Beyond the body and external representations … the brain. A commentary on the article Learning beyond the body by Juan-Ignacio Pozo / Más allá del cuerpo y de las representaciones externas … el cerebro. Un comentario sobre el artículo Aprender más allá del cuerpo de Juan-Ignacio Pozo

My commentary is based on three matters derived from Ignacio Pozo’s article. First, I present my defence of the cognitive research that Pozo criticizes and characterizes as methodologically aseptic and disembodied. Second, I discuss my doubts regarding the author’s arguments on external representations overcoming the limitations of embodied cognition. Third, I examine the neuroscience perspective in order to clarify the representational debate.     

On the difficulties to resurrect the beyond. A commentary on the article Learning beyond the body by Juan-Ignacio Pozo / Sobre las dificultades para resucitar el más allá. Un comentario sobre el artículo Aprender más allá del cuerpo de Juan-Ignacio Pozo

This commentary follows Pozo’s critique of psychological theories rooted in the ‘cognitive revolution’ prompted by the emergence of computer technologies in the mid-twentieth century. The core of his criticism is the assumption of the mind/body dualism built in these theories. Pozo makes the case for an approach striving to integrate mind and body while postulating the notion of a basic incarnate mind, which grows beyond the restrictions of the body by mastering the symbolic formal systems of our culture. I argue that this vision smooths the mind/body dualism without overcoming it. I elaborate on four areas in which Pozo’s theory coincides with assumptions characteristic of the mind/body dualism: explicitness, formal notations, animal cognition and representations.     

From body to culture: the need for a developmental psychology view. A commentary on the article Learning beyond the body by Juan-Ignacio Pozo / Del cuerpo a la cultura: la necesidad de una mirada desde la psicología del desarrollo. Un comentario sobre el artículo Aprender más allá del cuerpo de Juan-Ignacio Pozo

The necessity of adopting a developmental perspective to understand the role that the body and action play in children’s representations is argued in proposals made by Pozo in his article Learning beyond the body: from embodied representations to explicitation mediated by external representations. The transformative power of action is valued from this developmental perspective, while at the same time revealing the close link between action, cognition and communication. Similarly, the explicitation and implicitation processes are considered to be recurrent phases that occur in any stage of development, applied to embodied knowledge as well as to more elaborate and explicit knowledge.     

Más allá de las representaciones mentales: la adquisición de los sistemas externos de representación

Resumen

En el presente artículo se defiende la idea de que los sistemas externos de representación (como la escritura, el sistema numérico o los mapas) constituyen un dominio de conocimiento propio, bien diferenciado de las representaciones internas, objeto de estudio clásico de la psicología. El análisis de las características propias de estos sistemas externos de representación así como la revisión de las principales pautas de su adquisición permiten justificar la tesis defendida.     

Beyond the tools: analysing personal and group learning environments in a university course / Más allá de la tecnología: análisis de los entornos de aprendizaje personales y grupales de estudiantes en una asignatura universitaria

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of a naturalistic study carried out with higher education students which describes their learning environments when working on academic tasks in groups and individually. In this study we want to analyse how they organize their learning activities and knowledge processes (reading, reflecting and sharing) and how these learning processes are integrated into their Personal Learning Environments (PLE). In order to achieve that, students had to reflect about the basic ‘components’ that make up their learning process: reading (using not only by text but also multimedia), doing/reflecting (creating cognitive artefacts) and sharing (discussing, showing, and offering and receiving feedback from and to a community of reference). Students formed relationships between those components and any technological tools they used and created mind maps to represent their PLEs. The main objective is to try to understand how PLEs are organized and how they are perceived by learners, not from a technological perspective but from a learning perspective. The main results confirm the strong nature of PLEs as a pedagogical approach with a strong technological base. In addition, those results suggest a close relationship between students’ beliefs and expectations regarding academic tasks as well as the importance they give to each component in their learning process.