Paper presented at the 1st annual meeting of Movement: Brain, Body, Cognition, Oxford, UK, July 9-11.
Both ethnographic and neuroscientific research suggest that physicists solve problems by engaging in imaginary sensorimotor simulation of phenomena under inquiry. However, how this finding might inform high-school instructional practice is yet unknown. As educational researchers who are inspired by embodiment theory, we are investigating the potential roles that students’ choreographed physical movements in classroom space play in learning physics concepts related to motion. Here we focus on two case studies of high-school students whose summative projects for an instructional unit involving movement-based problem solving manifested deep conceptual and affective relations with the subject matter. Through qualitative analyses we attempt to build a coherent narrative of the subjective processes that led to these results.