Chapter 6: The Gestures of Blind Mathematics Learners

When we began our investigations of the practices of blind mathematics learners in 2002, we had not envisaged that attending to their gestures would come to assume such a central role in our attempts to understand the particularities of their mathematics practices. Yet in retrospect, perhaps it could hardly have been otherwise; in the absence of access to the visual field, the hands and other parts of the body become critical channels through which information about the world is sensed, processed, and conceived. Still, although we know that blind learners will use their hands as substitutes for their eyes in order to perceive spatial data, does it necessarily follow that focusing on their gestures will illuminate the ways by which they make sense of mathematics? In this chapter, we will argue that it does. To do so, we first need to consider what we include as gestures.