Embodied cognition: Enhancing thinking through movement and gesture

Christopher Tay, Headteacher, Longden CE Primary School and Nursery, Shropshire, UK; Visiting Lecturer in ITE, University of Chester, UK Embodied cognition (EC) includes a range of ideas, commonly bound by the understanding that the thinking cycle – perception/interpretation – occurs across the brain, body and environment. The role of gesture and movement in enhancing instruction is well documented (Jump, 2022), but EC represents a growing research programme that stretches beyond commonplace notions of embodiment, seeking to challenge the orthodox idea of the brain as a reflexive organ waiting for an incoming stream of information from the body and beyond. It offers a radical alternative to the traditional dualist notion of the mind–body split and standard cognition accounts of thinking as an input–computation–output process that occurs in a brain sealed off from the world by the sensory buffer (Shapiro, 2011). Thinking in EC terms is dynamic and concurs with current ideas o