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 were 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) took place autumn 2022, and a summer university course ‘Enacting Education’ was developed and offered at AU. Cooperation on applications for research funding takes place.

The first International conference on Embodied educaron, hosted by AU/DPU, organized by EMBED, was held in Copenhagen 2024. The second one also takes place in Copenhagen, June 2026: https://conferences.au.dk/embodied-education-2026

• 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
• Matthew Crippen, Pusan National University, South Korea & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
• Menno van Calcar, Erasmus University, the Netherlands
• Tibor Solymosi, Susquehanna University, USA
• Veli-Mikko Kauppi, University of Oulu, Finland
• Surya Pasupuleti, University of Lapland (visiting scholar)