Show Them or Involve Them? Two Organizations of Embodied Instruction

Abstract

When instructors train people in physical actions, they often demonstrate what they want the learner to do. When basketball coaches use reenactments in training sessions, we find that they organize them in two ways: (a) as a performance treating the players as passive learners (what we call “demonstration as performance”); and (b) as active co-ordinated action among the players as involved coparticipants (what we call “demonstration as enactment”). It is through this ordering of cooperative organizations that, we argue, an enactment is achieved that is maximally coherent and followable as instructions for the observing audience of learners. Data are in Australian English.