Gesture as a Mechanism of Change

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.  Her focus is on the ways that the body can affect learning––how it provides insight into a learner’s skills and contributes to changing them. 

More specifically, she studies movements of the body that are representational––the gestures we produce when we talk—and contrasts them with movements that have a direct effect on the world––actions on objects. 

She is a co-investigator of the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) and co-director of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language at the University of Chicago. In 2001, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship.

She has published two books, The Resilience of Language and Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Learn. In 2005, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015, she will receive the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement in Basic Research from the Association for Psychological Science.