Assoc Professor Myrto Mavilidi
Faculty of Education
Southern Cross University
About
Associate Professor Myrto Mavilidi is an Australian Research Council Discovery (ARC) Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow in Educational Psychology and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. Myrto's research focuses on designing school-based movement-based interventions for children and adolescents to enhance cognitive, learning, and psychosocial outcomes. In 2022, she was named as one of the most productive early career scholars for 2015-2022 internationally in educational psychology (based on Fong et al., 2022_EPR). She has with a strong track record (> 80% of her publications in the top journals and external competitive funding received in Australia and internationally). She has received 6M AUD in external competitive funding. Myrto is a member of the American Sports Institute's International Board of Advisors.
Strand: Learning Through the Body
Embodied Learning as a Pedagogical Tool in Education: An Overview
This presentation will focus on understanding how embodied learning can be used as an effective pedagogical tool in school settings for different ages to support children’s learning and cognition. Starting from a short historical overview of the theoretical framework of “embodied cognition”, I will move to modern perspectives. I will also discuss how different fields from interdisciplinary research including education, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and public health conduct research on embodied cognition, and elaborate on the problematic use of inconsistent and diverse terminology across fields. Further, I will discuss the educational implications applied in preschool and schools and distinguish different types of embodied learning, including subtle or fine movements (e.g., gestures), to whole-body movements and their effects on academic and psychosocial outcomes. Lastly, I will move on describing where current research on embodied cognition sits, what are its current limitations, and what suggested future directions for research and practice could help to progress the field.