ABSTRACT
In “The Birth of a Word,” Deb Roy tracks the first word spoken by his son as a toddler. What is remarkable about Roy’s research is that it captures in image, in sound, and through representation and schematics how learning is situated
in real-world embodied interactions. The son is listening and taking in language, but he is also acting within the environment through all of his physical senses-the types of embodied learning we referred to in Chapter 4. In fact, scientists know that before we are born we are listening, because unborn babies respond to a mother’s voice. So even before Roy’s son was born, this little guy was listening in! Another way to think of this is in the parlance of John Dewey (1896), who noted that organisms do not just take in information and respond (the old stimulus-response theory of learning). Dewey observed that there is a transactional space surrounding any organism; this space encompasses the environment-organism transaction. To put this in less academic terms, in Roy’s video we see a young child and the environment surrounding that child. The child learns through interaction with the environment and with others within that environment-that is, in the transactional space between child and environment.
