Embodiment Online: How Gesture, Embodied Language, and Sketching Support Computer Science Learning

• In Event: Opportunities and Challenges in Equity-Centered Online Teaching and Learning in K–16 Computing Education

Abstract

OBJECTIVE
CS learning is treated as if it’s disembodied. However, past research contends that embodiment, specifically metaphors, provide the bedrock for understanding programming constructs and concepts (Manches et al., 2018). We re-situate the body by using embodiment as a theoretical framework to investigate CS learning. To support students’ opportunities to engage and participate in CS learning, we must be critical of our disciplinary practices and how we provide structures for some bodies to learn while marginalizing others. There are two objectives. First, we describe the ways embodiment - manifested through embodied representations like gesture, embodied language, and sketching - is used in CS teaching and mediates CS learning. Second, we describe how the embodiment students use transitions to online spaces.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Computing education research (CER) typically only examines the individual - as if learning is a function of “context-less problem-solving” (Gauvain, 1993). However if we want a complete understanding of how learning happens, then CER needs theoretical pluralism (Kafai et al., 2019b & Deitrick et al., 2015).

We argue that learning CS involves communication, negotiation, and interpretation. Embodiment implies that we make meaning from our body-based, lived experiences, not just through our minds (Stevens, 2012). Students are not just "banks receiving information," (Freire, 1996) but agents in joint meaning-making activities with other actors and embodied representations (Gutiérrez, Sengupta-Irving, & Dieckmann, 2010).

METHODS and DATA SOURCES
We first analyzed learning by reflecting on how teachers communicate and structure learning opportunities. We used grounded theory to analyze a set of naturalistic video recordings (288 minutes) of six undergraduate computing professors teaching recursion to their class. Then, we explored how students actually learn and what representations mediate their learning. We conducted an online dyad study of pairs of students collaboratively solving recursive problems.

FINDINGS
Our findings indicate why it is important to use embodiment as a lens to understand learning in computing education: the embodied representations are likely some of the few resources students can use to understand the abstract. We also hypothesize that embodiment contributes to making learning to program hard. Teachers are using embodiment that is layered and complex, and likely disassociated. It seems that teachers use embodiment that is likely not a product of design - or pedagogically informed. Preliminary findings of our dyad study suggest that students use similar forms of embodiment to teachers, but their use of embodiment seems to be a result of indoctrination into CS culture.

SIGNIFICANCE
This research aims to understand the ways embodiment mediates CS learning, which reveals the practices central to the “doing” and “knowing” of CS. Shapiro argues that because computing is a science of the artificial, we cannot understand learning about computing without interrogating the practices and sociocultural contexts (Ko, 2019).
Issues of equity and social justice are important for understanding how disciplinary practices impact learning. Classrooms are cultural and social spaces (Franke et al., 2007). Therefore, social inequities are easily perpetuated by using embodied practices that privilege students with certain forms of knowledge.

Author

• Amber Solomon, Georgia Institute of Technology