Designing for Broadening Participation in an Embodied Learning Environment (Poster 3)

• In Event: Designing for Dignity Affirming Experiences: Leveraging Embodied Learning Toward Equity in Interaction

Abstract

Objective
Designing for learning environments with embodiment links cognition to the body through representing phenomena through movement (Goldin-Meadow, 2004). This may provide opportunities for diverse articulations of knowledge to be produced, which offers students multiple perspectives to learn from, and in turn invites broader participation from students who might otherwise be excluded in normative, sedentary spaces (Marin et al., 2020). However, simply designing for embodied activity does not suffice to promote students’ heterogeneous contributions. There is a need to evaluate how embodied learning spaces can promote equitable learning through affirming students’ diverse articulations of knowledge.
Theoretical Framework
We examine students’ articulations of ideas that emerge within a classroom participating in a series of embodied learning activities (Danish et al., 2020). We ground this work in Activity Theory (Engstrom, 1987) to analyze the activity system and its mediators that students take up in individual and collective representations of science ideas. We ask the following questions: What diverse articulations of knowledge emerge in a collective embodied learning environment and its accompanying supplementary activities? How might the supplementary activities build on the collective actions performed in the embodied space?
Method
This study took place in 2019 as part of the Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP; Danish et al., 2020) project in a small private school in the midwest. A mixed 1st and 2nd grade class of students (n=22) participated in two types of activities to learn about states of matter. One set of activities were collective embodied actions in the mixed reality STEP space, and the second set of activities built off of the first by encouraging individual expressions of their collective ideas through a variety of multimodal activities (see Table 1). We utilize Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to look at video data to see the heterogeneous articulations of ideas that emerge in these supplementary activities.
Results
Our analysis revealed that students created a range of unique articulations expressing their ideas surrounding particles when participating in supplementary activities. These articulations were unique reflections of prior collective embodiment performed in the STEP space. Within the collective space, negotiation of rules for creating embodied representations involved students in the STEP space being directed by observers and facilitators, limiting the kinds of movements deemed acceptable by the group. We found that the supplementary activities created chances for students to participate in novel ways and craft personal articulations of their thinking which were affirmed by their peers and facilitators.
Significance
Providing opportunities for students to share their individual reflections on collective activity can lead to a range of heterogeneous representations of knowledge that might serve to broaden participation and ways for students to contribute in learning spaces. When these articulations are performed in front of peers, it allows for students’ contributions to be affirmed and accepted. We hope to encourage researchers to think explicitly on how they might design for activity in embodied learning spaces so students feel they can authentically contribute their unique articulations of knowledge within a learning environment.

Authors

• Zachary D. Ryan, Indiana University

• Joshua Adam Danish, Indiana University

• Xintian Tu, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Bria Nichole Davis, Indiana University

• Mengxi Zhou, Indiana University

• Morgan A. Vickery, Indiana University