Tracing bodies through liminal blends in a mixed reality learning environment

ABSTRACT

While research on embodied learning sheds light on the body’s role during science learning, there is a lack of understanding of how the body is drawn upon in subsequent learning interactions. We seek to understand how the body supports cognition and learning during and after embodiment. We elaborate upon the liminal blends framework (Enyedy, N., Danish, J. A., & DeLiema, D. (2015). Constructing liminal blends in a collaborative augmented-reality learning environment. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 10(1), 7–34.) to understand how many resources are taken up, blended together, and progressively refined towards canonical scientific understanding. By tracing the body, we demonstrate that embodied experiences are never ‘erased.’ Instead, although students find ways to articulate understanding that do not require movement, they nonetheless derive meaning from prior embodied activity. Young children exceed expected grade level understanding in part because their capability as embodied reasoners is privileged for learning. In addition to expanding liminal blends theory, we suggest implications for designing technology-enhanced environments and science learning. Across all audiences, findings suggest the importance of privileging an array of sensemaking resources often excluded from classrooms, and the importance of students mapping multiple representational forms to develop conceptual understanding of science phenomena

KEYWORDS:

• Science learning
• embodiment
• inquiry-based learning
• complex systems
• design study
• learning environment

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the students and teachers at the UCLA Lab School for their years of enthusiastic engagement in STEP research designs. We also thank our collaborators for their tremendous effort in making STEP possible including David DeLiema, Randy Illum, Joshua Danish and our Inquirium partners, Ben Loh and Sri Seah. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Finally, we thank the National Science Foundation (#IIS-152294, #IIS-1628918) for their continued support of STEP research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As stated in (Enyedy et al., 2017, p. 2099), analysis of pre-post tests for 58 1st, 66 2nd; 54% girls show the following: A paired-samples t-test was conducted to compare students’ pre-post scores. There was a significant increase in the scores between pre (M=15.29, SD=6.84) and post-tests (M=27.18, SD=8.55); t(119)= -16.54, p < .001, d = 1.548. As part of the pre-post test the children were asked to draw ‘what happens when solid ice changes to liquid water’ … we ran a mixed ANOVA [on drawings indicating] that there was significant gain in pre and post scores, (F1 (1,114), = 114.24, p<.001, α = 0.05.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation: [grant numbers IIS-152294 and IIS-1628918].