What is it about?
This article explores the role of gesture within teacher–student communicative interaction in one-to-one piano lessons.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The findings of this study revealed that the instrumental teaching context not only makes use of spontaneous co-verbal gestures, but also avails from a set of gestures, that in analogy to co-verbal gestures have here been termed spontaneous co-musical gestures. Whilst McNeill’s (1992, 2005) spontaneous co-verbal gestures provide a relevant conceptual basis for theorizing the interactional communication between teacher and student, spontaneous co-musical gestures were ubiquitous and an essential element in the process of musical communication between teachers and students. The communicative parallels established between co-verbal and co-musical spontaneous gestures have important implications for piano pedagogy and fields of study invested in musical communication by instigating new lines of enquiry, promoting empirically based practical and useful knowledge for practitioners.
Perspectives
I found this a very quite revealing study. In the absence of adequate gesture categorisations that could be used to categorise the gestures used by teachers during piano teaching I found that considering insights from a variety of different fields and using mixed-methods research methodology it was possible to devise a categorisation of piano teachers gestures. I am confident that the teachers' gesture categorisation proposed here will help advancing our knowledge on how teachers' gestures can help student learning and help developing more informed teachers, who know what they do and why they do it.
Lilian Simones
Queen's University Belfast
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Categorizations of physical gesture in piano teaching: A preliminary enquiry, Psychology of Music, October 2013, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0305735613498918.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
