Theories of embodiment offer challenges to educational research and practice in ways that could potentially both reveal and support processes of teaching and learning in populations otherwise underserved. In particular, we focus on the 2017 conference theme Making a Difference: Prioritizing Equity and Access in CSCL by sharing with the CSCL community our varied approaches for designing learning contexts that provide diverse students movement-based experiential entry points to STEM content. In our pursuit, we recognize that core content notions may initially emerge for students through participating in problem-solving activities that complement traditional verbal and symbol sign systems with corporeal–dynamical modalities. Drawing on our workshop participants’ research goals, we will facilitate activities oriented on grasping key ideas for theory, methods, and design.

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).