Co-constructing movement in space with people with visual impairments: the case of paraclimbing training

This study deals with multimodal interaction in the context of indoor climbing training involving climbers with visual impairments. More specifically, we focus on the activity of giving and following instructions during artificial wall climbing. The training activity involves a trainer who instructs a climber with visual impairment, leading him/her while climbing on the wall. The accomplishment of the activity systematically involves the materiality of the environment, in particular the climbing routes. Indeed, the instructions the trainer gives to the climber necessarily include references to the position of holds for hands and feet and the climbing proceeds through the unfolding mapping of the continously changing climbing space. The analysis contributes to the interactional perspective on disability and impairment demonstrating how the whole situated activity system (Goffman 1961, Goodwin 1997), including people and artefacts, enhances impaired people in pursuing their goal. Goodwin’s seminal work on aphasia grounded in naturally occurring interactions (2003), has shown a new perspective on disability, demonstrating that interaction provides people with aphasia the resources they need to communicate. In this same direction, we propose to investigate paraclimbing as a cooperative activity during which the trainer, beside providing her expertise, through the instructions puts her visual access to the wall in the climber’s service. People with different sensorial access to the climbing space (visual for the trainer, tactile for the climber), interactively produce this same space and make it available one another through the accomplishment of the activity. Drawing on previous studies on specialized bodily movement instruction (Keevallik, 2013, 2015) we demonstrate how verbal, visual and tactile resources, which in this case, due to the climbers’ visual impairment, are systematically distributed between the participants, contribute to the production of instructional turns. During the climbing, the trainer provides spatial instructions about the position of holds that the climber needs to propel him/herself upward. Verbal istructions are produced during the climbing and are sensitive to the unfolding bodily configurations that the climber assumes while moving on the wall. While the instructions locally provide the climber the resources for organizing his/her movements’ projection, on the other side, the climber’s movements continuously re-orient the trainer’s instruction-giving activity. The analysis provides a detailed description of the modalities through which the verbal and the bodily resources contribute to the sequential organization of the activity and to the construction of a shared climbing space. In this context, the spatial dimension is fundamental and the analysis shows how the climbing space is co-constructed through the activation of multiple semiotic resources such as speech, body movements and touching. We analyze and discuss different temporal frameworks in the sequential organization of participants multimodal actions, showing how they relate to the locally negotiated goals and to the participants’ local access to the material environment. The theoretical framework we refer to is that of Conversation Analysis applied to instructions-in-interaction. The analysis is based on a corpus of 53 climbing sequences of a paraclimbing team. Data were trascribed according to the transcription conventions developed by Gail Jefferson (Jefferson, 2004). The participants’ consent was obtained according to the Italian law n. 196/2003 “Codice in materia di protezione dei dati personali”, which establishes the norms guaranteeing the safeguarding of persons and other subjects with regard to the treatment of personal and sensitive data. References GOFFMAN, Erving (1961). Encounters: two studies in the sociology of interaction. Indianapolis, IN, Bobbs-Merrill. GOODWIN, Charles (1997). The blackness of black. In: L. B. Resnick, R. Salijo, C. Pontecorvo, B. Burge (eds.), Discourse, Tools and Reasoning. Essays on Situated Cognition (pp. 111-140). Berlin, Springer. GOODWIN, Charles (Ed.) (2003). Conversation and Brain Damage. New York, Oxford University Press. JEFFERSON, Gail (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In: G.H. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 13–31). Amsterdam, John Benjamins. KEEVALLIK, Leelo (2013). The Interdependence of Bodily Demonstrations and Clausal Syntax. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 46:1 (pp. 1-21). KEEVALLIK, Leelo (2015). Coordinating the temporalities of talk and dance. In: A. Deppermann & S. Günthner (eds.). Temporality in Interaction (pp. 309-336). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins.