Engagement in Motion: How the Body Mediates Social and Emotional Engagement With Science Learning

Abstract

This paper investigates sociocultural perspectives on what it means for students to be engaged with learning, paying special attention to the ways that an embodied cognition perspective shifts how we conceptualize the relationship between engagement and learning. The analysis focuses on the Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) project, where young children use their bodies to model the motion of water particles in a mixed-reality system. Video data was coded for cognitive engagement with various scientific ideas about states of matter, and interaction analysis (IA) was used to explore the socioemotional dynamics of classroom interactions that supported and/or hindered this cognitive engagement. The analysis highlights key aspects of young learners’ social and emotional engagement that can inform how designers of embodied learning environments leverage the body as a representational tool.