Welcoming their scholarly focus on metaphorizing, I critique Díaz-Rojas, Soto-Andrade and Videla-Reyes's selection of the hypothetical constructs “conceptual metaphor” and “enactive metaphor” as guiding the epistemological positioning, educational design, and analytic interpretation of interactive mathematics education purporting to operationalize enactivist theory of cognition - both these constructs, I argue, are incompatible with enactivism. Instead, I draw on ecological dynamics to promote a view of metaphors as projected constraints on action, and I explain how mathematical concepts can be grounded in perceptual reorganization of motor coordination. I end with a note on how metaphors may take us astray and why that, too, is worthwhile.

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature. Whereas some educational designers believe that students should learn new concepts through explorative problem solving within dedicated environments that constrain key parameters of their search and then support their progressive appropriation of empowering disciplinary forms, others are critical of the ultimate efficacy of this discovery-based pedagogical philosophy, citing an inherent structural challenge of students constructing historically achieved conceptual structures from their ingenuous notions. This special issue presents six educational research projects that, while adhering to principles of discovery-based learning, are motivated by complementary philosophical stances and theoretical constructs. The editorial introduction frames the set of projects as collectively exemplifying the viability and breadth of discovery-based learning, even as these projects: (a) put to work a span of design heuristics, such as productive failure, surfacing implicit know-how, playing epistemic games, problem posing, or participatory simulation activities; (b) vary in their target content and skills, including building electric circuits, solving algebra problems, driving safely in traffic jams, and performing martial-arts maneuvers; and (c) employ different media, such as interactive computer-based modules for constructing models of scientific phenomena or mathematical problem situations, networked classroom collective “video games,” and intercorporeal master–student training practices. The authors of these papers consider the potential generativity of their design heuristics across domains and contexts.

We examine expert human mathematics-tutor gestures in the context of an interactive design for proportionality in order to design a virtual pedagogical agent. Early results implicate distinct gesture morphologies serving consistent contextual functionalities in guiding learners towards quantitative descriptions of proportional relations.

Learning scientists have been considering the validity and relevance of arguments coming from philosophy and cognitive science for the embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended nature of individual learning, reasoning, and practice in sociocultural ecologies. Specifically, some design-based researchers of STEM cognition and instruction have been evaluating activities for grounding subject content knowledge in interactive sensorimotor problem solving. In so doing, we submit, the field stands greatly to avail of theoretical models and pedagogical methodologies from disciplines oriented explicitly on understanding, fostering, and remediating motor action. This conceptual paper considers potential values of ecological dynamics, a perspective originating in kinesiology, as an explanatory resource for tackling enduring Learning Sciences research problems. We support our position via an ecologicaldynamics reexamination of the function of metaphor in the instruction of sports skills, somatic awareness, and mathematics. We propose a view of metaphors as productive constraints reconfiguring the dynamic system of learner, teacher, and environment.

The core of human connection is embodied action, with synchrony, coordinated movement, and affective attunement through the body present from infancy. Yet whereas all students have the capacity for co-presence, a common focus of formal educational institutions on spoken language for interaction makes communication inaccessible to some students, thus impeding their participation in learning. As such, toward providing resources for nonverbal autistic students we must ask: How do we design for inclusive social participation of students with diverse interactional modalities? This paper outlines the development of an embodied-design solution that centers the dynamic body as the nexus of social interaction, thus reclaiming the natural versatility of multimodal interpersonal communication. The Magical Musical Mat is a domain-general platform that allows people to interact through the non-speaking modalities of touch and sound. It removes interactional asymmetry between diverse interlocutors and surfaces the basic human need and capacity to connect with one another, in school and beyond.

Little is known about the collaborative learning processes of interdisciplinary teams designing technology-enabled immersive learning systems. In this conceptual paper, we reflect on the role of digitally captured embodied performances as boundary objects within our heterogeneous two-team collective of learning scientists and computer scientists as we design an embodied, animated virtual tutor embedded in a physically immersive mathematics learning system. Beyond just a communicative resource, we demonstrate how these digitized, embodied performances constitute a powerful mode for both inter- and intra-team learning and innovation. Our work illustrates the utility of mobilizing the material conditions of learning.

In this preliminary report, we propose a previously unidentified role that instructors’ gestures may play in helping students evaluate existing computer code. We find that instructors use gesture to animate processes encoded in the static inscriptions of computer programs in order to make invisible, dynamic phenomena perceptible to students. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the embodied instructional work of teaching programming.