Manual Guiding in Peer Group Interaction: A Resource for Organizing a Practical Classroom Task

How might someone carry out an educational task by moving an object or by guiding another person in doing so? This article describes the practical work of a group of school students as they work through an object-based physics task. It analyzes a recurrent practice whereby one student influences another's embodied conduct, either by manually guiding an object (a weight, a moveable plank, and so on) or by guiding the hand of another student as they manipulate an object. We show how the practices of manual guiding involve a range of embodied and contextual resources. They serve to maintain and restore the progressivity of the task in two environments: corrective sequences and local projects involving interactional teams.