TY - JOUR
T1 - Embodied Pathways and Ethical Trails
T2 - Studying Learning in and through Relational Histories
AU - Vossoughi, Shirin
AU - Jackson, Ava
AU - Chen, Suzanne
AU - Roldan, Wendy
AU - Escudé, Meg
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation [5256]; Spencer Foundation [SP0039818]. We would like to thank the following people for their support of these ideas and feedback on earlier drafts: Megan Bang, Joshua Danish, Frederick Erickson, Manuel Espinoza, Candy Goodwin, Erin Gutierrez, Rogers Hall, Walter Kitundu, Daniel Jin, Susan Jurow, Thomas Philip and Jim Spillane. We are especially grateful to the children and educators who served as partners in this work.
PY - 2020/3/14
Y1 - 2020/3/14
N2 - Studies of embodied cognition offer powerful accounts of the semiotic resources people use as they think together within different domains. Yet this research does not typically foreground the history of relationships within focal interactions—a history we have found to be consequential to the ways embodied actions unfold. Through ethnographic and interactional analysis of the assistance students received in a tinkering afterschool program and the forms of assistance they enacted over time, we show how children supported one another using embodied movements that were embedded in relational histories and imbued with pedagogical and ethical values. We substantiate these findings by introducing the range of embodied movements identified within the setting, followed by a detailed analysis of three cases spanning distinct time-scales (5 minutes, 1 week, 3 years). The cases help establish the construct of embodied pathways, which we define as courses of possible action involving participants’ bodies and voices that model particular relations. We argue that the experience of receiving embodied assistance creates resources for mediation in the future, as seen in subsequent acts of guidance and solidarity across children. More broadly, we argue for greater attention to how people learn to be in relation within research on embodied learning.
AB - Studies of embodied cognition offer powerful accounts of the semiotic resources people use as they think together within different domains. Yet this research does not typically foreground the history of relationships within focal interactions—a history we have found to be consequential to the ways embodied actions unfold. Through ethnographic and interactional analysis of the assistance students received in a tinkering afterschool program and the forms of assistance they enacted over time, we show how children supported one another using embodied movements that were embedded in relational histories and imbued with pedagogical and ethical values. We substantiate these findings by introducing the range of embodied movements identified within the setting, followed by a detailed analysis of three cases spanning distinct time-scales (5 minutes, 1 week, 3 years). The cases help establish the construct of embodied pathways, which we define as courses of possible action involving participants’ bodies and voices that model particular relations. We argue that the experience of receiving embodied assistance creates resources for mediation in the future, as seen in subsequent acts of guidance and solidarity across children. More broadly, we argue for greater attention to how people learn to be in relation within research on embodied learning.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85078018721&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85078018721&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/10508406.2019.1693380
DO - 10.1080/10508406.2019.1693380
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85078018721
VL - 29
SP - 183
EP - 223
JO - Journal of the Learning Sciences
JF - Journal of the Learning Sciences
SN - 1050-8406
IS - 2
ER -