Why Every Teacher Should Know About Ecological Psychology! A Conversation with Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Vicente Raja

Future Learning Design Podcast

As educators, a great deal of our understandings of what learning is has been dominated by behaviourist (check out previous episode with Carol Sanford) and cognitivist ideas, but what if our decisions about how we design learning environments, and think about pedagogy and curriculum had taken in ecological insights of Eleanor Gibson and James Gibson and the branch of psychology known as ecological psychology. So few educators know that such a sub-discipline even exists!

Rather than individual students's brains neatly arranged in rows in intentionally informationally impoverished learning environments to compute information and construct meaning in a meaningless world out there, we might have young people as object-environment systems moving around and exploring informationally rich environments to fine-tune their action-perception through multi-sensory relating to the ecologies that they participate in! Sounds like a pretty different world!

This episode welcomes Miguel Segundo-Ortín and Vicente Raja, post-doctoral researchers at the MINT Lab, and research fellows at University of Murcia, Spain. Together, they are the authors of the book Ecological Psychology (Cambridge Elements, 2024) -https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ecological-psychology/9E79001702D4D8029E19D11CD330149FMiguel Segundo-Ortin is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and member of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, particularly embodied cognition, comparative cognition, and human agency.https://miguelsegundoortinphd.com/

Vicente Raja a post-doctoral researcher at the MINT Lab, a research fellow at University of Murcia (Spain) and external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University (Canada). His research lies at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the history of the sciences of the mind, and has appeared in venues including Synthese, Minds and Machines, Physics of Life Reviews, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Philosophical Psychology, Adaptive Behavior, Cognitive Systems Research, and Theory and Psychology, among others. He has also edited/is editing a book for Routledge and special issues for the Journal of Consciousness Studies and Topics in Cognitive Science. https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/about/people/vicente-raja/

This is a talk given by Vicente In Memoriam: Eleanor Gibson - https://youtu.be/QmV4Iz1jJs8?si=HAScaBYB2RcNKjTa

James J. Gibson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson