Embodied artifacts and conceptual performances

2013

Abstract: Learning scientists are only beginning to appreciate the potential of synergy between two concurrent developments—theory of embodied cognition and technology of embodied interaction. We characterize and evaluate this prospective synergy from a sociocultural perspective. First we analyze learning in explicitly embodied cultural practices (e.g., surfing), then analogize to the implicitly embodied practice of mathematics. We next contextualize this analogy via interpreting data collected in a design-based research study, in which twenty-two 9-to-11-year-olds developed notions of proportionality through participating in guided problem-solving activities in an embodied-interaction space. In both surfing and mathematics, we argue, learners develop “embodied artifacts, ” i.e. body-based and modular rehearsed actions. Embodied artifacts lend individuals entry into disciplinary competence via participation in action, refinement of operations, and integration into activity structure...

Trninic, D., & Abrahamson, D. (2013). Embodied interaction as designed mediation of conceptual performance. In D. Martinovic, V. Freiman & Z. Karadag (Eds.), Visual mathematics and cyberlearning (Mathematics education in digital era) (Vol. 1, pp. 119-139). New York: Springer.

Can conceptual understanding emerge from embodied interaction? We believe the answer is affirmative, provided that individuals engaged in embodied-interaction activity enjoy structured opportunities to describe their physical actions using instruments, language, and forms pertaining to the targeted concept. In this chapter, we draw on existing literature on embodiment and artifacts to coin and elaborate on the construct of an embodied artifact—a cognitive product of rehearsed performance such as, for example, an arabesque penchée in dance or a flying sidekick in martial arts. We argue that embodied artifacts may encapsulate or “package” cultural knowledge for entry into disciplinary competence not only in explicitly embodied domains, such as dance or martial arts, but also implicitly embodied domains, such as mathematics. Furthermore, we offer that current motion-sensitive cyber-technologies may enable the engineering of precisely the type of learning environments capable of leveraging embodied artifacts as both means of learning and means for studying how learning occurs. We demonstrate one such environment, the Mathematical Imagery Trainer for Proportion (MIT–P), engineered in the context of a design-based research study investigating the mediated emergence of mathematical notions from embodied-interaction instructional activities. In particular, we discuss innovative features of the MIT–P in terms of the technological artifact as well as its user experience. We predict that embodied interaction will become a focus of design for and research on mathematical learning.

Design researchers should inform the commercial production of educational technology by explicating their tacit design practice in workable structures and language. Two activity genres for grounding mathematical concepts are explained: ‘‘perception-based design’’ builds on learners’ early mental capacity to draw logical inferences from perceptual judgment of intensive quantities in source phenomena, such as displays of color densities; ‘‘action-based design’’ builds on learners’ perceptuomotor capacity to develop new kinesthetic routines for strategic embodied interaction, such as moving the hands at different speeds to keep a screen green. In a primary problem, learners apply or develop non-symbolic perceptuomotor schemas to engage the task effectively; In a secondary problem, learners devise means of appropriating newly interpolated mathematical forms as enactive, semiotic, or epistemic means of enhancing, explaining, and evaluating their primary response. In so doing, learners heuristically determine either inferential parity (perception-based design) or functional parity (action-based design) as epistemic grounds for reconciling na.ve and scientific perspectives. Ultimately embodied-learning activities may interleave and synthesize the genres’ elements. This taxonomy opens design practice into richer dialog with the learning sciences. An appendix lays out the embodied-design framework in a ‘‘how to’’ form amenable for replication both within the domain of mathematics and beyond.

Routledge eBooks, 2024

Educational Studies in Mathematics

Recent developments in cognitive and educational science highlight the role of the body in learning. Novel digital technologies increasingly facilitate bodily interaction. Aiming for understanding of the body’s role in learning mathematics with technology, we reconsider the instrumental approach from a radical embodied cognitive science perspective. We highlight the complexity of any action regulation, which is performed by a complex dynamic functional system of the body and brain in perception-action loops driven by multilevel intentionality. Unlike mental schemes, functional systems are decentralized and can be extended by artifacts. We introduce the notion of a body-artifact functional system, pointing to the fact that artifacts are included in the perception-action loops of instrumented actions. The theoretical statements of this radical embodied reconsideration of the instrumental approach are illustrated by an empirical example, in which embodied activities led a student to th...

Frontiers in Education, 2020

A rising epistemological paradigm in the cognitive sciences-embodied cognition-has been stimulating innovative approaches, among educational researchers, to the design and analysis of STEM teaching and learning. The paradigm promotes theorizations of cognitive activity as grounded, or even constituted, in goal-oriented multimodal sensorimotor phenomenology. Conceptual learning, per these theories, could emanate from, or be triggered by, experiences of enacting or witnessing particular movement forms, even before these movements are explicitly signified as illustrating target content. Putting these theories to practice, new types of learning environments are being explored that utilize interactive technologies to initially foster student enactment of conceptually oriented movement forms and only then formalize these gestures and actions in disciplinary formats and language. In turn, new research instruments, such as multimodal learning analytics, now enable researchers to aggregate, integrate, model, and represent students' physical movements, eye-gaze paths, and verbal-gestural utterance so as to track and evaluate emerging conceptual capacity. We-a cohort of cognitive scientists and design-based researchers of embodied mathematics-survey a set of empirically validated frameworks and principles for enhancing mathematics teaching and learning as dialogic multimodal activity, and we synthetize a set of principles for educational practice.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2020

This special issue focuses on the theoretical, empirical and practical integrations between embodied cognition theory (EC) and educational science. The key question is: Can EC constitute a new theoretical framework for educational science and practice? The papers of the special issue support the efforts of those interested in the role of EC in education and in the epistemological convergence of EC and educational science. They deal with a variety of relevant topics in education and offer a focus on the role of the body and embodied experience in learning and educational settings. In conclusion, some further topics are suggested that will need to be investigated in the future, such as a critical evaluation of the possibility for an epistemological alliance between educational theory and embodied cognition, and the contribution that enactive cognition can provide to educational systems, organizations, institutions and policies. 1 Manuscript The idea for this special issue derives from the need to discuss the theoretical, empirical and practical integrations between embodied cognition theory (EC) and educational science. The starting question is: Can EC constitute a new theoretical framework for educational science and practice? Since the 1990s, EC theory emerged within the cognitive sciences by taking the hypothesis of the co-dependence of body, mind and environment seriously, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

Different approaches to embodied learning-conceptual learning of curricular content grounded in a new capacity for enacting forms of purposeful physical movement in interaction with the environment-have become increasingly central to mathematics-education research. This research forum provides participants with an up-to-date overview of diverse and complementary theoretical perspectives on embodied learning, principles derived from these perspectives governing the design of environments for learning various mathematical content, and demonstrations thereof. We speculate on promising directions for future embodied design research.

2019

Psychology has made, and continues to make, a significant contribution to the discipline area of education. Since one of the main aims of education concerns student learning-which is an indisputably psychological phenomenon-we argue that the emerging research agenda of embodied cognition has much to offer educational practitioners, researchers, and/or policy-makers. Although embodied cognition is still in its infancy, the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of the literature provides some thought-provoking recommendations to enhance educational practice or practices, which in turn can bring about student learning more effectively. Consequently, this article will be concerned with the discussion of two issues: first, we provide a brief historical overview that foregrounds embodied cognition, and, second, we outline the educational implications of embodied cognition through the use of some examples significant to education. We conclude with an argument for the importance of making findings in an area we call 'embodied education' available to teachers.

Abstract: Embodiment perspectives from the cognitive sciences offer a rethinking of the role of sensorimotor activity in human learning, knowing, and reasoning. Educational researchers have been evaluating whether and how these perspectives might inform the theory and practice of STEM instruction. Some of these researchers have created technological systems, where students solve sensorimotor interaction problems as cognitive entry into curricular content. However, the field has yet to agree on a conceptually coherent and empirically validated design framework, inspired by embodiment perspectives, for developing these instructional resources. A stumbling block toward such consensus, we propose, is an implicit disagreement among educational researchers on the relation between physical movement and conceptual learning. This hypothesized disagreement could explain the contrasting choices we witness among current designs for learning with respect to instructional methodology for cultivating new physical actions: Whereas some researchers use an approach of direct instruction, such as explicit teaching of gestures, others use an indirect approach, where students must discover effective movements to solve a task. Prior to comparing these approaches, it may help first to clarify key constructs. In this theoretical essay we draw on embodiment and systems literature as well as findings from our design research so as to offer the following taxonomy that may facilitate discourse about movement in STEM learning: (a) distal movement is the technologically extended effect of physical movement on the environment; (b) proximal movement is the physical movements themselves; and (c) sensorimotor schemes are the routinized patterns of cognitive activity that becomes enacted through proximal movement by orienting on so-called attentional anchors. Attentional anchors are goal-oriented phenomenological objects or enactive perceptions (“sensori-”) that organize proximal movement to effect distal movement (“-motor”). All three facets of movement must be considered in analyzing embodied learning processes. We demonstrate that indirect movement instruction enables students to develop new sensorimotor schemes including attentional anchors as idiosyncratic solutions to physical interaction problems. These schemes are by necessity grounded in students’ own agentive relation to the world while also grounding target content, such as mathematical notions. Significance: Engineering developments in computational technology have created unprecedented opportunities for industry to build and disseminate mathematics-education applications (“apps”). Thousands of these applications are now literally at the fingertips of any child who can access a tablet, smartphone, or personal computer with responsive touchscreen. Educational researchers could contribute to the quality of these ubiquitous consumer products by offering design frameworks informed by theories of learning. However, existing frameworks are derived from interaction theories drawing on epistemological assumptions that are no longer tenable, given the embodiment turn in the cognitive sciences. A proposed systemic reconceptualization of mathematical objects as grounded in sensorimotor schemes for material interaction offers educational designers heuristics for creating activities in which students learn by discovering motion patterns.