Foundations Of Embodied Learning

Foundations of Embodied Learning advances learning, instruction, and the design of educational technologies by rethinking the learner as an integrated system of mind, body, and environment. Body-based processes—direct physical, social, and environmental interactions—are constantly mediating intellectual performance, sensory stimulation, communication abilities, and other conditions of learning. This book’s coherent, evidence-based framework articulates principles of grounded and embodied learning for design and its implications for curriculum, classroom instruction, and student formative and summative assessment for scholars and graduate students of educational psychology, instructional design and technology, cognitive science, the learning sciences, and beyond.

Foundations of Embodied Learning advances learning, instruction, and the design of educational technologies by rethinking the learner as an integrated system of mind, body, and environment. Body-based processes—direct physical, social, and environmental interactions—are constantly mediating intellectual performance, sensory stimulation, communication abilities, and other conditions of learning. This book’s coherent, evidence-based framework articulates principles of grounded and embodied learning for design and its implications for curriculum, classroom instruction, and student formative and summative assessment for scholars and graduate students of educational psychology, instructional design and technology, cognitive science, the learning sciences, and beyond.

This two-volume set is the first comprehensive overview of the multi-disciplinary field of Embodied Cognition. The second volume covers the fields of embodied language processing and embodied conceptual representations. It also covers the emerging areas of embodied social interaction and humanoid embodiment. With contributions from internationally acknowledged researchers from a variety of disciplines, the two volumes will be a landmark publication in the field, and of great interest to researchers and advanced students in the cognitive sciences and allied disciplines.

The International Handbook of the Learning Sciences is a comprehensive collection of international perspectives on this interdisciplinary field. In more than 50 chapters, leading experts synthesize past, current, and emerging theoretical and empirical directions for learning sciences research. The three sections of the handbook capture, respectively: foundational contributions from multiple disciplines and the ways in which the learning sciences has fashioned these into its own brand of use-oriented theory, design, and evidence; learning sciences approaches to designing, researching, and evaluating learning broadly construed; and the methodological diversity of learning sciences research, assessment, and analytic approaches. This pioneering collection is the definitive volume of international learning sciences scholarship and an essential text for scholars in this area.

"This book operationalises the new field - EmLearning - that integrates embodiment and grounded cognition perspectives with education using the 4E approach as a guiding principle, which suggests that cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, or extended. Chapters highlight empirical data providing readers with research-based insight into the theoretical foundations of embodied cognition in learning, illustrated by practical examples. Ultimately, the volume contributes a radical understanding of embodied cognition, demonstrating the importance of the field to the educational system more broadly, and suggests a fundamental change to the way learning, education, and curriculum design is viewed and considered. Based on contemporary scientific findings, the book addresses the educational area with a focus on opening the embodied approach to a wider audience that will circulate the new knowledge and support their educational practices. Written with the purpose of contributing to a broad spectrum of academic educational fields, this book will be of importance to postgraduates, researchers, and academics in the fields of higher education, educational psychology, teacher education, and teaching methodology and practice. Teachers and school politicians should also benefit from this volume more broadly"--

Edited by a diverse group of expert collaborators, the Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning is a landmark volume that brings together cutting-edge research examining learning as entailing inherently cultural processes. Conceptualizing culture as both a set of social practices and connected to learner identities, the chapters synthesize contemporary research in elaborating a new vision of the cultural nature of learning, moving beyond summary to reshape the field toward studies that situate culture in the learning sciences alongside equity of educational processes and outcomes. With the recent increased focus on culture and equity within the educational research community, this volume presents a comprehensive, innovative treatment of what has become one of the field’s most timely and relevant topics.

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.

Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field's immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science. Examples, cases, and research findings taken from the wide range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists effectively explain and explore the relationship among the three perspectives. Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.