. The most salient lecture environment ‘thing’ is a blackboard: all lecture theatres have a blackboard. While all the lectures are filmed in the period 2010–2018, when a whiteboard is also presumably widely used, the main artefact that can be seen in the background is the blackboard, not any form of technology. Only 3 out of 10 lecture halls have or visibly feature a marker-based whiteboard, which is a next generation, supposedly more technologically advanced version of a blackboard.

The microphone is another salient element of lectures: 6 of the lecturers use it.

Half of the lecture halls on the videos are equipped with a projector. Four lectures use PowerPoint presentation technology (Geography, Computer Mathematics, Architecture and Public Administration) and no other technology to support lecturing is used. The PowerPoint slides are captured by the camera, but the focus always remains on the speaker, and the slides are always in the background, whereas the speaker is in the foreground.

Four lecturers extensively use photographs and other types of visual representations. None of the lecturers used PowerPoint presentations with bullet point text. What is notable when slideware technology is used in the case of four lectures, is the choice of PowerPoint to embed multimedia materials in all four cases. Many and varied types of images are embedded in PowerPoint presentations, 60 in total (photographs, pictures, graphs, charts, tables, etc.), signaling that the use of the visual and graphic representations as the lecture tools/resources in presentation technology are present to a notable extent in our sample. There seems to be no particular or traditional disciplinary profiles in terms of perceiving one discipline as being image or visualization ‘friendly’: the four lectures in which visual materials were used are on diverse subjects – Architecture, Geography, Computer Mathematics and Public Administration, whereas the lectures that did not use visuals were in Quantum Mechanics, Civil Engineering, Philosophy, Literature and Calculus. However, there were some disciplinary distinctions in relation to the type of images: Architecture and Geography lecturers mainly used photographs, whereas the Public Administration and the Computer Mathematics lecturers used mostly graphs, charts and tables. The embedded video mode is present only in one lecture (Japan, in Computer Mathematics), which raises questions around the extent that videos are used in a lecture’s pedagogy, not just for capturing the lecture.

Actor descriptions and scene configuration

This part of the findings focuses on materiality elements and denotation, showing the presence (or absence) of bodies, and what is happening to them (see Tables 4 and 5 below).

Table 4. Version a. Key body characteristics, camera presence and voicing.

Key body characteristics and camera presence		No.	University
Gender (presumed binary, can be different)	Male	9	India, Japan, Russia, Egypt, Palestine, USA, UK, Italy, Canada
	Female	1	Spain
Clothes	Formal (suit and tie)	3	Russia, Palestine, USA
	Semi-formal (jeans or trousers and shirts)	6	India, Japan, Egypt, UK, Italy, Canada
	Semi-formal dress	1	Spain
	Casual clothes (e.g., jeans with t-shirts or sweatshirts)	0	/
	Specific visible identity clothes or body-related ‘thing’ (e.g., goth make up, hats, piercing, tattoos, scarves, assistive technology)	0	/
Camera presence and voicing	Camera focus only on the speaker	8	India, Japan, Russia, Egypt, USA, UK, Italy, Canada
	Camera shifts focus from the speaker to learners/audiences	2	Palestine and Spain
	Only the speaker ( the lecturer) speaks	8	India, Japan, Russia, Egypt, USA, UK, Italy, Canada
	Interaction with the audience: both the speaker and the audience speak	2	Palestine and Spain

Table 5. Version b. Key body characteristics, camera presence and voicing.

Characteristic→	Gender		Clothes		Camera focus		Voice
University/Discipline↓	M	Fem	For	S-F	speaker	learners	speaker	learner
U1: India/Quantum Mechanics	√	–	–	√	√	–	√	–
U2: Japan/Computer Sciences/Mathematics	√	–	√	–	√	–	√	–
U3: Russia/Public Admin	√	–	–	√	√	–	√	–
U4: Egypt/Civil Engineering	√	–	√	–	√	√	√	√
U5: Palestine/Philosophy		√	–	√	√	√	√	√
U6: Spain/Geography	√	–	√	–	√	–	√	–
U7: USA/Literature	√	–	–	√	√	–	√	–
U8: UK/Quantum Mechanics	√	–	–	√	√	–	√	–
U9: Italy/Calculus	√	–	–	√	√	–	√	–
U10: Canada/Architecture	√	–	–	√	√	–	√	–
Total→	9	1	3	7	8	2	8	2

M: male; Fem: Female; For: Formal; S-F: Semi=formal.

In all the videos the camera is focused on the lecturer, and he or she is in the frame the entire time, whereas the student ‘audience’ is only partially visible or not visible at all. In one lecture only the camera focus shifts for a brief moment so that the entire student audience comes into frame. A video viewer in almost all cases cannot see the reactions of the audience to the lecturer’s speech, the setting of the room/hall or the atmosphere.

The focus of the camera is firmly on the speaker in eight lecture videos. University 5: Palestine and University 6: Spain are an exception to this rule: in both lectures the response of the audience is frequently shown. Although the interactive and active learning paradigm is strongly promoted in the Western academic circles, lectures recorded in the USA, Canada, and UK, as prominent Western contexts, are not showing any students’ interactions or reactions. Conversational and interactive lectures that actively involve students’ questions and comments, such as the ones by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel who applies a Socratic method by presenting controversial and challenging cases for students to discuss and debate, constantly energized by his questioning. These lectures are highly engaging and lauded in the US and globally, but such lectures might be the exception rather than the rule. In our lecture sample, the feedback from students is given either verbally in rare instances when the viewer can see or hear the students, or non-verbally through postures and gestures in the instances when the viewer can see the students’ non-verbal reactions. The camera often follows the act of the lecturer-actor to focus on his performance.

Nine lecturers are male (in a normative sense of the perceived gender), and all ten lecturers are supposedly middle-aged. We cannot be sure and claim whether they are indeed male, middle-aged or ‘older’ per se (they could be, for example, transgender). Male lecturers are dressed in a very similar, semi-formal uniform manner. The body of all lecturers reinforce normative bodies and abilities, e.g., assistive technology such as wheelchair or specific body-related identity markers such as scarves or tattoos are not visible among lecturers in our sample of most viewed lectures. We also did not identify any of the lecturers as Black.

Body gestures and movements

This part of the findings focuses on materiality elements and denotation, showing the presence (or absence) of bodies, and what is happening to them (see Tables 6 and/or 7 below).

Table 6. Version a. Lecturers’ gestures and body movement.

Gestures and body movement	No.	Universities’ lecturers
Writing on the blackboard	8	India; Japan; Egypt; Spain; USA; UK, Italy, Canada
Writing on the white board	0	/
Pointing at the blackboard/white board	8	India; Japan; Egypt; Spain; USA; UK; Italy; Canada
Pointing at the projected images (photographs, graphic representations, illustrations)	4	Japan; Russia; Spain; Canada
Using gestures as spatial and temporal embodiment (representing concepts such as near, far, small, big, now, then, here, there)	10	All universities
Using gestures for rhetorical emphasis (holding palms up, outstretching arms towards the audience, etc)	10	All universities
General body movements: pacing, distinct changes in positioning and in posture	7	India; Egypt; Palestine; Spain; USA; Italy; Canada

Table 7. Version b. Lecturers’ gestures and body movement.

Action→	Writing on BB	Writing on WB	Pointing at the board	Pointing at the projected images	Making gestures for spatial/temporal meaning	Making specific gestures for emphasis	Walking, pacing, changing positions and postures
University/Discipline↓
U1: India/Quantum Mechanics	√	–	√	–	√	√	√
U2: Japan/Computer Sciences/Mathematics	√	–	√	√	√	√	–
U3: Russia/Public Admin	–	–	–	√	√	√	–
U4: Egypt/Civil Engineering	√	–	√	–	√	√	√
University 5: Palestine/Philosophy	-	–	-	–	√	√	√
U6: Spain/Geography	√	–	√	√	√	√	√
U7: USA/Literature	√	–	√	–	√	√	√
U8: UK/Quantum Mechanics	√	–	√	–	√	√	√
U9: Italy/Calculus	√	–	√	–	√	√	√
U10: Canada/Architecture	√	–	√	√	√	√	√
Total→	8	0	8	4	10	10	7

BB: Blackboard; WB: White board.

Most lecturers (8 out of 10) write on the blackboard, and what is more, they all point at the board when they have to clarify their discourse. Something that they explain verbally is linked to the represented on the board. As shown in the first section of the data analysis, four lecturers use projected images (photographs, pictures, graphic representations, etc.) in their lectures. All four lecturers who use digital media as a mode of communication use gestures very often commonly pointing at the screened media. All lecturers use gestures to enact their speech, signaling concepts which seemed to us to mean: ‘near’, ‘far’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘us’, ‘you’, ‘them’, etc. These gestures are always made simultaneously to the lecturers’ act of speech: they gesticulate while they speak. We thought it was very interesting that all lecturers make common rhetoric gesture of thumb-and-finger accentuation: they hold their index finger and thumb together when making an important point (also inferred from their voice intonation). This gesture seems to hold important meaning in lecturing, to stress the significance of the information presented. They all also outstretch their arms towards the audience and move the positioning of their hands: they hold their hand’s palms up and turned inwards, towards their body and towards the audience. None of these gestures can be observed as typical or exclusive for an individual country and culture context – all those gestures are used across all lectures to make the speech more dynamic for attention and engagement purposes in lecturing performance.

However, although the lecturer’s position changes a lot, the lecturers from University 2: Japan and University 3: Russia maintain a static position for most of the time. This might relate to cultural factors, but we cannot claim that. However, it should be pointed out that the former projects a video to his students and the latter shows several graphs and tables to support his discourse, hence their lectures are strongly mediated by non-verbal resources. All the other eight lectures are packed with embodied dynamics: lecturers pace from the blackboard to the audience and back, they walk around the room, they frequently change their postures. What is more, in the two videos where students interact with the lecturers (University 5: Palestine and University 6: Spain), the students also use similar gestures and body movement to those of the lecturer when they speak.

Discussion: meanings, hierarchies and intersection of things and bodies

In this section, we will unpack the above findings and discuss them in relation to selected embodied performativity and socio-cultural meanings and ideologies, as the Conceptual Object of our semiotic analysis. To remind the reader, our analysis goes from identifying lecture elements (micro meaning), describing them (meso meaning) to unpacking these in relation to the key concept or theory (macro and meta meaning – thing and body idiom). Our findings at the micro and meso level of represented elements and denotation suggest that lectures in our international lecture sample operate within an established set of material and ritualized ‘codes’ (Goffman 1963), that help define what a lecture is in a higher education environment. We address these codes by unpacking collective socio-cultural meanings of lectures via the body and thing idioms.

The salient body and thing idiom: platform-gaze and gendered body

First, in our sampled videos, and, it can be expected more widely, a lecture is a monofocal platform event, where the lecturer has a dedicated space for lecturing, as it is common in lecture theatres. We will unpack the meaning of this configuration by exploring the role of lecturer as a gazing actor in a position of authority, not only a textual performer. The focal analytical unit is therefore a body-thing idiom assemblage through gaze and platform entanglement. The presence of the ‘podium’ or platform fosters the audience’s monofocal attention directed to the speaker (Scollon 2003). A collective ‘unidirectional gaze’ is directed towards the speaking authority, and the speaking authority gazes over the audiences from their dedicated, often elevated, space. Arguably, universities have an option to present a smaller sized or seminar-type lectures where the podium may not be that distinct and lecturers could choose to walk around the space, but all lectures took place in lecture theatres where ‘mingling’ with the students was nearly impossible. Such platformised address to audiences can be considered critically as mediating a ritual of hegemonic gaze:

If I gaze at you and see you gazing back, I can speak for you as though we are the same person. If I speak and you remain silent, we can simulate a conversation in which I make pronouncements and you reserve judgment. (Scollon 2003, 94)

This platform-gaze positioning reproduces a hierarchical order between teachers and students, mediated by the architectural and design features of lecture environments. The unidirectional ‘gaze’ disciplines and encultures the learners into the social order and hierarchy they are to be members of as Scollon (2003, 94) argues that: ‘(c)rucial to systems of discipline is the architecture of the hierarchical gaze. (…)’. The author (Scollon 2003, 97) adds that

Power relations are expressed through linguistic means such as forms of address and the ‘syntax of hegemony’ as well as elements of body idiom such as gaze, body orientation and facial expression. (Scollon and Scollon 1983, 1994, 2001)

However, the monofocal platform or teaching space in lecture environments does not necessarily mean that the hierarchy is strongly maintained or that lecturers do not challenge it. This inherent lecture hall hierarchy can be diffused. And that is exactly the point of elaborating on this synergy between the body idiom of gaze and the thing idiom of platform. If we go back to our earlier points about lectures as dialogic co-presence (Thesen 2007) and an act of invigorating students’ interest at the intersection of provocative questions and mediating technology (Thesen 2007), then attention needs to be paid to the extent to which the lecturer attends to students’ presence. We identify this through students’ voice, as we consider all lectures collectively.

Only two lecturers in our study provide voicing opportunities to learners to clearly acknowledge their presence. Yet, a monofocal address could still produce dialogic engagement (Thesen 2009). In their study Bannink and Dam (2013) point out that although silent, the audience is usually emphatic to powerful and interesting lectures: they can nod, smile, laugh, frown, take notes etc, all of which shows a type of learning engagement via non-verbal expression. The chosen angle of lecture recording only in two cases show students’ faces and reactions. The lecturer can refer to students to acknowledge their interpretative faculties and their interpretations of the ongoing speech and content, while analysing the lecture’s learning resources (Hallewell and Lackovic 2017). In that way, lecturers can acknowledge students meaning making processes in situ as an exchange of ongoing meanings, rather than a unidirectional dissemination of messages (Kress and Salander 2012). However, as we did not analyse speech, we can only conclude a general lack of student voice, which means that only two lecturers posed direct questions to the students and provided time for their responses. The point is that every lecturer has a possibility and opportunity to challenge and diffuse a hierarchical modus operandi of platform lectures not just via engaging discourse but also by giving voice to students.

Lecturers’ gesturing and pointing is a special form of body idiom. Special dynamics of the lecture is achieved via gesturing and interactions with a thing, such as the blackboard. The meaning of the lecture’s content ongoing in the minds of both lecturers and students is linked to the universal act of pointing (Pi, Hong, and Yang 2017). Research evidences the importance of gesturing in lectures to direct and increase learners’ attention and engagement or signal content significance (Tian and Bourguet 2016; Pi et al. 2019). In short, body language and gestures in lecturing matter for learners’ engagement with the lecture content (Roth and Bowen 1998; Corts 2006; Weinberg, Fukawa-Connelly, and Wiesner 2015). This relates to McInnes (2013) and Thesen’s (2007) claim that such dynamism in lectures creates a feeling of spontaneity and draws students’ attention. As the lecture is a form of presentation and demonstration, through their bodies, lecturers create a link between the lecture’s textual meaning and material resources present in the lecture space, such as slideware or a blackboard. This enlivens the lecture’s text (Goffman 1981; Friesen 2014), taking advantage of different media affordances for meaning making in lectures. Gesturing towards the visual presentation media such as photographs, which was apparent when lecturers used photographs, evokes the arguments by Pozzer-Ardenghi and Roth (2004) about the important role of gestures and photographs as distinct meaning-making resources in lectures. In terms of Goffman’s view on how lecturers enact lectures’ verbal content, they were all doing the ‘fresh talk’ that we mentioned earlier (Goffman 1981) as none of the lecturers were reading from a pre-prepared document.

Body idiom also includes the gender of the lecturers as a specific body characteristic that has socio-cultural significance. This is rarely considered when talking about lectures and lecturing. The focal centre of attention is nine times out of ten on a male speaker. Male¹ lecturers display a certain ‘uniformity’ in the way they are dressed – formal enough yet not too ‘tie and briefcase business executive’ clothes seem to represent a standardized dress code for a male lecturer. This assemblage of clothes and gender as a representative lecturer of the most viewed lectures at ‘top’ global universities may seem to be of little significance or relevance. However, the historical and cultural framing of females and their bodies as passive and beautifully decorated subjects of male gaze has implicitly undermined the value of the female voice and therefore females as vocalized knowing and intellectual subjects for a very long time. What women would have or want to say or how they contributed to scientific or any other progress would be rarely given public significance or attention historically, unless they were ruling elites. We may be still struggling to overcome these framings today. Although some may argue that women have reached an equal position in academia, discrepancies between male and female academics in terms of salaries and awarded professoriate are telling. The authority and competence of the male voice over female voice is reproduced in our lectures’ sample. If we consider black female academics (Stockfelt 2018), they are generally a rare university media occurrence and there were none in our sample in the contexts where we would expect this to be the case (e.g., USA, UK, Canada). As the sample is arguably small, we also considered other most viewed lectures (up to 10 in each context) across sampled universities and none featured ‘alternatively’ dressed or looking, differently able, and minority-group lecturers.

We do not claim that this is the general case but invite attention in terms of what kind of lecturers are considered presentable, competent, and representative university speakers, both by university and video viewers, and why. On the one hand, some disciplinary fields are more male dominated; hence male lecturers representing those fields are unsurprising, although more female and diverse identity role models are certainly needed in STEM disciplines. On the other hand, this rationale of representativeness relative to staff gender ratio raises further questions in terms of whether staff members in most viewed lectures in university media channels are female in the disciplines where female academic staff are equally or more represented than male staff. This would need further investigation.

The thing idiom focus: blackboard and digital technologies

We will now turn to the thing idiom and salient material things that mediate lectures. The microphone reinforces the importance given to the verbal mode of communication in lectures (Postareff et al. 2008; Behr 1988; Friesen 2011; Thesen 2009). This could also be due to the fact that the lecture was intentionally recorded. To be heard well and at a distance is also symbolic of numerous student audiences in large lecture theatres due to the massification of contemporary higher education.

‘Blackboard’ presence as the dominant ‘thing idiom’ in all lectures is notable. It is a symbol of an educational space (Johnson 1980). In our sample, blackboards are present in all contexts, much used in the three mathematics-salient subjects of Computer Science, Quantum Mechanics, and Calculus. If we consider the argument of Groskreutz, Logofatu, and Schott (2018), Qazi et al. (2014) and Sewasew, Mengestle, and Abate (2015) who categorize ‘chalkboard lectures’ as ‘traditional’, our data suggests that traditional (blackboard and chalkboard) lecturing remains in modern-day lectures. All videos feature blackboards, and eight blackboards and chalks are actively used. The real time action and creative expression by the lecturers that the blackboard affords both fixates and energizes students’ attention. The blackboard also carries historical and socio-cultural meanings. It signifies how things that were at one time radical, revolutionary and transformational become commonly integrated and naturalized in society and in education:

Few people realize that the classroom blackboard is one of the most revolutionary educational tools ever invented. And it may be hard to fathom that blackboards as we know them today were unknown until relatively recent times. The invention of the blackboard had an enormous impact on classroom efficiency. Due to their simplicity, effectiveness, economy and ease of use, the simple blackboard and its cousin the whiteboard have substantial advantages over any number of more-complex modern technologies. At the end of the 18th century, students in Europe and America were still using individual slates made of actual slate or pieces of wood coated with paint and grit and framed with wood. Paper and ink were expensive but slate and wood were plentiful and cheap, making them the economical option. (taken from Concordia University Portland blog, underlined words by the authors)

What we underline in the excerpt is the economic rationale for any new technologies, showing how efficiency targets have always affected and driven educational change and technology adoption. The blackboard is an example of how educational environments transform due to practical material needs, responding to economical and managerial logic. Indeed, the current audit and business model culture at universities highlights accountability and management purposes of the artefacts and digital technology (Shore 2008), rather than pedagogical innovation (Lacković 2020).

Contrary to the promotion in the literature (Rossiter 2014; Lin, Liu, and Chu 2011; Egelandsdal and Krumsvik 2017) but as expected, the use of instant feedback technology such as Clickers or Digital Ink in lectures is non-existent in our sample. Four lecturers engage with visual resources (photographs, illustration, graphs) through PowerPoint in lecturing as important points of reference that highlight the lecture’s multimodal meaning making character. No PowerPoint presentations used bullet points with text, which suggests that Tufte’s (2003) critique framed as ‘death’ by bullet points was taken onboard quite literary. This finding intrigues us as we are aware that bullet-points in PowerPoint or other presentation technology are still widely used in lecturing practice, at least in the UK.

Although digital technology initiated a wave of creative and interactive uses of technology at universities, lectures operate around a set of standard and monolithic technologies and pedagogies (Henderson, Selwyn, and Aston 2017; Gourlay 2015). Our ‘digital technology’ findings suggest a particular idea of ‘digital’ university – digitalization in this case is present as presentation and lecture capture technology, rather than diverse technologies and digital content used in teaching. The university-as-market place has increased staff workload and pressure related to research impact, thus devaluing time and efforts spent on teaching preparation to explore various digital modes, platforms, and media in lecturing. The lack of diverse media uses is unsurprising, confirming a discrepancy between institutional or policy pressures to develop digital learning and how technology actually supports pedagogy in practice (Henderson, Selwyn, and Aston 2017; Henderson, Finger, and Selwyn 2016, 235). It remains to be seen whether and when lecturing and lecture media change and diversify in any significant way.

Limitations and future research

Inevitably, our study has limitations. Only ten lectures from ten global countries are examined, and we cannot claim that these are representative videos of national university systems, teaching or subject disciplines. However, we can claim that those were among the most viewed videos (altogether viewed by more than 1,000,000 viewers) coming from the highest ranked universities in each country. These are lectures that attracted significant viewers’ attention. Our findings do not tackle the quality of the lecture content or suggest that the lectures analysed were not engaging students’ interpretation or imagination, or that students’ presence was not acknowledged, as we did not analyse language. The next step is indeed to include orality and understand how it relates to the lecture’s physical and digital materiality (e.g., see the related work by Gourlay (2020) on posthumanism and digital university). We could have done an ethnographic analysis of one or two lectures, but we used a different approach as we were interested in mapping all lectures’ material elements in the first part of our analysis, and then unpacking most salient body and thing idioms in all lectures. Ideally, the number of the sampled and analysed lectures would be higher. How non-digital and digital technologies are used in relation to lecture content would merit further inquiry. In addition, the strong, moderate, or blurred signification of the discipline (Trowler 2014) in lectures and inclusion of diverse lecturers requires further considerations. Future studies could engage lecturers, technology experts and students in describing and reflecting on lectures. The latest ‘translation’ from live lecture experience into online synchronous or asynchronous lectures and what that means also calls for new explorations.

Conclusion: the lecture as a multimodal, socio-material performance

We explored the non-verbal, socio-material characteristics of 10 most viewed live lectures of top 10 global universities, video recorded and provided by the universities’ websites and official YouTube channels. This was done via a multimodal semiotic analysis (Lacković 2018, 2020) to develop further understanding and socio-cultural conceptualization of lectures and lecture practice as embodied (via body idiom) and mediated by the things present in the lecture (via thing idiom). An intersection of these was also considered via the thing-body idiom of lecture platform and lecturer’s gaze.

Lectures operate with a variety of material modes that imbue various meanings of the lecture (e.g., in relation to hierarchical and historical higher education character), routinely mediated by normative bodies and things, such as senior male lecturers and the omnipresent blackboard. The materiality in the sampled global lectures is cunningly similar. These material modes can have enabling and constraining affordances in an educational context (Acton 2017, 1441), representing and reinforcing specific socio-cultural meanings and practices. The presence of diverse digital technology is marginal, and students’ hands-on response via technology is absent, which emphasizes the discrepancy between digital education reality from one side and technology hype, recommendations and futuristic vision from the other.

The described socio-material character of lectures evident in the findings reinforces ‘monolithic social categories, fixity and power’ (Gourlay 2015, 310). There is a need for

purposefully considering of how materiality limits or enhances possibilities for learning, and critically deliberating how and why specific educational practices become stabilised, dominant and powerful. (Acton 2017, 1449)

This paper is not challenging the practice of lecturing. Rather, it calls for rethinking and re-conceptualizing of lectures to account for their material character, such as things, design and bodies, and the socio-cultural meanings and ideologies they mediate. It also draws attention to the importance of animating the lecture at the intersection of lecture display, embodied communication and verbalization that invites students’ voice. As such, the findings have broader international implications for renewed understanding and development of higher education practices.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nataša Lacković

Nataša Lacković is a co-Director of the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation and the hub ‘ReOPeN Graphic Futures’ at the Institute for Social Futures, Lancaster University. Her research tackles how education, student wellbeing and sustainability literacy can be developed through semiotic, multimodal, socio-material, and critical lenses.

Biliana Popova

Biliana Popova is an Assistant Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn University. She is currently working on her second PhD at the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University. Her research is focused on examining the socio-material aspects of Higher Education and the university as an institution through the prism of Assemblage Theory.

Notes

1 what we presume are male lecturers