Metaphors Are Projected Constraints on Action: An Ecological Dynamics View on Learning Across the Disciplines

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: Learning Sciences SIG Poster Session

Abstract

Learning scientists are evaluating the validity and relevance of arguments from cognitive science and philosophy for the embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended nature of individual activity in sociocultural ecologies. Yet in so doing, we submit, the field stands to avail of theoretical models and pedagogical methodologies originating in disciplines oriented explicitly on understanding, fostering, and remediating motor action. This exploratory paper considers the potential value of ecological dynamics, a perspective originating in kinesiology, as an explanatory resource for tackling enduring LS research problems. We support our argument by reexamining the function of metaphor in the instruction of sports skills, somatic awareness, and mathematics. We propose a view of metaphors as constraints affecting the dynamic system of learner, teacher, and environment.

Authors

• Dor Abrahamson, University of California - Berkeley

• Raúl Sánchez-García, European University, Madrid

• Cliff Smyth, Saybrook University