From an interactional perspective, I study a carving workshop led by a blind sculptor, with visually impaired and sighted people. Particular attention is paid to participants' tactile resources and trainer's embodied demonstrations. In this creative context, multimodal practices offer stimulating ideas on the way learners experience and (re)create artworks.
In this paper, I propose the study of a particular type of didactic interaction: a carving workshop with visually impaired and sighted people. My aim is to challenge the methodological basis of creative inquiry by questioning the way participants mobilize a plurality of modalities and resources in interaction. A blind sculptor, who knows a specific piece of art, leads a carving workshop and guides visitors throughout the work of making a copy of what they have previously experienced during a visit. He produces verbal assessments and advices, creating tactile and haptic configurations as primary resources to accomplish his role. He gives instructions and embodied demonstrations (Streeck, Goodwin & LeBaron 2011), guiding the movements of participants' hands with his own hands, and mobilizes specific tools. In doing this, he proposes creative options, which can be acknowledged and retained by the visitor/trainee. The workshop is preceded by a tactile visit to a museum: visually impaired and sighted visitors are accompanied (by a guide) and explore by touching the model of the artwork. Through a fine-grained interactional analysis of these interactions, I intend to question the role of applied linguistics in studying the affordances of art-based methods, the multisensory understanding of learnables, as well as the emergence of collaboration and intersubjectivity in interaction. With a trans-disciplinary and multimodal approach, this paper seeks to explore new ways of thinking about the relationship between language, knowledge, and the world (Bradley 2017) as it may be experienced and (re)created in context by learners. Learning into and through art is therefore considered as a creative multi-leveled process, which relies on both individual invention and social negotiation.
