Science classrooms have ignored the body—and it's harming learning
A new analysis reveals that science education has overlooked how students learn through physical experience and embodied engagement with materials. Researchers argue this oversight undermines effective teaching and call for rethinking curriculum design to integrate hands-on, body-centered learning approaches that could improve student outcomes and retention.
Originaltitel: What Is the Role of the Body in Science Education? A Conversation Between Traditions
<p>Bodily engagement with the material and sociocultural world is ubiquitous in doing and learning science. However, science education researchers have often tended to emphasize the disembodied and nonmaterial aspects of science learning, thereby overlooking the crucial role of the body in meaning-making processes. While in recent years we have seen a turn towards embracing embodied perspectives, there persist considerable theoretical and methodological differences within research on embodiment in science education that hamper productive discourse. What is needed is a careful examination of how different traditions and disciplines, among them philosophy, social semiotics, and cognitive science, bear on embodiment in science education research. This paper aims to explore and articulate the differences and convergences of embodied perspectives in science education research in the form of a dialogue between three fictitious personas that stand for the cognitive, social-interactionist, and phenomenological research traditions. By bringing these traditions into dialogue, we aim to better position the role of the body in the science education research landscape. In doing so, we take essential steps towards unifying terminology across different research traditions and further exploring the implications of embodiment for science education research. </p>