Christine Lee’s research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places

This paper investigates affect as part of children's sensemaking in the context of a play‐based mixed‐reality science learning environment. We build on theories of affect as disciplinary work by investigating the multiple layers of affect that are essential to children's scientific inquiry and to identify pedagogical moves that recognize, value, and build on this affect as integral to learning. Findings encourage educators to affirm children's dignities as scientific inquirers by validating children's diverse and affective resources in the learning process.

In inquiry-based science lessons teachers face the challenge of adhering to curricular goals while simultaneously following students’ intuitive understandings. Improvisation (improv) provides a useful frame for understanding teaching in these inquiry-based contexts. This paper builds from prior work that uses improv as a metaphor for teaching to present a translated model for analysis of teaching in an inquiry-based, elementary school science lesson context. We call our model instructional improv, which shows how a teacher spontaneously synthesizes rules of improv with teaching practices to support student learning, engagement, and agency. We illustrate instructional improv through case study analysis of video recorded classroom interactions with one teacher and 26 first and second grade students learning about the complex system of honey bee pollination in a mixed reality environment. Our model includes the following defining features to describe how teaching happens in this context: the teacher 1) tells a story ; 2) reframes mistakes as opportunities ; 3) agrees ; 4) yes ands ; 5) makes statements (or asks questions that elicit statements) ; and 6) puts the needs of the classroom ensemble over individuals . Overall, we show how instructional improv helps explain how teachers can support science discourse and collective storytelling as a teacher (a) shifts power and agency to students; (b) balances learning and agency; and (c) makes purposeful instructional decisions. Findings have immediate implications for researchers analyzing interactions in inquiry-based learning environments and potential future implications for teachers to support inquiry learning.

While research on embodied learning sheds light on the body’s role during science learning, there is a lack of understanding of how the body is drawn upon in subsequent learning interactions. We seek to understand how the body supports cognition and learning during and after embodiment. We elaborate upon the liminal blends framework (Enyedy, N., Danish, J. A., & DeLiema, D. (2015). Constructing liminal blends in a collaborative augmented-reality learning environment. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 10(1), 7–34.) to understand how many resources are taken up, blended together, and progressively refined towards canonical scientific understanding. By tracing the body, we demonstrate that embodied experiences are never ‘erased.’ Instead, although students find ways to articulate understanding that do not require movement, they nonetheless derive meaning from prior embodied activity. Young children exceed expected grade level understanding in part because their capability as embodied reasoners is privileged for learning. In addition to expanding liminal blends theory, we suggest implications for designing technology-enhanced environments and science learning. Across all audiences, findings suggest the importance of privileging an array of sensemaking resources often excluded from classrooms, and the importance of students mapping multiple representational forms to develop conceptual understanding of science phenomena

This symposium offers considerations for designing playful mathematics learning environments by synthesizing empirical research across four contexts that differ in location, formality, timescale, materials, facilitation, and participation structures. Despite the importance of play across the lifespan, mathematics classrooms are often spaces students feel a void of agency and enjoyment. This has strong implications for students' sense of competence and their identities as individuals who participate in and enjoy mathematics. Thus, designing playful environments where children enjoy and participate in mathematics as a form of meaning making is a critical issue for equity in education. By putting these four studies in conversation with one another, we hope to develop a refined understanding of how particular design decisions influence learner engagement in mathematics, with an eye towards making mathematical play more accessible both in and out of school.

Inspired by the current embodiment turn in the cognitive sciences, researchers of STEM teaching and learning have been evaluating implications of this turn for educational theory and practice. But whereas design researchers have been developing domain-specific theories that implicate the role of physical movement in conceptual learning, the field has yet to agree on a conceptually coherent and empirically validated framework for leveraging and shaping students' capacity for physical movement as a socio-cognitive educational resource. This symposium thus convenes to ask, "What is movement in relation to concepts such that we can design for learning?" To stimulate discussion, we highlight an emerging tension across a set of innovative technological designs with respect to the framing question of whether students should discover an activity's targeted movement forms themselves or that these forms should be cued directly. Our content domains span mathematics (proportions, geometry), physics, chemistry, and ecological system dynamics (predator-prey, bees).

Beginning from the assumption that young children (ages 6-8) are capable of reasoning about complex phenomena [12], we set out to better understand dimensions of the Science through Technology Enhanced Play environment that provided support for children to learn about relationships between multiple levels of an emergent phenomenon [23] states of matter. We conducted interactional analysis [15] of several moments in two classrooms as students developed and refined understanding of rules that connect micro behavior of particles of water to macro understanding about states of matter. We argue that central to students' disciplinary work were (1) multiple forms of agency negotiated within the STEP environment that were deeply intertwined with (2) students' embodiment. Agency and embodiment both supported students' consensus understanding of relationships between levels of the states of matter phenomenon (3) through students' joyful and playful collaborative work. We examine several episodes in detail to explore these findings.