RESEARCH

Enactive Education

Currently developing an educational theory and pedagogy, “Enactive Education”, that has its origins in enactive cognitive science, dynamic systems theory, phenomenology and Buddhist psychology. Central to Enactive Education are the ideas of enactive cognitive scientist and neurophenomenologist, Evan Thompson. See Thompson’s (2007) exceptional and groundbreaking book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Enactive Education also draws on her supervisor Megan Boler’s, cutting-edge, work on philosophy and politics of emotion and Lorraine Code’s (2006) book on Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Her Ph.D. dissertation is called “Enactive Education: Befriending Contemporary Educational Paradoxes.”

 

Currently developing a dynamical, theory of the Imposter Phenomenon understood as a culturally enacted phenomenon. She challenges the current understanding of this phenomenon as a psychological trait. She arguse for a viable understanding of the IP and impostor feelings as publicly and collaboratively formed, radically socially embedded, and “enacted” through an embodied and socially embedded history of structural coupling of person and environment. She is currently organizing an empirical research project examining the ways the culture of higher education in Canada enacts impostor feelings in students and faculty through cultural factors, such as the structuring and political economy of academic work, the valuing of product over process, scholarly isolation, aggressive competitiveness, lack of mentoring, and disciplinary nationalism.