Beyond Verbal: A Methodological Approach to Highlighting Students’ Embodied Participation in Mathematics Classroom

Despite the growing availability of classroom measures, such measures rarely attended to the embodied nature of learning. This article describes the collaborative development of a practical measure to capture embodied participation in mathematics classrooms with four elementary school teachers—working with students at the intersections of multiply marginalized identities: students of color, emergent bilinguals, and students with disabilities—who informed the measure design and ensured that the data were actionable in their contexts. This article contributes to existing research on classroom measures by highlighting the value of attending to embodied learning through multiple modalities and representations of student participation. We further highlight how such a measure provides practical insights into participation that extend beyond verbal only measures.