Communicating musical knowledge through gesture: Piano teachers’ gestural behaviours across different levels of student proficiency

Lilian Lima Simones, Matthew Rodger, Franziska Schroeder

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Abstract

Teachers’ communication of musical knowledge through physical gesture represents a valuable pedagogical field in need of investigation. This exploratory case study compares the gestural behaviour of three piano teachers while giving individual lessons to students who differed according to piano proficiency levels. The data was collected by video recordings of one-to-one piano lessons and gestures were categorized using two gesture classifications: the spontaneous co-verbal gesture classification (McNeill, 1992; 2005) and spontaneous co-musical gesture classification (Simones, Schroeder & Rodger, 2013). Poisson regression analysis and qualitative observation suggest a relationship between teachers’ didactic intentions and the types of gesture they produced while teaching, as shown by differences in gestural category frequency between teaching students of higher and lower levels of proficiency. Such reported agreement between teachers’ gestural approach in relation to student proficiency levels indicates a teachers’ gestural scaffolding approach whereby teachers adapted gestural communicative channels to suit students’ specific conceptual skill levels.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)723-735
Number of pages13
JournalPsychology of Music
Volume43
Issue number5
Early online date30 May 2014
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2015

Keywords

  • bodily movement
  • education
  • gesture
  • instrumental music teaching
  • musical learning
  • non-verbal

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