Gestures in Educational Behavior Coordination. Grounding an Enactive Robot-Assisted Approach to Didactics

The ability to coordinate behaviors at an interindividual level has shaped human social evolution by enabling the formation and maintaining the cohesion of large social groups. Nonverbal communication always played a central role in this process—a role that now can be expanded. With the introduction of social robots, capable of emulating human appearance and movements to communicate with us through social signals, the mechanisms of human–human nonverbal communication offer us a way to improve human social communication with robots in a variety of fields—from information to assistance to people with special needs. In this article, we explore this possibility with reference to educational robotics, and, more precisely, to robot-supported didactics. In the first part of this chapter, we discuss the concepts of behavior coordination and structural coupling as evolutionary mechanism underlying human social structures and illustrate the importance of nonverbal communication in social interactions. We will give examples of different nonverbal communication channels and illustrate, with recent paradigmatic studies, how they can be used for social robotics in different cultural settings. In the second part of the chapter, focusing on educational robotics, we illustrate how nonverbal communication between humans and robots can be used as feedback channel between teachers and students in order to reinforce the structural coupling in an enactive robot-assisted approach in didactics.