Educational Psychology Review 27 (3):371–389 (2015)
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Abstract |
New and radically reformative thinking about the enactive and embodied basis of cognition holds out the promise of moving forward age-old debates about whether we learn and how we learn. The radical enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) poses a direct, and unmitigated, challenge to the trademark assumptions of traditional cognitivist theories of mind—those that characterize cognition as always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations of some kind. REC has had some success in understanding how sports skills and expertise are acquired. But, REC approaches appear to encounter a natural obstacle when it comes to understanding skill acquisition in knowledge-rich, conceptually based domains like the hard sciences and mathematics. This paper offers a proof of concept that REC’s reach can be usefully extended into the domain of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, especially when it comes to understanding the deep roots of such learning. In making this case, this paper has five main parts. The section “Ancient Intellectualism and the REC Challenge” briefly introduces REC and situates it with respect to rival views about the cognitive basis of learning. The “Learning REConceived: from Sports to STEM?” section outlines the substantive contribution REC makes to understanding skill acquisition in the domain of sports and identifies reasons for doubting that it will be possible to apply the same approach to knowledge-rich STEM domains. The “Mathematics as Embodied Practice” section gives the general layout for how to understand mathematics as an embodied practice. The section “The Importance of Attentional Anchors” introduces the concept “attentional anchor” and establishes why attentional anchors are important to educational design in STEM domains like mathematics. Finally, drawing on some exciting new empirical studies, the section “Seeing Attentional Anchors” demonstrates how REC can contribute to understanding the roots of STEM learning and inform its learning design, focusing on the case of mathematics.
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References found in this work BETA
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch - 1991 - MIT Press.
Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.Evan Thompson - 2007 - Harvard University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Enactivism, Radical Enactivism and Predictive Processing: What is Radical in Cognitive Science?Robert W. Clowes & Klaus Gärtner - 2017 - Kairos 18 (1):54-83.
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Pictorial (Conversational) Implicatures.Tibor Bárány - 2019 - In Andras Benedek & Kristof Nyiri (eds.), Image and Metaphor in the New Century. Budapest, Magyarország: pp. 197-208.
Optimizing Performative Skills in Social Interaction: Insights From Embodied Cognition, Music Education, and Sport Psychology.Andrea Schiavio, Vincent Gesbert, Mark Reybrouck, Denis Hauw & Richard Parncutt - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
Recombinant Enaction: Manipulatives Generate New Procedures in the Imagination, by Extending and Recombining Action Spaces.Jeenath Rahaman, Harshit Agrawal, Nisheeth Srivastava & Sanjay Chandrasekharan - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (2):370-415.
View all 9 citations / Add more citations
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