From STEM to STEAM: An Enactive and Ecological Continuum

STEM and STEAM education promotes the integration between science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and the arts. The latter aims at favoring deep and collaborative learning on students, through curricular integration in K-12 science education. The enactive and ecological psychology approach to education puts attention on the role of the teacher, learning context and socio-cultural environment in shaping lived learning experiences. The approach describes education as a process of embodied cognitive assemblage of guided perception and action. The latter process depends on the interaction of learners with digital and/or analogue learning affordances existing within the socio-technological environment. This article proposes that the scope of an enactive-ecological approach can be extended to the domain of learning science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM), especially when it comes to understanding deep roots of the learning process. We first present an exhaustive literature review regarding the foundations of both the enactive and the ecological learning theories, along with their differences and key similarities. We then describe the fundamentals and latest research advances of an integrated STEAM pedagogy, followed by the notion of mixed reality (XR) as an emerging educational technology approach, offering an understanding of its current foundations and general disposition on how to understand digital immersion from ecological psychology. Next, we propose a systems theoretical approach to integrate the enactive-ecological approach in STEAM pedagogy, framed in the Santiago school of cognition attending to the interactive dynamics occurring between learners and their interaction with learning affordances existing within their educational medium, establishing that sensorimotor contingencies and attentional anchors are important to restrict sensory variety and stabilize learning concepts. Finally, we consider two empirical studies, one from Chile and the other from New Zealand, in which we demonstrate how the enactive-ecological approach built upon a systems theory perspective can contribute to understanding the roots of STEAM learning and inform its learning design.

Multi-Scopic Neuro-Cognitive Adaptation for Legged Locomotion Robots

Dynamic locomotion is realized through a simultaneous integration of adaptability and optimality. This article proposes a neuro-cognitive model for multi-legged locomotion robot that can seamlessly integrate multi-modal sensing, ecological perception, and cognition through the coordination of interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory information. Importantly, cognitive models can be discussed as micro-, meso-, and macro-scopic; these concepts correspond to sensing, perception, and cognition; and short-, medium-, and long-term adaptation (in terms of ecological psychology). The proposed neuro-cognitive model integrates these intelligent functions from a multi-scopic point of view. Macroscopic-level presents an attention mechanism with short-term adaptive locomotion control conducted by lower-level sensorimotor coordination-based model. Macrosopic-level serves environmental cognitive map featuring higher-level behavior planning. Mesoscopic level shows integration between the microscopic and macroscopic approaches, enabling the model to reconstruct a map and conduct localization using bottom-up facial environmental information and top-down map information, generating intention towards the ultimate goal at the macroscopic level. The experiments demonstrated that adaptability and optimality of multi-legged locomotion could be achieved using the proposed multi-scale neuro-cognitive model, from short to long-term adaptation, with efficient computational usage. Future research directions can be implemented not only in robotics contexts but also in the context of interdisciplinary studies incorporating cognitive science and ecological psychology.

Designed to Seduce

Up to 70% of all watch time on YouTube is due to the suggested content of its recommender system. This system has been found, by virtue of its design, to be promoting conspiratorial content. In this paper, the author firstly critiques the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, showing it to be philosophically untenable. This means that technological artefacts can influence what people come to value (or perhaps even embody values themselves) and change the moral evaluation of an action. Secondly, he introduces the concept of an affordance, borrowed from the literature on ecological psychology. This concept allows him to make salient how technologies come to solicit certain kinds of actions from users, making such actions more or less likely, and in this way influencing the kinds of things one comes to value. Thirdly, he critically assesses the results of a study by Alfano et al. He makes use of the literature on affordances, introduced earlier, to shed light on how these technological systems come to mediate our perception of the world and influence action.

Neither mindful nor mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance

A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent's conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them.

Ecological Mechanistic Research and Modelling

There is a recent literature in philosophy that is about developing a taxonomy of scientific explanations for phenomena, the kinds of models we use, and the research programmes that produce the explanations and models. Roughly, there are two basic research programmes. The first programme takes some capacity of a system, and maps out how it works by breaking it down into various sub-capacities, each with their own distinct characteristics. The end goal is a functional model, a ‘how-possibly’ box-and-arrow type explanation of how a capacity such as memory is organised. The second programme instead focuses on analytically decomposing a proposed mechanism that produces a phenomena into real parts and processes. Empirical work focuses on establishing that the proposed parts are part of the actual mechanism being modelled, and localising where those parts live and how they contribute to implementing the phenomena. The end goal is a dynamical mechanistic model, a ‘how-actually’ explanation in which each model part explicitly represents the dynamics of a real part or process. Mechanistic models, when they are possible to develop, are considered to be the best form of explanation of a phenomena.Ecological psychology has, so far, widely resisted becoming a mechanistic science. This is in part due to our objections to mechanistic, Cartesian ontologies, and more recently because it’s not clear we can meaningfully decompose the systems we study in order to develop such models. I will argue here that both of these concerns are unfounded, that ecological psychology is actually perfectly capable of developing mechanistic models, and that therefore we should do so, in order to gain the benefits.

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ФОРМУВАННЯ ЕКОЛОГІЧНОЇ СВІДОМОСТІ ПІДЛІТКА ЗАСОБАМИ СОЦІАЛЬНИХ МЕДІА

В статті теоретично й емпірично досліджується вплив сучасних соціальних медіа на формування і розвиток екологічної свідомості підлітка. Розглянуто зміст понять «екологічна свідомість», «соціальні медіа», «екологічна криза». Виокремлено фактори, що впливають на якість публікацій у соціальних мереж і екологізацію соціальних мереж. Встановлено необхідність в екологізації сучасної медіа-освіти, її стійкому розвитку та оновленні у відповідності до вимог сьогодення суспільства і довкілля. Нами було проведено емпіричне дослідження екологічної свідомості, в якому взяли участь учні загальноосвітнього навчального закладу – Гончарівської гімназії Чернігівсього району, Чернігівської області (n=60). В дослідженні було використано такі методи дослідження: контент-аналіз, методика «ЕЗОП» та бланк «Натурафіл». Підібраний банк методик дозволив нам оцінити рівень розвитку екологічної свідомості особистості школяра, що допоможе виокремити пріоритетні напрямки роботи з ними в медіапросторі. За результатами проведеного дослідження та за допомогою контент-аналізу соціальних мереж підлітків, що дало змогу виокремити основну проблематику у взаємодії людини і природи, встановлено, що в середньому близько 18% обстежуваних продемонстрували низький рівень розвитку екологічної свідомості, що характеризується зневажливим і споживчим ставленням дитини до природи. Близько 35% мають найбільш сформоване естетичне й прагматичне ставлення до природи, інакше кажучи, вони сприймають її як «красиву та корисну». Лише 16% респондентів мають задовільний рівень екологічної свідомості, що характеризується тим, що підліток сприймає природу як джерело знань і майбутнього. Перспективи подальших досліджень вбачаємо у теоретичному та емпіричному вивченні стану розвитку екологічної свідомості у підлітків і можливих шляхів його покращення. Література Андрєєв, А.С. (2009). Психологічні аспекти екологічних проблем й екопсихологічні тренінги. Екологічна психологія: Збірник наукових праць інституту психології ім. Г.С. Костюка АПН України, 7(19), 18–23. Гирусов, Э.В. (1983). Экологическое сознание как условие оптимизации общества и природы. Философские проблемы глобальной экологии, 145–153. Євдокимова, Т.О. (2007). Розвиток екологічної свідомості підлітків – учасників скаутського руху. (Дис. канд. псих. наук). Київ. Кулик, Т.М. (2013). Системно-динамічні особливості розвитку екологічної свідомості студентів. (Дис. канд. псих. наук). Луцьк. Лисенко, Т.М. (2013). Особливості екологічної свідомості у студентів. Вісник Харківського національного педагогічного університету імені Г.С. Сковороди. Психологія, 46(1), 102–108. Пономаренко, Т. (2019). Особливості побудови зворотного зв’язку в онлайн комунікації психолога при груповій взаємодії. Науковий часопис НПУ імені М.П. Драгоманова. Серія № 12. Психологічні науки, 8(53), 66–75. Скребець, В.О. (2006). Екологічна свідомість: визначення поняття змісту і форм прояву. Екологічна психологія. Київ : Стакер. Barker, R.G. (1968). Ecological psychology: Concept and methods for studying the environment of human behavior. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press.

Artifacts and affordances: from designed properties to possibilities for action

In this paper I critically evaluate the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, and find it wanting. I then introduce the various ways in which artifacts can come to influence moral value, and our evaluation of moral situations and actions. Here, following van de Poel and Kroes, I introduce the idea of value sensitive design. Specifically, I show how by virtue of their designed properties, artifacts may come to embody values. Such accounts, however, have several shortcomings. In agreement with Michael Klenk, I raise epistemic and metaphysical issues with respect to designed properties embodying value. The concept of an affordance, borrowed from ecological psychology, provides a more philosophically fruitful grounding to the potential way(s) in which artifacts might embody values. This is due to the way in which it incorporates key insights from perception more generally, and how we go about determining possibilities for action in our environment specifically. The affordance account as it is presented by Klenk, however, is insufficient. I therefore argue that we understand affordances based on whether they are meaningful, and, secondly, that we grade them based on their force.