DPU

Aarhus Universitets segl

EMBodied EDucation (EMBED)

About the research unit

In the last four decades, we have been witnessing a turn in cognitive science, social sciences, and the humanities toward understanding learning, feeling and cognizing processes in general as situational embedded, embodied activities. For short: The turn toward enacted, embodied cognition. The EMBED unit harbors research focused on various aspects of embodiment with implications for learning, pedagogy and didactics.

Focus:

  • Embodied and enacted approaches to mind and learning, including radical enactivism
  • The (neo)phenomenological ‘embodied tradition’: impact on learning and pedagogical thinking
  • Implicit learning (impacts on didactics/implementations in educational settings (e.g. STEM)
  • Pragmatism (neo- and classical) – impacts on educational thinking
  • Representationalist accounts of the mental, e.g. metacognitive/higher-order models of consciousness and introspection
  • The functions of consciousness in relation to learning; learning as a precondition for consciousness

Work:

Discussions, presentations of papers and ideas at our (virtual) meetings every 5-6 weeks. Collaboration on publications and conference presentations. We are collectively represented at ECER in Yerevan 2022 and at the INPE conference at AU/DPU in Copenhagen 2022: https://conferences.au.dk/inpe2022 . A Ph.D. course 'Embodied Education. 4Es cognition and emotion in education, pedagogy and didactics' (with Prof. Shaun Gallagher, Memphis University) takes place autumn 2022, and a summer university course ‘Enacting Education’ has been developed and offered at AU. We expect to present collectively at EARLI in Thessaloniki 2023. Cooperation on applications for research funding takes place. A conference on embodied education in week 40 2023, hosted by AU/DPU is being  planned.

  • Camila Leporace, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • Dag Munk Lindemann, UCL University College, Denmark
  • Denis Francesconi, University of Vienna, Austria
  • Farida Youssef, The Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Egypt
  • Henri Pettersson, University of Oulu, Finland
  • Joanne Mun, Pusan National University, South Korea
  • Matthew CrippenPusan National University, South Korea & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
  • Menno van Calcar, Erasmus University, the Netherlands
  • Saeed Azadmanesh, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran
  • Sara Baroni, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
  • Tibor Solymosi, Susquehanna University, USA
  • Veli-Mikko Kauppi, University of Oulu, Finland