Encapsulating Concepts in Gestures and Drawings During Educational Design Team Meetings

Design activities in which two or more people are participating are always multimodal and thus require a multimodal analytical framework. This article reports how a multimodal analytical framework is used in a microanalysis of a segment from an educational design team meeting in which 3 participants created and reused a metaphoric gesture in support of their discussion. The gesture was associated with a diagram through a combination of talk, gaze, and other nonverbal communicative modes. The repetition of the gesture as a single semiotic resource helped evoke a rich, shared team history, which made it easier to discuss complex concepts.