SCIENTIFIC LEARNING PROGRESSION THROUGH GESTURE AND PLACE USING THREE FACETS OF EMBODIED COGNITION

Students learning complex spatial and temporal geologic concepts often incorporate gestures into their descriptions and explanations. These gestures are a manifestation of a student’s cognitive processes, and can therefore lend insight into students’ learning patterns and behavior. When a student uses a gesture to reference a tangible object, aspect, or space within their physical environment, this is an example of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is the viewpoint that much of a person’s cognitive processes stem from their interaction with their physical surroundings. Cognitive processes such as perception, sensorimotor functions, information processing, and communication are closely tied to how we interpret and interact with our surroundings. Wilson (2002) describes several facets of embodied cognition, including: 1) a person’s cognition is situated directly within the environment, 2) people off-load cognition into our environment, and 3) when removed from the environment (are “off-line”), their cognition associated with the environment remains body-based.

We observed geology students at a traditional geologic field camp while they worked on projects including mapping of faulted and folded rocks, stratigraphy, paleocurrent analysis, etc. We present examples of the three aforementioned facets of embodied cognition using the gesture nomenclature described by Van Boening & Riggs (2020). For example, when a student points to, traces, or mimics a geologic feature or area they observe in the field, they are exhibiting an understanding of their placement within the environment and the placement of the physical attribute being observed. As students move from observation to interpretation, they may begin to “off-load” information via gestures that mimic their surroundings in order to work through more complex spatial-temporal ideas to explain their surroundings. When students are removed from the field setting and asked to describe features or outcrops, they will often use gestures to recall, construct, recreate what they observed and interpreted in the field. These three facets of embodied cognition lend us insight into how students progress from observation to interpretation, scaffold their ideas, and build conceptual models through the use of gestures in both field and non-field settings. This insight may help educators to gage the accuracy and completeness of student learning.