Embodied meaning making: The use of gesture in the responses of year 1 children to multimodal artefacts

The research context and the focus of the study Talk is critical to the education process as it is the medium of instruction as well as a way for children to present knowledge and develop ideas together. The latter quality identifies talk as a tool for collaborative ‘meaning-making’. Meaning-making is where understandings are co-constructed through unique and dynamic interpretations (Postman and Weingartner, 1969). This project was concerned with the ‘dialogic’ meaning-making of children in the Year 1 classroom. The term ‘dialogic’ links to the work of Bakhtin (1981, 1984) who saw the development of ideas as a process of exchange between voices. However, recent research within the field of literacy has drawn attention to the value of multimodal texts in developing meaning-making skills (Maine, 2015). In light of this, a research project was developed to explore how children use embodied modes to make meaning in response to wordless picture books. The term ‘embodied’