Embodiment and Embodied Design

Picture this. A preverbal infant straddles the center of a seesaw. She gently tilts her weight back and forth from one side to the other, sensing as each side tips downward and then back up again. This child cannot articulate her observations in simple words, let alone in scientific jargon. Can she learn anything from this experience? If so, what is she learning, and what role might such learning play in her future interactions in the world? Of course, this is a nonverbal bodily experience, and any learning that occurs must be bodily, physical learning. But does this nonverbal bodily experience have anything to do with the sort of learning that takes place in schools—learning verbal and abstract concepts? In this chapter, we argue that the body has everything to do with learning, even learning of abstract concepts. Take mathematics, for example. Mathematical practice is thought to be about producing and manipulating arbitrary symbolic inscriptions that bear abstract, universal truisms untainted by human corporeality. Mathematics is thought to epitomize our species’ collective historical achievement of transcending and, perhaps, escaping the mundane, material condition of having a body governed by haphazard terrestrial circumstance. Surely mathematics is disembodied! We reject this commonly held view and argue instead that all school subjects, even mathematics, are embodied. An embodied perspective rejects the Platonic notion of mathematical objects as ideal entities whose mere shadows us mortals might hope to apprehend. Furthermore, this perspective promotes an epistemological conceptualization of mathematics, and in fact all STEM content, as grounded not in its sign systems and inscriptional forms (which clearly are pivotal to its practice) but in the situated, spatial–dynamical, and somatic phenomenology of the person who is engaging in activity marked by society as “mathematical.” We argue even more strongly that fundamental STEM knowledge is itself shaped by the embodied nature of the human mind. The objective of this chapter is to outline the embodiment approach, explain how it contributes to our understanding of learning, and propose and exemplify how this understanding informs the design of STEM learning environments.