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Collaborative Research Center "Performing Cultures" (finished)

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Description of Project B5:

Educational Gestures
in School, Family, Youth Culture, and Media

Fourth Project Phase (2008–2010):

Following the prior studies, this phase of the project looks at the significance of gestures in educational activities and the instructional potential of gestures. In the project’s research thus far, it has already become clear that gestures play a major role in the dissemination and acquisition of knowledge in educational contexts, and that the human body functions as a medium for understanding, enabling people to acquire practical knowledge through a mimetic grasp of information. The focus of the research performed during the 2008–2010 project phase is the educational potential of gestures, which to date has been left largely unexamined. The project looks at gestures as repeatable movements of the whole body or individual parts of the body, as practices of physical representation that may take on greater significance in educational contexts, where the process of generation of meaning is fundamentally incomplete. We are examining the commonalities and differences between gestures made in the four main fields of socialization, during processes involving the transmission of knowledge and rules of social behavior, and how educational gestures differ in their performative effects through the different institutional contexts in which they are embedded.

 

The project will furthermore examine how, in educational contexts, gestures make the bodies of those engaged in teaching and learning visible as media for the transfer of knowledge, and how gestures, as practices of physical behavior, have profound effects on social communication in the main areas where socialization takes place: the school, family, peer culture, and media use. Both in the more narrowly defined educational framework of the school and in the more open contexts involved in learning and teaching within families, peer cultures, and practices of media use, the project examines how gestures become educational gestures and have an educational effect, not only intentionally, but also involuntarily and inadvertently.

 

Directed by:

Dr. Christoph Wulf, University Professor

 

Subproject: School

Dr. Christoph Wulf, University Professor

Dr. Kathrin Audehm

Dr. Ingrid Kellermann

 

Subproject: Family

Sebastian Schinkel

 

Subproject: Youth

Gerald Blaschke

Dr. Ruprecht Mattig (Kyoto University, JAPAN – associate)

 

Subproject: Media

Nino Ferrin

Dr. Birgit Althans, University Professor (University of Trier – associate)