Body of Knowledge: The Role of Embodiment in Science Education

The duality of science – its reach for the abstract while remaining anchored in the concrete – sets the stage for why science and science education, by extension, is a crucial arena for embodied cognition. Indeed, science education research is ideally suited to test theoretical claims about the embodied underpinnings of cognition empirically. In this talk, I present an overview of how the body bears on science learning. To illustrate these overarching perspectives, I draw on case studies in modern physics to discuss how embodiment enables and restricts the abilities of learners to think scientifically.