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Enactive Metaphors: Learning Through Full-Body Engagement

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Abstract

Building on both cognitive semantics and enactivist approaches to cognition, we explore the concept of enactive metaphor and its implications for learning. Enactive approaches to cognition involve the idea that online sensory-motor and affective processes shape the way the perceiver-thinker experiences the world and interacts with others. Specifically, we argue for an approach to learning through whole-body engagement in a way that employs enactive metaphors. We summarize recent empirical studies that show enactive metaphors and whole-body involvement in virtual and mixed reality environments support and improve learning.

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Notes

  1. It is possible that some metaphors cannot be acted out and can only remain properly propositional. For example, “I feel like a million bucks.” Others can only work by acting them out; for example, if I pick up a banana and pretend it is a phone. This is, we suggest, a difference in what a concept may afford in regard to metaphor—a difference in what we can do, given the human body and the particular environment, rather than a difference in metaphor kind. This difference in affordance does not seem to depend on the level of abstractness of the concept. Some abstract concepts, like energy or mass, may be difficult to act out; others, like gravity, may be easier (see Enactive Metaphors in Learning Interventions).

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Acknowledgments

Research for this project was supported by the National Science Foundation Informal Science Education grant (DRL-1114621), entitled “Metaphor-Based Learning of Physics Concepts Through Whole-Body Interaction in a Mixed Reality Science Center Program.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, 331 Clement Hall, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA

    Shaun Gallagher

  2. Faculty of Law, Humanities and Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

    Shaun Gallagher

  3. Department of Curriculum, College of Education, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 394 Education Building, 1310 S. 6th St., Champaign, IL, 61820, USA

    Robb Lindgren

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  1. Shaun Gallagher
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Correspondence to Shaun Gallagher.

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Gallagher, S., Lindgren, R. Enactive Metaphors: Learning Through Full-Body Engagement. Educ Psychol Rev 27, 391–404 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-015-9327-1

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