Multisensory Emplaced Learning: Resituating Situated Learning in a Moving World

Abstract

This article outlines the implications of a theory of “sensory-emplaced learning” for understanding the interrelationships between the embodied and environmental in learning processes. Understanding learning as multisensory and contingent within everyday place-events, this framework analytically describes how people establish themselves as “situated learners.” This approach is demonstrated through three examples of how culturally constructed sensory categories offer routes to knowing about the multisensoriality of learning experiences. This approach, we suggest, offers new routes within practice-oriented educational theories for understanding how human bodies become situated and embedded in cultural, social, and material practices within constantly shifting place-events.

Notes

Vaike Fors’ research on teenagers sensory practices in museums and online was funded between 2007 and 2009 by the Swedish Research Council. Åsa Bäckström's research about skateboarders’ aesthetic learning processes was funded by the Swedish Research Council between 2008 and 2012. Sarah Pink's research into Slow Cities was funded between 2005 and 2007, by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University and a small grant from the Nuffield Foundation (UK).

¹See, for example, http://www.slowfood.com/education/