Embodiment and Embodied Design

Learning scientists of embodied cognition by and large reject conceptualizations of knowledge as amodal cerebral content and instead seek to model knowing — knowledge as a verb, not a noun — as it manifests dynamically in complex material and intersubjective human practice through the actual experiences of bodily structure and action, sensory processing, and mental simulations of these experiences. Models of embodied cognition offer solutions to the “symbol grounding problem” (Harnad, 1990), an epistemological conundrum of how amodal, arbitrary, and abstract symbols (so-called AAA symbols; Glenberg, Gutierrez et al., 2004) that enable limitless expression and vast computational power in domains such as language and mathematics can also come to have meaning for the people who use them. Researchers of embodiment strive to implicate how humans draw on multiple sensory modalities and coordinated action, as well as metaphors derived from these modalities, to derive and express meaning. An example is observing interlocutors jointly performing depictive gestures to refer to features of mathematical objects they are co-imagining and transforming in service of a proof or engineering project.

These prevalent phenomena of mundane praxis bear direct implications for instructional methodology, such as for teachers supporting students’ conceptual and procedural development. Embodied design (Abrahamson, 2009, 2014, 2015) is a comprehensive pedagogical approach to creating technologically enabled interactive learning environments, where students engage in activity genres that draw on innate or early developed sensorimotor capacities, such as perceptual judgment, movement coordination, and joint action. These activities typically center on prescribed or emergent tasks that bear little to no symbolic content, yet contribute to participants’ intellectual development. Embodied design-based researchers explore interventions aimed at improving education across a wide array of topics and developmental stages, including: early literacy and reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, scientific inquiry, engineering design, computer programming; as well as emotional intelligence, social skills, and pedagogy.

Research on embodiment and embodied design draws on diverse scholarly sources, including cognitive neuroscience, theories of situated, distributed, and enactive cognition, developmental, cognitive and social psychology, genetic epistemology, phenomenological philosophy, psycho-linguistics, gesture studies, complex dynamical systems theory of motor development and control, ethnomethodological discourse analysis, artificial intelligence, robotics, and contemplative somatic practices.