Crumpled Time: Gesture and Sensation in Classroom Video Data

• In Event: Video Data and the Time-Image: Cinematic Methodologies in Education Research

Abstract

Objectives:
Increased focus on the role of gesture in teaching and learning in STEM disciplines has led to the use of high-speed cameras in classroom research with the aim of documenting and studying the micro-sensations that operate beneath language and perception. Nemirovsky (2013) for instance has taken 1 second video data, and stretched or unfolded the moment, so that he might ‘see’ what would otherwise escape perception. In other work in the area of embodied cognition, eye-tracking video equipment is used to study the way that students’ eyes attend to a mathematical task, tracking the exact location on the page where the eye rests, in addition to other kinds of brain imaging (Patten & Cambell, 2004). Digital technological interventions of this sort are becoming more and more prevalent in education research. This paper critically examines such video practices and maps out the consequences for theories of teaching and learning. The objective is to show how such work, despite its limitations, points to the materiality of screen media while also mapping the complex ways in which sensation and gesture carve out multiple, and yet simultaneous, temporalities in learning events.
Theoretical Framework:
Drawing on the work Deleuze on sensation, perception and duration, Massumi (2011) suggests that vision entails a “speculative investment” and that perception attends to the virtual indeterminacy of the material world, through the development of a “habitual inattention to the imperceptible in vision”. If perception involves a “chaos of vision” (eyes jittering, light scattering) then vision is inhabited by touch, smell, taste, proprioception (“the registering of the displacements of body parts relative to each other”), anything and everything in a process of folding together of “undifferentiated sensory experience” (Massumi, 2011, p. 95). Such ‘revisioning’ of visual perception forces us to rethink both the potentiality of the body and the nature of the moving image. This paper uses Deleuze’s concept of the time-image to theorize new ways of thinking about video data in terms of how such data is imbricated with impersonal and amodal sensations.
Methods:
This paper discusses three different experiments in “collecting” video data, and shows how Deleuze’s cinema books when combined with Massumi’s work on sensation help us examine the implications of video data in education research. I focus on the “affective tonality” of perception in its modulation with other intensities (Manning, 2009). In doing so I aim to demonstrate research methods that step outside of a logic of representation.
Scholarly Significance:
It is essential that we critically examine new technologies that are deployed in education research for how they impact our educational practices. This paper examines new video practices for how they might grasp the “asignifying particles” between thought and language (Massumi, 2002). The analysis of these practices will help researchers study their own use of video for how the moving-image and the time-image are at work.

Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University