Enactivism in educational theory "looks at each learning situation as a complex system consisting of teacher, learner, and context, all of which frame and co-create the learning situation." [70]
What does it mean to be an active learner?
It means students are interacting with the material in any way that can promote active thought, via ‘activities’ for learning or via re-framing the note-taking process to encouraging thinking about the material rather than transcribing the content.
What are the benefits of active learning?
There are clear ethical as well as pedagogical benefits to the use of active learning techniques. Interacting with content through active learning has some compelling advantages over ‘delivery mode’ lectures. It helps to maintain student concentration and deepens learning towards the higher-level skills like critical thinking.
What is the difference between active and observational learning?
- "Enactive learning is learning by doing and experiencing the consequences of your actions." - "It is said that observational learning allows for learning without any change in behavior" 1. Attention to the model
What is enactivism in cognitive science?
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes.
What is an example of enactive learning?
Enactive (0 - 1 year) It involves encoding physical action based information and storing it in our memory. For example, in the form of movement as a muscle memory, a baby might remember the action of shaking a rattle. This mode continues later in many physical activities, such as learning to ride a bike.
What is enactive learning Bandura?
Enactive learning is learning by doing, whereas observational learning involves learning by watching others. Albert Bandura, the father of Social Learning, contends that observational (vicarious) learning accounts for many aspects of human learning.
Why is enactive learning important?
Enactive learning, because it involves active engagement on a task, may appear to be most important because students can learn the steps to perform a task successfully; however it can also lead to a trial and error cycle if the student do not possess the knowledge required to perform the task.
What is enactive teaching?
Enactive Teaching in Higher Education is a narrative exploration of embodied teaching in the. university classroom based on the enactive view of cognition described by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. On the surface, their philosophy is a heavily theoretical critique of epistemological dualism.
What are the 3 concepts of Bandura's social learning theory?
Bandura asserts that most human behavior is learned through observation, imitation, and modeling.
What are Bandura's 4 principles of social learning?
Observational learning is a major component of Bandura's social learning theory. He also emphasized that four conditions were necessary in any form of observing and modeling behavior: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
What are Bruner 3 modes of representation?
The work of Jerome Bruner (1966) has been influential in early algebra. He identified three modes of representation for mathematical objects: the enactive, the iconic and the symbolic, which move broadly from the concrete to the abstract.
What are the four major principles of Bruner's theory?
Bruner (1966) states that a theory of instruction should address four major aspects: (1) predisposition towards learning, (2) the ways in which a body of knowledge can be structured so that it can be most readily grasped by the learner, (3) the most effective sequences in which to present material, and (4) the nature ...
How is Bruner's theory used in the classroom?
Bruner advocates that “a good teacher will design lessons that help students discover the relationship between bits of information. To do this a teacher must give students the information they need, but without organizing it for them” (Saul McLeod).
What is Enactive?
adjective. having power to enact or establish, as a law.
What is Bruner's discovery learning?
Discovery Learning was introduced by Jerome Bruner, and is a method of Inquiry-Based Instruction. This popular theory encourages learners to build on past experiences and knowledge, use their intuition, imagination and creativity, and search for new information to discover facts, correlations and new truths.
What is Bruner's theory of cognitive development?
Bruner believed development does not consist of discrete stages but is a continuous process. He also believed language is a cause and not a consequence of learning. He believed that more knowledgeable people play a major role in the cognitive development of a learner and that you could speed-up the learning process.
Which is more effective Enactive learning or vicarious learning why?
The enactive learning effect is generally stronger than the vicarious learning effect in online knowledge contributions.
What is Enactive mastery?
Enactive mastery involves creating a situation in which people can experience a “small win” which becomes a catalyst for further performance.
What are the three modes of representation?
Jerome Bruner Theory His research on children's cognitive development proposed three 'modes of representation': Enactive representation (based on action) Iconic representation (based on images) Symbolic representation (based on language)
What is Bruner's three tiered model of learning?
In Bruner's research of cognitive development of children in 1966, he proposed three modes of representations — enactive, iconic, and symbolic. This type of representation happens in the very young (birth to age 1). It involves encoding action based information that is then stored into our memory.
How does active learning help students?
Active learning promotes recall and deeper understanding of material, as students are engaging with the content rather than simply listening to it. There are also equity benefits that flow from active learning, as lower-performing students have greater benefits from active learning than students who are already achieving high grades. Another equity outcome from active learning is that using different modes of delivery supports students who have different learning styles. There are clear ethical as well as pedagogical benefits to the use of active learning techniques.
What is active learning?
Simply put, active learning is the process of learning via engaging with the content. It means students are interacting with the material in any way that can promote active thought, via ‘activities’ for learning or via re-framing the note-taking process to encouraging thinking about the material rather than transcribing the content.
Why is active learning important?
Active learning promotes recall and deeper understanding of material, as students are engaging with the content rather than simply listening to it. There are also equity benefits that flow from active learning, as lower-performing students have greater benefits from active learning than students who are already achieving high grades.
How long can you listen to a lecture?
students are passively listening) their concentration limit is between 10 and 20 minutes, a small fraction of a lecture. Passively listening to a lecture can be useful at promoting learning at the lower end of a taxonomy ...
What is delivery mode in international relations?
‘Delivery mode’ lectures, where students listen rather than interact, are not good at promoting higher-level learning and skills.
Is passive listening good for learning?
Passively listening to a lecture can be useful at promoting learning at the lower end of a taxonomy of learning such as – to ‘remember’ and ‘understand’ – but is not as good at promoting higher-level skills like ‘apply’, ‘analyse’ and ‘evaluate’.
Who is Jess Gifkins?
Jess Gifkins is a Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Her research focuses on decision-making practices in the United Nations Security Council and international responses to mass atrocity crimes. Her work has been published in Cooperation and Conflict, the Australian Journal of International Affairs, Global Responsibility to Protect, among other outlets. She is Associate Editor of Critical Military Studies.
What is pretend play?
One obvious place to look for processes that involve enacting metaphors is in pretend play, which is one of the earliest informal learning contexts. Pretend play has traditionally been defined as “symbolic play” involving linguistic capabilities (Huttenlocher and Higgins 1978) and internal representational and intellectualist meta-representational capacities (Leslie 1987 ). It is possible, however, to take a less intellectualistic or cognitivist, and a more enactivist approach to pretend play. Gregory Currie ( 2004 ), for example, moves towards such an understanding of pretense when he focuses on the perceptual ability to see-in, i.e., the ability to see resemblances or affordances in the objects (e.g., see 2004, p. 220). He remains close to the traditional cognitivist line, however, since he does not take seeing-in as sufficient for pretense and thus requires further representational, offline processing.
What is cognitive semantics?
The cognitive semantics of image-schemas, metaphors, and blending gives us a way to conceptualize how embodied perception and action can scale up into the more sophisticated and intellectual aspects of cognition. One could argue that the processes involved in this scaling up are enactive processes that depend on all of the embodied, affective, and intersubjective aspects discussed in the previous section. Some proponents of the cognitive semantics approach to metaphor downplay differences between the use of metaphors in linguistic practices in contrast to more action-oriented practices (such as pretend play—see the following section). There is “no formal difference between metaphor as revealed by linguistic expressions and metaphor as revealed by other forms of human action, including the production and use of material culture” (Ortman 2000, p. 616). As Malafouris ( 2013) points out, however, this claim fails to acknowledge the important affordance differences actually involved in using artifacts (material mediation) versus linguistic mediation. His “material engagement theory” emphasizes the affordances that are based on the different properties of things versus words, texts, or propositions. Accordingly, he suggests that “materially enacted metaphors” (e.g., picking up a banana and pretending to use it like a telephone) are different from proposition-based metaphors (e.g., producing a statement like “Time is money” or “I feel like a million dollars”).
How important is enactive metaphor?
In this paper, in addition to developing the concept of enactive metaphor, we review empirical evidence showing that enactive metaphors are important for learning . Specifically, the evidence shows that in some cases, enactive engagement with a metaphor, in a fully embodied way, benefits the learning process more so than passive encounters with sitting metaphors (see Enactive Metaphors in Learning Interventions ). Our primary aim, then, is to show the relevance of the notion of enactive metaphor, and more generally, the enactivist approach, to educational contexts. After introducing the notion of enactive cognition ( Enactive Cognition ), we discuss the concept of enactive metaphor by contrasting it with an analysis of metaphor found in cognitive semantics ( Enacting Metaphors ). We then show how the concept of enactive metaphor can be used to understand the early informal learning context of pretend play ( Metaphors and Pretend Play ). In Enactive Metaphors in Learning Interventions, we review studies that show how enactive processes and metaphors are relevant in formal classroom contexts. We then extend this review to recent empirical studies of technologies that offer support for the use of enactive metaphors in science education, including a study of our own using mixed reality to support the study of physics and astronomy ( Putting Metaphors to Work in Technologically Supported Learning Environments ).
How do metaphors help in learning?
1997; Duit 1991; Gentner and Wolff 2000 ). Effective metaphors allow learn ers to transfer understanding of a familiar domain to a new, unfamiliar domain. For example, discussing the atmosphere as a “blanket” of gasses around the earth opens up potential insights pertaining to its protective or temperature-control characteristics (Cameron 2002 ). Educational metaphors, however, are typically disembodied, static models of processes that require the learner to “think through” the mappings from source to target domain. They are sitting metaphors, and while they are capable of making explicit the semantic similarities between domains, it is not always clear that these kinds of metaphors bring learners any closer to a state of knowing that would allow them to perform actions in a particular domain with an awareness or instinct for how these actions will affect the system, or to see the consequences of such actions before they happen. Enactive metaphors in educational contexts, on the other hand, present learners first with an activity—moving in a prescribed way or play-acting a specified process. Enactive metaphors have the potential to dialogically develop a stable sense of relationships by prompting the user to act out their understandings with their bodies and adapt those understandings via salient channels of feedback. In an example developed below, students can metaphorically identify with an asteroid and act out its movement in a planetary system in order to learn from their own kinesthetic feedback about the principles of gravity.
What is the idea of enactivism?
The idea of enactivism is that online bodily processes, not only sensory-motor processes but also affective processes as well (Gallagher and Bower 2014 ), shape the way the perceiver-thinker experiences and considers the world and interacts with others. Varela offered the metaphor of “laying down a path in walking” to capture the sense of enactive cognition. The path (or our understanding) is not preestablished; we construct it as we go and specifically through bodily processes, such as walking, moving, gesturing, reaching, grasping, and interacting with others.
How does gesture affect cognition?
Gesture, for example, takes up some of the cognitive load and adds to or supplements processes of mathematical cognition. Studies by Goldin-Meadow and others show that children perform better (faster and more accurately) on math problems when they are allowed to use gestures, in comparison with when they are asked to sit on their hands (Alibali and DiRusso 1999; Goldin-Meadow et al. 1999, 2001 ). Alibali and Nathan’s ( 2012) observation of teacher and student gestures in a mathematics classroom showed that enactive gestures frequently appear during effective instructional discourse such as using one’s arms to demonstrate the slope of a line. Gesture, as a part of language, not only scaffolds our thinking processes but also adds meaningful information, both for the gesturing subject (actually supporting her thinking) and for the communicating partner (Cole et al. 2002; McNeill 1992 ). Gesture, using visual-spatial formatting, provides extra information that is not found in the verbal-representational format of speech alone, as evidenced, for example, in problem-solving tasks involving mental rotation (Chu and Kita 2008 ). Likewise, the use of gestures to enact the rotation of physical models of molecules correlates with higher accuracy on a diagram translation task (Stull et al. 2012 ).
What is the enactivist approach?
The enactivist approach has strong links to dynamical systems theory, emphasizing the relevance of dynamic coupling and dynamic coordination across brain-body-environment.
How is knowledge constructed in enactivism?
knowledge is constructed: it is constructed by an agent through its sensorimotor interactions with its environment, co-constructed between and within living species through their meaningful interaction with each other. In its most abstract form, knowledge is co-constructed between human individuals in socio-linguistic interactions...Science is a particular form of social knowledge construction... [that] allows us to perceive and predict events beyond our immediate cognitive grasp...and also to construct further, even more powerful scientific knowledge."
What is enactivism in neuroscience?
McGann & others argue that enactivism attempts to mediate between the explanatory role of the coupling between cognitive agent and environment and the traditional emphasis on brain mechanisms found in neuroscience and psychology. In the interactive approach to social cognition developed by De Jaegher & others, the dynamics of interactive processes are seen to play significant roles in coordinating interpersonal understanding, processes that in part include what they call participatory sense-making. Recent developments of enactivism in the area of social neuroscience involve the proposal of The Interactive Brain Hypothesis where social cognition brain mechanisms, even those used in non-interactive situations, are proposed to have interactive origins.
What is enactivism in psychology?
Philosophical aspects. Enactivism is one of a cluster of related theories sometimes known as the 4Es. As described by Mark Rowlands, mental processes are: Embodied involving more than the brain, including a more general involvement of bodily structures and processes.
What is enactivism related to?
Enactivism is closely related to situated cognition and embodied cognition, and is presented as an alternative to cognitivism, computationalism, and Cartesian dualism .
Why are enactive theories limited?
According to this objection, enactive theories only have limited value because they cannot "scale up" to explain more complex cognitive capacities like human thoughts. Those phenomena are extremely difficult to explain without positing representation. But recently, some philosophers are trying to respond to such objection. For example, Adrian Downey (2020) provides a non-representational account of Obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then argues that ecological-enactive approaches can respond to the "scaling up" objection.
How has AI influenced enactivism?
The activity in the AI community has influenced enactivism as a whole. Referring extensively to modeling techniques for evolutionary robotics by Beer, the modeling of learning behavior by Kelso, and to modeling of sensorimotor activity by Saltzman, McGann, De Jaegher, and Di Paolo discuss how this work makes the dynamics of coupling between an agent and its environment, the foundation of enactivism, "an operational, empirically observable phenomenon." That is, the AI environment invents examples of enactivism using concrete examples that, although not as complex as living organisms, isolate and illuminate basic principles.
What is inter-enactive agency?
In a similar vein, "an inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behavior of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself". According to Torrance, enactivism involves five interlocking themes related to the question "What is it to be a (cognizing, conscious) agent?" It is:
Abstract
We argue that an approach to the learning of mathematics based on enactive (bodily acted out) metaphorising may significantly help in alleviating the cognitive abuse millions of children worldwide suffer when exposed to mathematics.
34.1 Introduction
In our view, the most critical issue in mathematics education is the fact that millions of schoolchildren worldwide are exposed to mathematics in a way that turns out to be an inescapable torture for most of them.
34.2 Theoretical Background and Research Questions
Increasing awareness has been emerging during the last decades in the mathematics education community that metaphors are not just rhetorical devices but powerful cognitive tools that help us in building or grasping new concepts, as well as in solving problems in an efficient and friendly way (Chiu 2000; Díaz-Rojas and Soto-Andrade 2015; English 1997; Lakoff and Núñez 2000; Libedinsky and Soto-Andrade 2015; Sfard 2008, 2009; Soto-Andrade 2006, 2007, 2015; and many others).
34.3 Methodology
Our methodology adheres to the enactivist perspective, where we focus on the learners doing and knowledge is not metaphorised—by the researcher—as an object to be captured or held by a learner (Sfard 2008, 2009 ).
34.4 Illustrative Examples of Enactive Metaphorising
We report and discuss below two types of examples of enactive metaphorising in challenging mathematical situations that we experimented with in the above cohorts.
34.5 Discussion and Conclusions
Motivated by an enactivist perspective, we have shown by way of illustrative examples how metaphorising and enacting (acting out) mathematical objects, processes and situations can make a significant difference in the ideas and insights that may emerge from learners tackling a mathematical challenge.
Notes
Funding from PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centres of Excellence Project BF0003 and from University of Chile Domeyko Fund (Interactive Learning Networks Project) is gratefully acknowledged.
What did Piaget and Bruner disagree on?
Bruner and Piaget disagreed on the following: Bruner believed development is a continuous process, not a series of stages. Bruner also believed development of language is a cause and not a consequence of cognitive development.
What is the enactive stage of education?
In this theory, he identified three modes of representation. Enactive is the stage that involves direct manipulation of objects without an internal representation.
What is the enactive stage?
Enactive, which is the representation of knowledge through actions. Iconic, which is the visual summarization of images. Symbolic representation, which is the use of words and other symbols to describe experiences. The enactive stage appears first.
What did Bruner believe?
Bruner believed that all learning occurs through the stages we just discussed . Bruner also believed that learning should begin with direct manipulation of objects. For example, in math education, Bruner promoted the use of algebra tiles, coins, and other items that could be manipulated.
What should a learner do after a learner has the opportunity to directly manipulate the objects?
After a learner has the opportunity to directly manipulate the objects, they should be encouraged to construct visual representations, such as drawing a shape or a diagram.
What is the concept of discovery learning?
The concept of discovery learning implies that a learner constructs his or her own knowledge for themselves by discovering as opposed to being told about something.
What is the iconic stage?
The iconic stage appears from one to six years old. This stage involves an internal representation of external objects visually in the form of a mental image or icon. For example, a child drawing an image of a tree or thinking of an image of a tree would be representative of this stage.
