Foundations of Embodied Learning

A Paradigm for Education

Mitchell J. Nathan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000430103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

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.

Part I

A Fundamental Problem for Education and a Proposed Solution

1

We are Learning Creatures Who Struggle to Design Effective Education Systems Framing the Problem

Very young children exhibit their understanding of balance and space as they first learn to navigate and walk without being instructed (Adolph, et al., 1997). To illustrate the complexity of these learning achievements, by comparison, programming robots to navigate and walk has been enormously challenging and is only recently showing success after some 50 years and at a cost of many hundreds of billions of dollars in research and development. The iRobot Roomba alone has been the product of an estimated $100M of R&D by 2015.

(Castellanos, 2015).

Having taught AI systems to play chess, computer scientists were surprised to learn how much more difficult it was to teach computers to recognize speech (Norman, 2017). Infants, on the other hand, readily develop speech, and by their first birthday they will have learned to both understand and produce verbal utterances that they have never heard before

(Bergelson & Swingley, 2013).

This is also the age by which infants start to produce spontaneous hand gestures and arm movements to accompany their spoken language (Goldin-Meadow, 2015). Newborn babies demonstrate facial recognition through preferential looking. However, this is a capability that still eludes computer scientists, who struggle with how to provide this general skill across a broad range of facial forms.

1.1 The Central Problem: Need for a Coherent, Evidence-based Theory of Learning

Learning is basic to the human experience. Throughout one’s lifetime, a vast and highly varied amount of knowledge and skill is learned. Education is basically about engineering learning experiences. Despite the enormous importance of effective educational systems for social mobility, individual opportunity and a healthy and secure nation, educational institutions are not guided by a coherent, evidence-based theory of learning (e.g., Korthagen & Kessels, 1999). Without this overarching framework to guide educational design and decision making, teachers are left to make choices based on their own ideas about how learning takes place, and how to collect evidence that their students are learning.

Professionally trained educators are, of course, equipped with general and content area-specific pedagogical methods, but the connections of these practices to theory is often thin and insufficient to help customize learning experiences to the suit the range of learners, topics, and teachers. Without appropriate guidance, educational administrators cannot make sound strategic choices on how to allocate limited resources, such as maintaining the professional training of their staff. With no scientific base to direct them, students are left to participate in inefficient exercises; they don’t know how to direct their own study efforts, engage in effective self-teaching, or help their peers. As a nation, we spend billions of dollars to maintain and reform our educational systems and practices, design classrooms, order curriculum materials and educational technologies, institute testing regimens, and implement teacher training programs. We regularly make educational choices and implement educational programs with a poor understanding of how people learn. Furthermore, poor designs from K-12 education make their way into higher education and workplace learning, leading to additional lost opportunities.

Box 1 What is Learning?

I define learning as lasting changes in our behavior. Whenever we can observe these systemic changes in behavior, we can ascribe some learning process.

This definition is intentionally broad because people are able to perform an enormous range of behaviors and educators must appreciate that there are many different kinds of learning that people experience. This is why an integrative framework is necessary. If educators acknowledge that people’s behaviors operate across a wide range of time scales, they may realize educational systems must attend to learning processes across a wide range of time scales as well.

The central goal of this book is to describe a coherent, evidence-based framework for how people actually learn. This description highlights something rather remarkable: Our natural ways of thinking, teaching, and learning are embodied. By embodied, I mean that people necessarily use body-based resources to make meaning and to connect new ideas and representations to prior experiences. I also mean that when we create educational systems that restrict our access to these natural, embodied resources, we impede our abilities to think and learn, and we may significantly underestimate what people know and how deeply they are engaged with the ideas of interest.

Take for example, the trend in schools to move away from concrete, hands-on thinking about mathematics and reading. Although there is strong evidence that both early mathematical thinking and early reading benefit from a Piagetian approach that fosters the development of serial thinking through concrete operations (Hattie, 2009, p. 43; the effect size of this approach is typically d = 1.28), widespread educational practices rapidly move to minimize these overt concrete behaviors in classrooms and regularly restrict students’ use of concrete resources during testing. Another example is to look at students’ self-employed study skills. When left on their own, students regularly choose some of the most ineffective methods. As double damage, they greatly overestimate the effectiveness of the study methods they choose, and often avoid the most effective methods, such as self-testing, even when they are aware of them, because of the greater effort (actions) involved in carrying out these methods (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

Educators specifically design classrooms to restrict students’ physical and social interactions. This practice only increases with students’ age. The education community creates testing situations that restricts children’s ability to move their bodies in ways that can help them think, interact with objects, and interact with other people. For many students, schools with traditional instruction are a unique setting where they are blocked off from access to some of the most useful and flexible cognitive resources they have, resources that people ordinarily use while thinking and learning in nearly any other setting (Resnick, 1987).

However, there are many circumstances where learning is demonstrably improved by engaging one’s body. Throughout this book, the reader will encounter a curated set of findings from scientific research and instructional designs that show embodied learning to be an asset for education. The examples reach across developmental levels, from pre-K through K-12 and into college and professional learning. The topics span language, mathematics, social studies, science, and engineering. The reader may experience an over representation of examples involving language and mathematics. This is largely because there is significantly more research that has been done in these areas to date. It is my hope that the ideas presented in this book can encourage more research in other scholastic content areas. Across these various examples, a pattern is emerging among theorists, educators, and designers that embodied learning is a natural human activity, and it is possible to design for it and harness it in ways that can inform educational practices and policies in order to usher in a new era of educating the embodied mind.

1.1.1 Example: Early Algebra Education

As one extended example, students can demonstrate an intuitive understanding of algebra relationships, such as how unknown quantities (such as X) behave, and how to describe general quantitative relationships for a given situation. Some readers may be cringing right now at the thought of doing algebra. For many people, learning algebra was a traumatic experience. They may have “gotten by” without developing a solid understanding of what algebraic expressions really meant, or why one would ever need to know how to use them.

There are informative studies of children who were given the freedom to talk about numerical quantities with their classmates—before they had formal instruction about algebra—while they moved about freely. These studies showed that students actually have some very good intuitions about how to think about unknown quantities and generalized relationships between quantities (French & Nathan, 2006; Koedinger & Nathan, 2004). These students naturally used their bodies and movement-based scenarios to act out ways that they think quantities can be in relation to one another.

For example, students intuitively realize they can use their bodies to act like a balance scale in order to depict the two sides of an equation. When in balance, both physically and conceptually, students readily recognize that there is an innate relationship between two sets of quantities being equated, even though each side can be very different visually. Young students can faithfully act out skits that capture the important quantitative relationships. They can depict operations such as multiplication by having multiple students each do the same thing in unison. Subtraction can be acts of removal, division, sharing and splitting, and so on (Nathan, 2008).

When speaking about relationships between unknown and known quantities, children can intuitively think of mathematical expressions as describing...