Exploring Enactivism as a Networked Learning Paradigm for the Use of Digital Learning Platforms

This paper takes a step towards a complex understanding of technologies in education and explores enactivism, a cognitive science and philosophy of mind related to the networked learning paradigm. Rooted in biology and phenomenology, with resonances in recent feminist poststructuralism, enactivism contrasts dualistic approaches and focuses on the intertwined multiple interactions between mind, body, and the environment. By considering cognition as situated and embodied, enactivism understands learning as the process of knowing, where experience can generate change. The paper explores the pedagogical implications of this theoretical framework by drawing on empirical evidence from the implementation of a digital learning platform in Danish schools. Two participatory workshops with teachers were organized to understand enactive modelling, considering embodied and situated aspects of the relations between the participants and the digital learning environment. Findings show that the platform implementation takes place in an ecological networked learning system, where imagination and new possibilities arise from the meeting of humans, non-humans, things, and societal entities. In an enactive perspective, this is explained by the fact that different embodiments and sense-making processes give rise to unique worlds and multiple possibilities of becoming.