This article focuses on touch, talk and embodied resources as a means of
directing participants’ attention to a focal point in a pedagogical
task. The data are drawn from a corpus of approximately 150 hours of
video-recorded lessons from primary and lower secondary classrooms in
monolingual and multilingual settings in Finland. The data were scanned
for episodes of touch that occurred between teachers and students in
relation to an ongoing pedagogical agenda. Using multimodal conversation
analysis, we identified a complex multimodal gestalt (CMG; Mondada
2014a) consisting of touch followed by a deictic pointing gesture that
occurred within an ongoing pedagogical activity. We present three
excerpts from different pedagogical contexts that involve such a CMG as a
means of directing a recipient’s attention to a pedagogical task. The
CMG is relevant for managing attention within an ongoing learning task.
We show how this CMG provides parallel participation frameworks without
competition for the speaker, and argue that it is a technique for
bringing together the teacher, student and content in ways that
encourage the recipient’s attention to the pedagogical content. This
analysis contributes to the growing body of studies on haptic sociality,
especially in the institutional context of education.