In recent years, in cognitive psychology, we assist to a paradigm change from the so-called classical symbolic perspective, to situated, distributed and embodied views about cognition. These tenets significantly influenced the educational research and practice, and conducted to interesting developments. The situated nature of learning describes their embedded in a physical and social environment; which implies that the didactic contents and activities should be contextualized in real-world situations, and the learners should be involved in communities of practice. The distributed cognition perspective extends the domain of cognition from the interval between the sensorial input and the behavioral output, to the external (tools, learning materials, culture, society, etc.) and internal (body) environment, emerging from continuous mutual interactions.
Embodied cognition is a theory of mind in cognitive science, which assumes that cognition is a “bodily-grounded phenomenon” (Clark, 1997), resulting from a process of codetermination between the organism and its complex environment. The body is view as a basis for human thought and as a tool of communication and social interaction. A growing number of studies in the field suggest that mental representation, thinking, remembering, language comprehension and other higher-order cognitive processes, are shaped by the dynamics of various sensorimotor processes (sensations, perceptions, motor actions, bodily coordination, mental imagery, etc.). Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1987, 1990) argue that concept construction, as well as metaphoric construction, is based on a kind of second-order modeling of the physical world and relying on analogies (mapping processes) between abstract domains (target domains) and more concrete ones (source domains). The conceptual mapping is considered a higher level reasoning process which involves the ability to see similarities, relationships and structural systems. At an ultimate analysis, the source domains are closely related to our physical, biological and interactive body. Consequently, the core of the conceptual system is indirectly grounded in perception, physical movement or mental images.
In this paper we argue for the utility of a constructive model in teaching, where (1). The meaning of abstracts concepts is constructed from conceptual metaphors grounded in bodily experiences and coded in language - and (2). The conceptual understanding is view as an active process of analogical mapping and inductive inferences. The roles of grammar, ontology and peoples’ implicit theories are also discussed.
We present in the paper several applications of the model for teaching physics – classical mechanics - in high-school: the concepts of speed and acceleration in linear and circular motion and in different coordinate systems. We emphasize the implications of this perspective for curriculum development.