Abstract

Gesture is recognized as part of and integral to cognition. The value of gesture for learning is contingent on how it gathers meaning against the ground of other relevant resources in the setting—in short, how the body is laminated onto the surrounding environment. With a focus on lamination, this paper formulates an integrated theory of viewpoint and spatial reasoning; develops an embodied approach to documenting and understanding the live construction of students’ spatial models; and offers new implications for the teaching of spatially complex concepts. We start with a study of how undergraduate students playfully gesture the first-person movements of components of an engineering system, step out to depict how the system appears from the outside, and all the while track how the components of the system spatially interact in the open canvas of empty space around the body. Students who manage all three—switching from character viewpoints to observer viewpoints while maintaining a coherent organization of space—better learn the engineering concept. We then examine this process in the unscripted discourse of a classroom of 1^st and 2^nd graders pretend-playing as bees. This second study extends the analysis of interactions between spatial reasoning and viewpoint into unplanned teacher-student discourse (including adjustments in talk and action over time) and a materially rich setting. In all, the paper formulates an embodied learning framework that integrates viewpoint and spatial reasoning with implications for learning design.

摘要

手势被认为是认知的一部分和不可或缺的一部分。学习手势的价值取决于它如何根据环境中的其他相关资源收集意义——简而言之，身体如何被贴合到周围环境中。本文以分层为重点，提出了观点和空间推理的综合理论；开发一种具体的方法来记录和理解学生空间模型的实时构建；并为空间复杂概念的教学提供了新的意义。我们从研究本科生如何玩弄工程系统组件的第一人称运动开始，走出去描绘系统如何从外部出现，并一直跟踪系统的组件如何在身体周围空白空间的开放画布中进行空间交互。管理所有三个方面的学生——从角色视角切换到观察者视角，同时保持空间的连贯组织——更好地学习工程概念。然后，我们在一个有 1 人的教室的无脚本话语中检查这个过程。^ST和2^个年级学生假装扮演的蜜蜂。第二项研究将空间推理和观点之间的相互作用分析扩展到计划外的师生对话（包括随着时间的推移对谈话和行动的调整）和物质丰富的环境。总之，本文制定了一个具体的学习框架，将观点和空间推理与对学习设计的影响相结合。