Susan Goldin-Meadows, Thinking With Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape our Thoughts (Basic Books, 2023).

As an educator, I am exquisitely sensitive to the information students are sending me with their gestures and body language, such that I am certain many find my pedagogical style a little unnerving.

I recall a class once that included a shy, withdrawn student who usually sat three-fourths the way back in the lecture hall and never contributed to the discussion, her eyes always cast down, almost afraid to make eye contact with me or anyone. One day, I made some comment, and this reticent student, for the first time, lifted her gaze such that she made eye contact with me, eyes with a kind of urgency. I called on her, I had hoped, in an encouraging, inviting way: “Yes, you wanted to say something?”  She seemed surprised that I noticed and shook her head no and cast her eyes downward again. We would probably label this student “painfully shy,” but her body language in that moment suggested something else.

I have subsequently tried to modulate how I interact with these kinds of students, those who don’t pipe up or instantly thrust their hands in the air. Once they learn I am observing their body language, they tend to be more mindful, not wanting to accidently reveal anything to me.  There have been countless other occasions where I have read a student’s body language, asked them if they wished to say something, only to have the students say “no” in a confused manner—perhaps they failed to understand that their body language was communicating something to me.  Whether they realize it or not, students–all of us, really–are clearly saying something through our gestures, facial expression and body positions, as clearly as if we were speaking or shouting.

While I am attuned to body language and gesture, I find that students generally are not. When I ask them to make class presentations–or even informal ones where they must address the class–I find many students do not know what to do with their hands, how to stand, how to use their eyes.  That said, I must confess that I conduct very little instruction in effective non-verbal communication, nor do I evaluate and grade specifically for body language and gesture—the way I would for effective writing. 

Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor of psychology and comparative human development, studies gesture at her lab at the University of Chicago. All educators should grasp the implications of her work for how we teach and how students learn. “Hand gestures say what’s on your mind,”(4) Goldin-Meadow asserts.  My student—the one who raised her eyes in recognition–was saying something to me, even as her words were saying something else. 

Language is not the only medium of communication, and perhaps not even the dominant medium.  Gestures are not merely symbolic tics—the equivalent of saying “ummm” or “like”—but are ways of conveying ideas.  Indeed, gestures are ideas in space.  “Language is only one window—and may be not always the best one—into [our] thoughts” (2-3) says Goldin-Meadows.   “By locating ideas in space, gesture not only externalizes ideas, but situates them within a spatial framework…Laying ideas out in space, even ideas that are not inherently spatial paves the way for using cognitive operations that rely on space.” (37)

“The body communicates, which is why people like to call it body language. But body language isn’t language in the traditional sense.” (52) That is, gestures, facial expressions are not language in the way that spoken/written sounds are language, with syntax and grammar, so perhaps we shouldn’t try to teach it or understand it or theorize it as if it were language.  But at the same time, we should not lessen or denigrate body language just because it is not the same as verbal language, for doing so perpetuates a persistent logocentrism in Western thought.  There is an older tradition in linguistics that holds that language = thought: that without language there is no thought.  Goldin-Meadows argues that we can indeed have and express thoughts without recourse to language. Indeed, thought is separate from the medium that conveys it.  Stated another way: thought precedes language–or gesture or painting—precedes the medium that communicates it.  Gesture conveys thought, and thus acts like a language. 

Given its importance for cognition and communication, Goldin-Meadows counsels that we should “pay attention to [our] students’ gestures,” (185) which may be the reason I was drawn to this book.  Paying attention to gesture becomes a kind of pedagogical practice in Goldin-Meadows’ formulation. “What would happen if we encouraged people to be aware of and to focus on the gestures they and others produce?” she asks. (204) Here is a lesson I learned from this book: rather than privately noting student body language, what if I drew explicit attention in class to these?  In effect, ask students “look at what your hands are doing.”

She argues that we need to develop pedagogical tools to enable teachers to become better “gesture readers.” (187) Because she argues that gesture is not really a language, one might wonder if “reading” the correct word here.  I would argue that it is appropriate if we are using the word in the sense we do when we say “reading a painting,” where read means to understand or to comprehend or to interpret.  “Reading” becomes an analogy for what we are doing when we are comprehending the signals produced by the body.  Whatever pedagogical strategies teachers might acquire, “Just giving adults a hint to pay attention to what learners say with their hands is enough to turn them into better gesture readers.” (189)

Goldin-Meadows also says that we can consciously design our gestures—that we can be more deliberately communicative with our gestures–what I might analogously term “writing” with the body. She shares the example of Amanda Gorman, the poet who performed at the inauguration of President Biden.  (208) “Gorman consciously choreographed her gestures for the inauguration.  But she patterned those gestures after the gestures she uses spontaneously.” (209) I would be concerned that such “design” would take on the phony or inauthentic types of gestures performed by politicians—with their extended thumbs gesticulating—or television reporters with their exaggerated arm motions. It might be better to learn from actors—the best are able to convey a range of thoughts with their bodies.  (Indeed, any facility I might have reading and writing body language no doubt came from my theatre background.) As we are thinking about the content of a general education core curriculum, perhaps we might include coursework in the reading and writing of body language. 

One step we might take in this direction would be for students to be invited to read or comment on the teacher’s body language, perhaps as one question on any course evaluation. Teachers might become more mindful of modelling effective body language and gesture. 

Understanding the communicative and cognitive role of gesture and body language “could also make [us] more aware of how communication technologies are inadvertently stymieing gesture and interfering with [our] ability to connect with and understand others.” (16) During the pandemic, when so much teaching and learning migrated to Zoom, we spent much time fussing over the staging of our rooms: the layout, the lighting, the appropriate background. Ironically, such staging did little to address how we would present ourselves—not how we dress but how our body and our hands and our expressions would appear over Zoom.  What if we attended more to how we stage ourselves when we are on and off Zoom?   

Many of us set up our cameras on Zoom in such a way as to hide our hands, focusing on our faces alone.  We might pick up facial expressions over Zoom, but the ability to mute and turn off our cameras (which I understand) has the effect of cutting off our gestures and body language. “FaceTime and Zoom concentrate on the face, not the hands, and thus eliminate the messages [we] convey in gestures…these developments [especially when used as instructional technologies] could decrease the role hands play in communication and have a profound effect on what communication and learning may look like in the future.” (209-10)

Goldin-Meadows asserts that these technologies might be redesigned to make them more gesture-evident. This is also a clarion call for instructional designers to rethink the design of online courses, to foreground gesture, not to hide and obstruct it.  Alternatively, paying attention to gesture could be a compelling argument for the continued relevance and superiority of f-2-f learning, as the best modality for containing all forms of language. The deficiencies of these technologies are an argument for learning together in the same (physical) space.

Given that human thought and communication is performed as much through the body as through the speech organs, I wonder if we’ll achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) only when machines can not only read gestures—there is some evidence that they can do so today—but also “write” their own body language. The Singularity or that moment of artificial “superintelligence” might arrive only when AI develops the capacity to communicate with other AIs through gesture, facial expression and body language.

David J. Staley is a higher education philosopher, strategist, futurist, theorist and designer, and is an Honorary Faculty Fellow in Innovation at CHELIP.  He is the author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education and the co-author of Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets.