Gestures to Support Personally Relevant Sense-Making and Science Reasoning Conversations in a Family Water Quality Workshop

• In Event: Learning in the Community

Abstract

The paper presents a study examining families’ embodied interactions in their sensemaking conversations in a water quality workshop. Our data include 44 hours of video data from 12 consented families. We analyzed transcripts with families’ verbal and non-verbal interactions to identify the embodied interactions that families enacted during their engagement with the water quality topic and the water model that represented local water sources. We found that families spatially distributed their hand gestures over three mediums (i.e., air space, tabletop, and water model) to support personally-relevant sensemaking conversations and contextualized science reasoning. The study brings implications to designing family-focused science workshops in informal settings by providing ample physical space for families to gesture in order to support their sensemaking process.

Authors

• Lucy R. McClain, The Pennsylvania State University

• Yu-Chen Chiu, The Pennsylvania State University

• Heather Toomey Zimmerman, The Pennsylvania State University