Professional gestures: A museum educator at work

Educator activity: Instructional posture and transmission issues

During his activity, the educator mobilizes a mixed instructional posture in order to enroll his audience. This posture is developed at the crossroads between the visitor, the museum item and the knowledge to be transmitted. To analyze it, we relied on the model proposed by Michel Allard and the GREM team (Allard, 1999), who adapted it from Renald Legendre (1983). This model was developed to elucidate the activity of a visitor in an educational context, but it can be adapted to the situation of a guided tour for individual visitors (our research context) where the educator’s discourse content remains stable, while his instructional posture and the way he transmits knowledge can be modified depending on audience specificities.

The model below shows that, in the context of the museum, three actors are connected by different relationships around an educational program. The topic represents the museum object in its context. The speaker is any agent who facilitates the comprehension of the object by providing the appropriate reading keys during the visit. The third agent corresponds to the visitors (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Interactions between actors in a museum.

There are specific connections between these three components. The appropriation relationship refers to how a visitor integrates a museum object intellectually, affectively or imaginarily. The support relationship constitutes the help provided directly or indirectly to the visitor in the appropriation process. From this point of view, the museum fosters a learning process that is the opposite of the scholastic one and leaves room for questioning: the visitor apprehends the object primarily as a whole before analyzing its various parts (Allard, 1999). The visitor can then address the object freely. Finally, the third category of relationship, transposition, is the adaptation of the topical content to the visitor’s appropriation capacity.

In the case of the Arts et Métiers Museum, the educator places himself in a popularization situation as he enables visitors to apprehend an object with its scientific and/or technical operating principles, which are often complex and almost impossible for novices to understand. He also helps the public fully to understand the importance and the richness of the object by situating it in its economic, social and historical contexts. At the same time, the educator refers his audience to the museographic reading keys, such as data available on information plates or on the institution’s website. The mediation activity has a short duration and can even sometimes take place only once for the visitor. Our research addresses the demonstration of an iconic object in the Arts et Métiers Museum: the Foucault Pendulum.

Making pendulum operation understandable

The demonstration of the Foucault Pendulum is a leading attraction that stands out among the educational activities at the Arts et Métiers Museum (Figure 2). It takes place every day at 12:00 and at 5:00 pm. An educator is in charge of explaining the operation of the object, the scientific concept that it demonstrates and its historical and social context. ¹ In the nineteenth century nobody was skeptical about the Earth’s rotation: astronomical observations had already proved it. But Foucault’s experiment was the first one to demonstrate it ‘on Earth’. ‘You are invited to see the Earth rotate in the meridian room of the Paris observatory. It was with these words that Léon Foucault invited the leading scientists of his time to witness his pendulum experiment, on February 3, 1851’ (La Nature, 1887, 756: 409–411).

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Figure 2.

A view of Foucault’s Pendulum.

The pendulum consists of a metal sphere suspended by a steel cable from the vault of the Saint-Martin-des-Champs Church. When the pendulum is pulled from its equilibrium position and then released gently, it begins to oscillate in a plane. Thanks to its design and installation, it dissociates from the movement of the Earth’s rotation. Thus, when we see the pendulum turn, we have to imagine that the pendulum does not rotate, but that it is the table (and by extension the Earth) that rotates in the terrestrial reference frame.

How does the museum educator teach this scientific content to the visitors? What does he do to involve the visitors at the Arts et Métiers Museum? Such are the questions that prompted us to investigate and understand the specificity of the scientific educator’s action.

Professional gestures: A tool for understanding the educator’s action

In order to understand the educator’s action, we first need to understand a set of contributive gestures in his specific way of communicating with a heterogeneous audience. He has to showcase a museum object and then use very few technical details to draw attention to the object itself. But he also has to account for the conditions of existence of the object. A dual focus is then required, similar to the teacher’s dual focus when presenting objects or knowledge items while fostering learner comprehension.

Referring to previous research on teacher action, then, seems appropriate in order to study the museum educator’s professional action. The first way to address the educator’s action would be to underline the importance of corporeality in the museum space at the precise moment of the demonstration. The identification of the acting body induces an in-depth reading starting from gesture identification to eventually grasping the social and epistemic function. Then in the museum context, some of these gestures are used to act on the visitor’s comprehension.

The role of the body in human action has been theorized in numerous theoretical trends. In this research, we relied on the following three studies, which we found appropriate.

Marcel Mauss demonstrated that the ‘techniques of the body’ reveal their efficiency through the bodily dimension of action. He underlined: ‘The body is the first and the most natural instrument of man or more precisely, if we do not consider the instrument, the first and most natural technical object and at the same time technical means of man is the body’ (Mauss, 1950: 372). When Mauss describes the traditional acts of everyday living, he considers the correspondence between gestures and the result of the activity. Then the ways of carrying, of walking, which can be explained through an analysis of the life environment, are studied considering their realization potential.

French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty conceptualized the body as an originary opening onto the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 1960). The acting subject apprehends what surrounds him not only as a simple objectifiable fact but also as a phenomenon that goes through his existence and in which he subjectively invests: ‘Any human usage of the body is already a primordial expression’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1960: 108). Hence the corporeality of the subject constitutes a relationship to the world which lets itself be seen and which can consequently be perceived.

Finally human action can be apprehended in socio-historical and cultural frameworks as Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf (2004) did, in an endeavor to highlight the importance of the gestures shaped by agents. These authors conceive human action as a constant remodeling of acts, of inherited, combined, transformed practices. We then have to determine if, in his ways of doing, the educator has integrated gestures that exist elsewhere, and specifically in the actions of a teacher, and whether he has transformed the practices he has observed in order to use them in his own activity. Historical anthropologists refer their analyses to the fact that gestures are incorporated and that they reveal filiations, continuations when they are observed and used in quite a ‘natural’ manner. Social mimesis is a dynamic concept that integrates the reuse and adaptation of existing practices; hence a creative activity on the basis of what is already there (Gebauer & Wulf, 2004).

These theoretical foundations led Anne Jorro (Jorro, 1998, 2004; Jorro & Croce-Spinelli, 2010) to propose a model for a teacher’s action. This model is built around four broad categories of professional gestures, which, as we have previously explained, seem appropriate to the study of the educator’s gestures (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Describing the model to categorize professional gestures.

Research methodology

The fieldwork took place at the Arts et Métiers Museum in October 2015. For this exploratory research, a scientific mediation session was filmed. The performing educator was highly experienced and had been presenting the Foucault Pendulum on a regular basis for 15 years. He confessed that this demonstration had been a ‘challenge’ during his first years, as he had been the first to perform it. According to him, he no longer had to pay attention to his gestures as they had been ‘inscribed in his body’.

The research team had entered a new field and intended to further investigate the problematics of mediation gestures for several years thereafter. A meeting was organized with the museum educators to explain the research objectives. One educator volunteered for this first step. To carry out this research, several constraints had to be taken into account:

The research was organized in three steps:

The team of researchers viewed the whole 25-minute demonstration. Several phases were identified:

To analyze the actions of the museum educator, a 10-second segmentation and a 5-second segmentation were carried out in order to capture his bodily movements and to identify the actions that have cultural mediation character.

The museum educator’s action: Gesture analysis

We used the analytical framework of teacher gestures and we took into account four major categories of gestures: language gestures, knowledge-staging gestures, regulation gestures and ethical gestures (Jorro, 2004). The 10-second and 5-second segmentations enabled detailed semiotic analysis. The team noted each of the four categories of gestures that could be observed in a table. Then the content was compared with the elicitation interview data. Sometimes the educator’s comments, in particular the language gestures and regulation gestures, matched our findings. In other cases, the body movements and the actions were identified with the film. The data contained the educator’s reflection over actions performed:

Looking on the right, on the left, I can see if everyone feels concerned.

There can be more specific reactions like when people feel annoyed, the body would speak and then words would take a turn … create some intimacy.

Language gestures

Language gestures are by far the most numerous and highlight the discursive mode used by the museum educator, between narration and explanation. At the outset, he adopts a strong enunciative posture resting on the railing. Through his body he indicates that he is embarking on a story. The hand gestures reflect the importance of the information transmitted. The highlighting of the narrative activity is made visible by placing, at breast height, the two hands, which join in order to emphasize the meaning of what the museum educator is saying. This gesture is reminiscent of the gesture used in sacred speech: it summons the audience’s attention while it aims to induce contemplation in a religious context. The speaking body of the museum educator indicates that he has knowledge to transmit as well as Foucault’s argumentation to present (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

The museum educator’s speaking body.

In his story, the educator gives many details on the historical and scientific context that helped Léon Foucault build his pendulum. He recounts events, mentions the prominent people, tells the story of the physical building of the pendulum and names the place where it was first presented. The narration is elegant. He uses the French ‘passé simple’ (a predominantly literary tense) during his narration.

While moving the Foucault Pendulum, the museum educator keeps his eyes on his audience, then seems to pull them towards the collection object, and then he gazes back again at his audience to continue his speech. We can observe that the language gesture is also a knowledge-staging gesture.

His language is alternately scientific and common. When he starts his narration, he gives precise dates and the context of the experience (cf. L23). After that he explains the running pendulum, using a scientific language. At the end, he summarizes with a common language, introduced by ‘pour résumer’. Sometimes he pre-empts the visitors’ questions, gives the example of the bicycle and leaves the visitors to guess the swing example.

His speech resembles a synthetic lesson but the numerous, very specific details show his mastery of the subject, which he addresses to an audience he has just met.

1851: experiment by Jean Bernard Léon Foucault in his private mansion in Paris, in Rue Assas. In February, Foucault presents his pendulum in the Pantheon … the rope is 11 m long, the pegs fall every 8 seconds, and the pendulum weighs 19 kilos.

The museum educator’s speech is a blend of narration, explanation and argumentation addressed to the public. The vocabulary is accessible and common as well as precise and scientific. The museum educator is actively listening to both the object and the audience. At the same time, he is also watching both.

Knowledge-staging gestures

During the demonstration, the museum educator installs equipment. He wears gloves to place the pendulum bob and align the pegs … he kneels. He leans toward the pendulum, squats to be at the level of the glass table, with the pendulum swinging above it. The actions of the museum educator here are object oriented. And the public silently watch this activity. The checking gesture of the object position verification is important: the museum educator has to assure the good conditions of the demonstration (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

An example of the museum educator’s knowledge-staging gesture.

The museum educator knows how to generate the staging of the pendulum. He stands inside the circular railing, this circular space, the space where the pendulum is installed, belongs to him. The public is standing outside the railing. The museum educator moves in circles, his whole body is in motion, he engages his audience, addressing them with his gaze and voice while moving. He casts a circular glance at the group for two minutes before beginning to act more individually. He looks at the public, then at the pendulum and back. This alternate glance is an object-oriented indicating gesture toward the scientific subject.

When he describes the pendulum, the museum educator mimes the gesture of taking it in his hand. He points to the top of the vault to refer to its height and to the length of the cable. He simulates the back-and-forth motion of the pendulum with his fingers, he indicates the number of oscillations and length figures with his fingers, materializes the sand ring of Foucault’s demonstration in the Pantheon, delivers facts. He is aware of these gestures during the elicitation interview:

the gesture will clarify or explain the demonstration … don’t know if it is a professional gesture or a totally natural one … at one point, we can say that one gesture is more relevant than another one … at the same time this gives energy to speech … people like it better with gestural and corporeal dynamics …

He concentrates and closes in on his actions: it all happens between him and his pegs, while he tells the story of the object. We observe gestures that are intended to attract attention. His gaze sweeps the audience. To reinforce his speech, the museum educator uses a series of raised hands, at breast height, while watching the audience:

it also allows, at some point, keeping your eyes on all visitors, glancing right and left, I can see if everybody feels involved.

The museum educator makes self-addressed gestures to support his speech and turns around to scan a part of his public. This rotation motion is an opportunity to take a few pegs. Meanwhile, he continues to recount the history of the object. The pedagogy of the museum educator is revealed through the actions of knowledge staging, of which he is particularly aware. In the interview, he returned to this point:

Need to adjust my voice … When it was important, I slowed down to insist, and when it was less important, I went back to my normal rhythm. Here, it is something a little bit like the gesture, well, in fact, going a little faster, and it can be done when needed.

Knowledge-staging gestures express an intense bodily activity on the part of the museum educator. He is also deeply aware of it when he analyzes his activity: ‘I’m moving actually…. But all this seems to me very coordinated. In fact, I use all of my body.’

Ethical gestures

At the beginning of the demonstration, the museum educator lets his eyes run over the pegs and the audience. He seems to enter into a dialogue with the pendulum, he knows it well, he takes care of it and seizes it with gloves. The delicacy of his gesture tends to show that this scientific object is precious and fragile (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

An example of the museum educator’s ethical gesture.

If the museum educator is very careful with the object, he also considers his audience with great care. He makes sure that the demonstration has been followed, saying: ‘Could you all see? Is this all clear?’ He comments on his act during the interview: ‘You can see it, I’m taking my time leaving the place in case there should be further questions … They’ve taken notes … They’ve basically understood … It was a very attentive audience … apparently it was successful …’ Concerned with interaction and with the transmission that he hopes to foster, he sees himself acting slowly to give the audience the opportunity to question him. He leaves some more time, as he knows that questions could still be asked; he does not bring the situation to a close too quickly.

Discussion

At the end of this research, it is important to revisit the two original questions. The first question concerns the educator’s action when he performs a demonstration before a heterogeneous audience in a museum space. How does the educator go about presenting the Foucault Pendulum experiment? This professional action was filmed and studied in detail thanks to a 10-second, and then 5-second, sequencing of the educator’s activity. Thus we could analyze and identify the bodily movements that we could define as professional gestures directing the educator’s activity as well as that of the audience.

The second question relates to the specificity of the educator’s activity with regard to a teacher’s. The educator provides knowledge, and the staging that is organized during the demonstration has similarities with the activity of a teacher orienting learning toward specific objects of knowledge. Thus the question of an analogy between these two occupations seems appropriate. But this analogy must be combined with the endeavor of distinguishing the activities of each professional. In other words, is the educator a teacher who performs in a cultural space? What is the specificity of his activity?

The analysis of this professional activity enabled us to determine that the educator uses language gestures and develops constant physical activity during his speech. Let us recall a few professional gestures performed by the educator:

During the demonstration-preparation phase, the educator makes an object-oriented indicating gesture, namely towards the pendulum, enabling the public to tame the object and make it knowable in turn. This indicating gesture is supported by a first language explanatory gesture when the educator starts presenting the object and the historical context of Foucault’s experiment.

The object-presentation phase is dominated by an explanatory language gesture, the clearest and most scientific one possible. The educator uses gestures of translation in explaining unfamiliar concepts.

During the demonstration, language gestures are amplified. This amplification aims at continuing the demonstration, using precise gestures of hands and eyes, which are dense. The educator questions the public and varies the rhythm of his speech by slowing down to let the audience appropriate the transmitted knowledge.

Finally, in the conclusion phase, the educator pays close attention to establishing an increased interaction with the audience: the listening gesture has moved from the object to the public. Indeed the educator, who was very attentive to the object during the demonstration, takes a longer look at his audience and leaves room for silence in order to allow a question or a request for clarification.

As for the second question, concerning the specificity of the activity of the educator with regard to that of the teacher, it is marked by at least three characteristics: demonstration content, effect on the audience and audience attention.

If the educator provides content to an audience, this content depends on the cultural mediation policy established by the museum and does not respond to specific points of a curriculum. Moreover the public’s understanding will not be evaluated in the same way as that of learners may be. In addition the educator does not know his audience in advance, and his mediation activity is ad hoc, it is not inscribed in a plan.

As for similarities, analysis allows us to match the teachers’ and the educator’s knowledge-oriented indicating gestures. Sets of hand and finger gestures precisely indicate the object and its trajectory … Similarly, the explanatory language gestures structure audience attention in the same way as those of the teacher when aiming at capturing students’ attention. The slowdown in speech flow, the importance of listening or attention supported by a circular glance are gestures common to both professions.

Further research

This exploratory research conducted in a museum during the demonstration of a scientific object, Foucault’s Pendulum, by an educator seems conducive to the development of other investigations. We are looking at the following further investigations: (1) deepening the analysis of the gestures of cultural mediation in other situations of demonstration; (2) making comparisons of this demonstration situation among specific audiences, such as student or adult audiences. We assume that interaction content and gestures may be different.