Learning beyond the body: from embodied representations to explicitation mediated by external representations / Aprender más allá del cuerpo: de las representaciones encarnadas a la explicitación mediada por representaciones externas

Abstract

A prevailing dualism in our culture led the psychology of learning to conceive, for decades, the mind as an amodal, abstract and arbitrary mechanism that manipulated symbols without content, at the same time that educational systems promoted symbolic knowledge, also devoid of content, meaning, context and emotion. The embodied cognition approach involves a new cognitive revolution that criticizes those assumptions, while defending an embodied mind that is implicit in nature, but also enactive, embedded and extended through cultural mechanisms. This paper assumes this approach, which requires a new design of learning environments that are based on that bodily experience, are situated and have strong emotional content. However, it also asserts that learning from the body will be insufficient if we cannot go beyond that, promoting the explicitation of these embodied and implicit representations through representational suppression, suspension and redescription processes mediated by different types of external representations. However, explicitation also requires implicitation processes, without which the incorporation of acquired knowledge into the embodied mind would not be possible.