Pedagogical Stance and its multimodal expression

The paper defines the notion of “pedagogical stance”, viewed as the type of position taken, the role assumed, the image projected and the types of social behaviours performed by a teacher in her teaching interaction with a pupil. Two aspects of pedagogical stance, “didactic” and “affective – relational”, are distinguished and a hypothesis is put forward about their determinant factors (the teacher’s personality, idea of one’s role and of the learning process, and model of the pupil). Based on a qualitative analysis of the verbal and bodily behaviour of teachers in a corpus of teacher-pupil interactions, the paper singles out two didactic stances (maieutic and efficient) and four affective-relational ones (friendly, dominating, paternalistic, and secure base). Some examples of these stances are analysed in detail and the respective patterns of verbal and behavioural signals that typically characterize the six types of stances are outlined.