ABSTRACT
Education from an embodied learning perspective rejects this notion. It highlights the ways that direct experiences are meaningful to learners, while learners struggle to make meaning from formal descriptions of those experiences. Learning to use and produce formalisms is a vitally important skill because of their value for representing ideas, patterns, and relationships that people already understand, and for participating in disciplinary discourse. Scientific theories are another type of formalism that can be a barrier to meaning and learning. Students often misinterpret the expression in ways that seem to be fueled by their common understanding of what literal symbols mean. Left frame shows the most concrete, physical form of the equivalency relations. The explicit nature of the mapping from the physical instantiation to the iconic instantiation is a key feature of the instructional approach, because this helps to shift the meaning from the concrete and embodied form so that it carries over to the slightly more idealized form.
