The Embodied Work of Teaching

Drawing on a range of empirical settings, the studies in this volume show that teaching is skillful doing-in-the-world and illuminate how teachers' full embodied repertoires are crucial in the accomplishment of the locally contextualized, yet recognizable acts, that instantiate their métier. The volume is of immense value to practitioners, researchers and educators alike.

* Søren Wind Eskildsen, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark *

This collection offers a diverse array of studies which encapsulates how teaching and learning are accomplished in their local orders of production. With their wide angle on the issues and their focused analytic lenses, the authors deftly zoom in on talk and embodied practices that are important and integral to giving readers an unobstructed aerial view of the ‘how’ that makes teaching and learning happen, again and again.

* Jean Wong, The College of New Jersey, USA *

This thought-provoking volume offers a glimpse into the ways we incorporate our bodies into what we do, say and teach. Its fine-grained analysis of real instances of talk demonstrates how teachers draw on gestures, gaze and the like to deal with the interactional challenges of the classroom ecology.

* Tim Greer, Kobe University, Japan *

[This book] is a valuable contribution to research on interaction in classrooms and similar pedagogical contexts. In particular, it shows how teaching and learning involve a multiplicity of participation frameworks and contingencies for both teachers and students to manage as they cooperate, or disengage and do not cooperate, or at least limit their cooperation, in the co-construction of the multimodal interaction through which teaching and learning are accomplished.

-- Eric Hauser, The University of Electro-Communications, Japan; University of Hawai ʻ i at Mānoa, USA * Discourse Studies 22(