Learning as Interactivity, Movement, Growth and Becoming, Volume 1

The contributions in this valuable two volume project elucidate a radical new approach to understanding human learning in all of its complexity; exposing its holistic quality that reaches beyond the neurophysical to embrace the true complexity of our sociocultural realities-past and present. It opens our horizons towards understanding how our own actions-reactions are shaped by deeply rooted decision-making processes formed over thousands of generations in the collective consciousness -ever since humanity began to produce culture some 3 million years ago.

Deborah Barsky, Researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES- CERCA) and assistant professor with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in the History and Art History Department at the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) in Tarragona (Spain)

The two volumes explain and develop research into distributed learning and the extended mind to explore how learning emerges in the sense-saturated interactivity between learners, teachers and the affordances of the learning situation. In doing so, they not only challenge many long-standing beliefs about the nature of learning processes, but also set out the groundwork for radically new methodologies and practices. The book is equally strong in theory and practicality. In the introductory chapter, the editors make the case for learning as an embodied yet interactive process of adaptation to the immediate demands of situated action and the emergent generalisation of these experiences as conceptual thinking within the extended human ecology. In the chapters that follow in Volume 1, these ideas are illustrated and developed through case studies of formal and informal learning contexts that not only serve to contextualise the theory within the lived experience of the reader, but also suggest a variety of means by which the ideas may be realised in practice. The volumes will prove inspirational both to theorists who are excited at having their ideas challenged and to teaching practitioners who are constantly seeking more effective means of stimulating their students’ learning and development.

Tom Bartlett, Professor of Functional and Applied Linguistics, University of Glasgow

King and Thibault have assembled a collection of works that breaks through our preconceived notions of how individuals learn. The two volumes are a must read for all who aim to advance knowledge through a profound transformation in the ways we work, live, and learn to ultimately add meaning to our lives. How can universities around the world prepare for a dynamic future that few of us can define? I would argue that the answer to this question is a socio-technical one, that lurks in the pages of the two volumes edited and authored, respectively, by King and Thibault. King and Thibault peek over-the-horizon into the changing technology landscape and shape our understanding of how the community of teachers and learners use that technology in their lived experience to reveal how we humans are meaning making beings.

Paul Bergey, Associate Professor & Director, Centre for Business Data Analytics, Business School, University of Western Australia

A highly original, valuable tome on the dynamics of learning ecologies in higher education that will undoubtedly be welcomed by the academic community, partially because of the scarcity books in international publishing providing a substantiated theory of learning at tertiary level. It will be especially appreciated by researchers and university teachers who can see beyond prevailing orthodoxies about learning in higher education, in terms of information transmission and content delivery, particularly because it provides empirical analysis of learning events showing why the process of learning is not adequately explainable as internal mental processes per se, but it is explainable through the interactivity or co-action of learners and university instructors, with the affordances of a distributed brain-body-environment learning system.

The editors of this brilliant collection (Vulume 1) had a fundamental role both in conceptualising this project about which we are enlightened through their well-written introduction, as well as in seeing it through to the end with a clearly articulated epilogue (Volume 2). Equally important that they inspired a group of outstanding authors from different disciplinary, discursive, and linguistic backgrounds working at higher education institutions in four different continents. Their chapters appearing in this volume contribute to developing the new construct articulated by the editors – the "Radical Embodied Educational Ecologies" for Learners and Teachers.

Bessie Dendrinos, Professor Emerita at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, President of the European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism, Director of its Cluster of University Research Units focusing on Multilingualism)

Against the well-worn grain of constructivist and behaviorist research in higher education, Mark E. King and Paul J. Thibault introduce in these two volumes a major new approach to theorizing teaching and learning. Drawing upon the latest research in embodied cognitive science, interactivity, ecological psychology, multi-modal event analysis, and distributed cognition and language, Learning as Interactivity, Movement, Growth, and Becoming

presents the "mind" of educational theory as not some "ghost in a machine," but as an integral part of the body. This cutting-edge version of scientific naturalism is then used to rethink our understanding of teaching and learning in higher education. The embodied educational ecologies presented here break new ground in the theoritization of teaching and learning, and radically challenge the mainstreams of teaching and learning theory in higher education. A stunning achievement!

Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston-Victoria author of

As behavioural science is demonstrating powerfully, the combination of psychological insights, systems thinking, and human evolution is a powerful cocktail that has caused a sea change in the understanding of our own species. In their two volumes, Mark King and Paul Thibault and the contributors authors apply this approach to education to great effect. Anyone interested in learning and teaching, as an education scholar, practitioner, or serious student, will benefit from the perspective of the learner as a psychological being embedded in and motivated by interconnections with others and technologies.

Robert Hoffman, Professor of Behavioural Economics, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania

Radical Embodied Educational Ecologies

A major academic achievement of these two volumes is the methodological approach called Radical Embodied Educational Ecologies. In fact, Mark King, Paul Thibault and their colleagues depart from the well-elaborated but constraining educational contexts into broader humanitarian ones. In so doing they actually transform their validated stance of Radical Embodied Educational Ecologies into something broader that may be called embodied learning ecologies very much akin to Baconian Advancement of Learning. They pointedly insist – "Learning is a self-organising process of sculpting a flow of endogenous process with no final pre-defined state (such as learning outcomes). Learning involves the parsing and the elimination of the irrelevant, the unimportant, the inappropriate, and the undesirable in processes of eliminative unlearning".

Multimodal Event Analysis

Another major methodological contribution of Mark King, Paul Thibault and their colleagues is Multimodal Event Analysis. It is an operational tool-kit for highly reliable and proficient intellectual work with cohesive phenomena that enable researchers and analysts to retain their integrity and entirety. Technically this methodology for studying human learning within distributed cognitive systems includes parallel multimodal analysis and interpretation of interactivity, as well as an array of eye-tracking techniques for investigating the co-synchronization of language behaviors and visual perception between persons in learning events.

Pragmatic importance

The pragmatic importance of the two volumes rests on its social relevance to major challenges of our times. Mark King and Paul Thibault quite pointedly note, that "the world is undergoing multiple and cascading crises that have been developing for the past few decades at least and which are only worsening". Their approach of radical embodied learning ecologies coupled with multimodal event analysis and other intellectual devices equip not only educators but academics and public at large to consciously and productively respond to the mounting challenges we confront now.

Mikhail Ilyin, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Politics and Governance, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Center for Advanced Methods of Social Studies and Humanities, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO)

These ground-breaking volumes reconceptualises learning by highlighting the multi-scalar inter-connectedness of learners with their complex ecological environments, with a focus on higher education. The empirical base of the studies in the two volumes is rich and diverse. And the theorisation is cutting-edge and radical. It will influence our thinking about learning and policy and practice in education for many years to come.

Professor Li Wei, Director and Dean, University College London, Institute of Education, London, England

These multi-perspectival volumes initiate a major theoretical and practical leap forward for those interested in the conjoined activities of teaching and learning. The robust conceptual framework described by King and Thibault, which is prismatically refracted throughout the following chapters in Volume 1, is that learning is catalyzed by interactivity among radically embodied agents who are haptically and semiotically entangled among ecologies of other people, artifacts, and social-material conditions. Volumes 1 and 2 together present a holistic and distributed reconceptualization of learning as emergent of dynamic relational ecologies. It situates human experience, sensation, and emotion at the center of learning/transformation/ growth. The conceptual framing and empirical examples are all centrally relevant for both researchers investigating learning and educators seeking to advance and deepen learning processes.

Steven L. Thorne, Professor in Department of World Languages and Literatures, Portland State University (USA), and Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Groningen (Netherlands)

In these important books, King and Thibault bring together a distinctive and original body of authors who offer a major contribution to how we can rethink learning and teaching in higher education. Backed up by sophisticated empirical methods using the tools of Cognitive Event Analysis, Interactivity, and Multimodal Event Analysis, the contributors to the first volume develop new methods and new theories for understanding the processes of learning and teaching. In the second volume, King and Thibault develop a new construct, Radical Embodied Educational Ecologies, to guide and frame new, positive ways of re-thinking education and its connections to skilled embodied activity as the key manifestation of human intelligence. This book is a major contribution to the high education debate. A must read for all who are concerned about the future of learning and teaching in Higher Education.

Beverley J Webster. Professor & Vice President (Education), Monash University Malaysia