Abstract:
The use of body modality and gestures play an important function in teaching. This presentation looks at body modality and gestures as pedagogic tools for teaching students digital technologies in the early years of school. Recent Australian and State educational initiatives have introduced coding and computational thinking into the early years curriculum. Teachers are now faced with developing practices to support young children’s coding and computational thinking through instruction, where “instruction consists of leading the learner through a sequence of statements and restatements of a problem or body of knowledge that increase the learner’s ability to grasp, transform, and transfer what he is learning’ (Bruner 1966, p. 49). The study used conversational analysis to analyse two primary teachers’ use of body modality and gestures in a learning activity on coding and computational thinking to preparatory (foundational) aged students.