The Enactment of an Instant: A Study of Gesture in Introductory Physics

Gesture has been shown to play an important role in how learners conceptualize phenomena in physics. However, we know little about how gesture is used to conceptualize instantaneity. Drawing on multimodal microanalysis of interaction, we examine how undergraduate physics students use representational gesture to make sense of instants while modeling energy dynamics. Our analysis describes four different forms of representational gesture used to capture instantaneity: These include (1) Replay loop of scenario, (2) Subinterval on timeline, (3) Freeze frame of scenario, and (4) Indexical location on timeline.