Embodied Learning: Why at School the Mind Needs the Body

Abstract

Despite all methodological efforts made in the last three decades, Western instruction grounds on traditional principles. Most educational programs follow theories that are mentalistic, i.e., they separate the mind from the body. At school, learners sit, watch, listen, and write. The aim of this paper is to present embodied learning as an alternative to mentalistic education. Similarly, this paper wants to describe embodied learning from a neuroscientific perspective. After a brief historical overview, I will review studies highlighting the behavioral effectiveness of embodied instruction in second language learning, mathematics and spatial thinking. On this base, I will discuss some of the brain mechanisms driving embodied learning and describe its advantages, clearly pleading in favor of instructional practice that reunites body and mind.

Observing and Producing Durational Hand Gestures Facilitates the Pronunciation of Novel Vowel-Length Contrasts

“…We believe that more experimental classroom studies are needed to further explore multimodal trainings for pronunciation teaching. All in all, the results of the study expand on recent studies that have highlighted the effectiveness of embodied instruction in second language learning by suggesting that gestures are a powerful tool that help learners to acquire not only vocabulary in second language (Macedonia, 2019) but also patterns of L2 pronunciation.…”

Motor-Enriched Encoding Can Improve Children’s Early Letter Recognition

“…Potential positive learning effects of motor-enriched encoding might have several explanations also involving working memory and retrieval processes. One theory is that motor-enriched activities activate not only cortical areas of cognitive control but also a wide range of cortical motor and sensory areas (Engelkamp and Zimmer, 1989;Barsalou, 2008;Macedonia, 2019). These cortical areas are responsible for generation of actions and processing the sensory consequences of the actions this may help encoding by (a) efficient activation of both the visual and phonological subsystems supporting working memory and (b) increased activation of sensorimotor brain areas both during encoding and retrieval (Macedonia et al, 2011;Mayer et al, 2015;Macedonia, 2019).…”

“…One theory is that motor-enriched activities activate not only cortical areas of cognitive control but also a wide range of cortical motor and sensory areas (Engelkamp and Zimmer, 1989;Barsalou, 2008;Macedonia, 2019). These cortical areas are responsible for generation of actions and processing the sensory consequences of the actions this may help encoding by (a) efficient activation of both the visual and phonological subsystems supporting working memory and (b) increased activation of sensorimotor brain areas both during encoding and retrieval (Macedonia et al, 2011;Mayer et al, 2015;Macedonia, 2019). The latter has been shown by Mayer et al (2015) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), reporting that a word recall task at 2-months post-acquisition correlates with increased activation of the left-brain motor cortex and the temporal brain sulcus in adults.…”

Dramatising the shock of the new: using Arts-based embodied pedagogies to teach life skills

“…In the West, a fundamental split is posited between mind and body … In the East, by contrast, … Body and mind, spirit and matter … interact in the dance which is the universe. (Peter Payne 5 )Although there is still a paucity of research into second language learning and embodiment, recent studies in neuroscience explain how the body is a tool to accumulate knowledge (Macedonia, 2019). They have found that words are related to experiences in our brains (Ullman & Lovelett, 2018) and that embodied learning empowers foreign language learning (Macedonia, 2019).…”

“…(Peter Payne 5 )Although there is still a paucity of research into second language learning and embodiment, recent studies in neuroscience explain how the body is a tool to accumulate knowledge (Macedonia, 2019). They have found that words are related to experiences in our brains (Ullman & Lovelett, 2018) and that embodied learning empowers foreign language learning (Macedonia, 2019). The body is more than a mediator, it reflects and is a source of knowledge construction; the unconscious aspects of the bodily experience forming the basis of cognitive and linguistic processes.…”