Wolff-Michael Roth

SungWon Hwang

This book is about the sensuous, living body without which individual knowing and learning is impossible. It is the interface between the individual and culture. Recent scholarship has moved from investigated knowing and learning as something in the mind or brain to understanding these phenomena in terms of the body (embodiment literature) or culture (social constructivism). These two literatures have expanded the understanding of cognition to include the role of the body in shaping the mind and to recognize the tight relation between mind and culture. However, there are numerous problems arising from ways in which the body and culture are thought in these separate research domains. In this book, the authors present an interdisciplinary, scientific initiative that brings together the concerns for body and for culture to develop a single theory of cognition centered on the living and lived body. This book thereby contributes to bridging the gap that currently exists between theory (knowing that) and praxis (knowing how) that is apparent in the existing science and mathematics education literatures.

The Interface of Culture and Mind

Scientific & Mathematical Bodies

Wolfgang M Roth

Maria I Goulart

Yew Jin Lee

Over the past two decades, western scholars increasingly have embraced cultural-historical activity theory as a framework for thinking about knowing and learning in school and workplace settings. Yet in the adoption of this framework, many of its fundamental underpinnings in materialist dialectic have dis-appeared. Cultural-historical activity theory has been fitted to a fundamentally dualistic way of thinking the subject and object of activity, individual and collective, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, abstract and concrete, etc. This book redresses the inappropriate translation by radically sticking to a materialist-dialectical theorizing of knowing, learning, participation, and identity. The authors draw on several detailed ethnographic studies at the kindergarten, elementary school, and middle school levels and in a workplace as case materials to articulate various aspects of the specifically human activity observed in each setting. Wolff-Michael Roth is Lansdowne Professor of applied cognitive science at the University of Victoria (UVic) and director of the CHAT@UVic laboratory concerned with the investigation of knowing and learning in science and mathematics across the lifespan. SungWon Hwang is postdoctoral fellow at UVic studying embodied cognition. Yew Jin Lee is a Ph.D. candidate at UVic focusing on workplace learning. Maria Inês Mafra Goulart is a Ph.D. candidate investigating science learning in kindergarten schools.

SungWon Hwang

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