Making meaning from a clock: Material artifacts and conceptual blending in time-telling instruction

How do conceptual processes interact with the material world in cognition? Integrating distributed cognition with cognitive semantics, this dissertation investigates relations between material structures and conceptual operations in the everyday activity of time-telling. Telling time is crucial to modern life but cannot be mastered without instruction. Where did our time-telling artifacts and practices come from? How do we read the time from an analog clock face? How does each new generation learn to perform this activity? To address these questions, the author gathered data on the history of time-telling artifacts and practices, analyzed the conceptual mappings involved in constructing time readings, conducted a cognitive ethnographic study of time-telling instruction in elementary classes (grades 1--3), and analyzed student errors when solving time problems. Episodes of interaction were transcribed for speech, gesture, and manipulations of artifacts by combining conversation analysis conventions with annotated images from the video data. Conceptual integration theory was then used to analyze the construction of meaning step-by-step in the unfolding discourse. The historical analysis shows how our modern ways of measuring and conceptualizing time were shaped by the selective pressures of an evolving cognitive ecology. The analysis of clock-reading details differences in the order of looking, imposition of image-schematic structure, and mapping from conceptual models when constructing absolute ('three thirty') versus relative ('half past three') time readings. In examining how functional systems for time-telling get perpetuated into new generations, the cognitive ethnography uncovers the process of 'guided conceptualization': a teacher controls the sequence of action while using artifacts, gestures, and speech to guide learners' conceptual operations, building and elaborating the blended spaces used to generate time readings. In this process, gestures play a key role in setting up material anchors for conceptual elements. Finally, the analyses uncover sources of student errors, which often remain hidden, and show how conceptual changes can occur after a history of apparently successful performance. By relating actions in the world to the conceptual operations involved in meaning-making, the dissertation explores phenomena that span the internal/external boundary, taking a step toward a more complete and coherent account of human cognition.