The benefits of instructor immediacy have been well researched over the past 40 years. This study investigated students' comfort with instructors' nonverbal immediacy behaviors. University students reported their comfort with three nonverbal communication behaviors: haptics, proxemics, and kinesics. A series of paired-sampled t tests suggested a…

Gesture is recognized as part of and integral to cognition. The value of gesture for learning is contingent on how it gathers meaning against the ground of other relevant resources in the setting--in short, how the body is laminated onto the surrounding environment. With a focus on lamination, this paper formulates an integrated theory of…

Pedagogical communication is an action wherein the body, being a part of a relational whole, performs a fundamental role. A bibliographical survey of studies on the interaction between teacher and student confirms that there is a strong correlation between the teacher's nonverbal behavior and the students' level of motivation and…

This study explores how teachers visualize their professional persona. It is based on six case studies of female teachers in Israel, who photographed themselves at work, focusing on images of ideal situations of teaching. The study explores the self-perceptions of the teachers, which led to the construction of the images, by analysis of the signs…

In this article, the author writes that in online education, students and professors can lose important connections to each other. Obviously distance learning has merits. People who might not other-wise have access to education can take online courses. That is particularly true for women, who must often balance mothering with paid work and find it…

Using a message interpretation perspective, this study (N = 379) examined how sex of the student, sex of the teacher, and the setting affect the messages students receive from a teacher's excessive use of immediacy. Results reveal that students interpret excessive immediacy from female teachers as caring, but the same behavior from male teachers…

Nonverbal communication, which includes proxemics, or the study of an individual's use of space, plays a major role in communication relationships. Culture, gender, and status can all influence one's use of personal space. This study was designed to investigate the physiological effects (heart rate and galvanic skin response) of the invasion of a…

In many classrooms, the issue of emotional legitimization is often forgotten, but in the distance education setting, two limitations highlight this issue even more. The distance education classroom lacks proximity and eye contact, which are pedagogically important as they prompt anxiety in students and draw them into learning. Rather than leading…

Recognizes the importance of nonverbal behavior (65% of communication is nonverbal) in the elementary and secondary school classrooms, and provides examples and a method for observing this behavior in student teachers. (NKA)