Abstract Summary
To expand discussions of teaching and learning beyond classroom spaces, this talk describes instances of embodied and situated action in language learning interventions using mobile Augmented Reality (AR), the primary objective of which is to embed languaging events and resources in phenomenologically rich and embodied experience in the world.
Abstract :
Human development arises as a function of participation in, and contribution to, historically formed and dynamically emergent social, symbolic, and material ecologies of association. When viewed this way, learning of whatever kind cannot be clearly separated from social fields and processes, material conditions, and living bodies (Bourdieu, 1984). In this sense, humans are open systems and development involves an ‘ensemble’ process orchestrated along a brain-body-world continuum (e.g., Atkinson, 2010; Cowley & Steffensen, 2007; Spivey, 2007; Steffensen, 2013). An open systems approach is particularly relevant to understanding technology-mediated communicative and cognitive activity since the meditational means at hand transform the morphology of human action in ways that potentially enable and constrain developmental trajectories. To expand discussions of teaching and learning beyond classroom spaces, in this talk I describe instances of “learning in the wild” (borrowing from Hutchins, 1995; see also Thorne et al., 2015; Wagner, 2015), highlighting the relevance of embodied action and place in language learning interventions using mobile Augmented Reality (AR), the primary objective of which is to embed languaging events and resources in phenomenologically rich and embodied experience in the world (Hellermann, Thorne, & Fodor, 2017; Thorne et al., 2015; Thorne & Hellermann, 2017; Zheng et al., 2018). Our video analysis of language learners engaged in AR activity draws from multiple approaches (activity theory, the ‘distributed language view’ (Thibault, 2011), usage-based linguistics, multimodal ethnomethodology, posthumanism) and illustrates the achievement of ongoing co-action through visible embodied displays, the performance of new actions through coordinated (re)use of public semiotic resources (Goodwin, 2013), and perhaps controversially, the physical surround as actant in the sequential production of action in interaction.
