The M-BOD scenarios sketched out above differ from those described in the EL section in that the former take seriously the role of desire in student learning. In the M-BOD scenarios, students resource their creative and dramatic selves to become their own guides in working out the meaning(s) of History, ethics, bullying, etc. This learning is “deep” because it involves the body in several ways: Sometimes bodies actually get up and move through space (i.e., the walking dance or doing field research) Students are prompted to respond to situations more than follow directions; these situations require them to “read” other people and multiple texts and contexts Students’ formal presentations (their strategic, other-directed productions) elicit actual responses from people, which (whether good or bad, or a mix) then require some expression and reflection Back to Discussion of "Situating M-BOD"       Preface One: Situating Embodied Learning Two: Case Study: Oliver Identity and Learning: “Follow What I Am Doing: Do The Rules That I’m Doing: It’s Very CoM-pli-cated” Improvisational/Feedback "1,2,3...16, 17,18, NineTEEN" Innovation: “I Can Look At Your Cards” Producelike Behavior: "Why Do The Make Queen Better Than Jack?" Conclusion: "The Bricolage, The Music, The Movement" Three: Implications for the Literacy Autobiography Assignment              

It is useful to think of embodied learning (“M-BOD”), as Gee conceives it, as a dimension of EL since the pedagogy constructs learning as active and interactive, but it would be a mistake to conflate the concepts. M-BOD is a framework, a set of principles, for understanding how people become motivated to engage and re-engage cognitively challenging tasks--to "practice" at something--but this is not thinkable as an operation of (again in Fenwick's words) an "autonomous rational knowledge-making self, disembodied, rising above the dynamics and contingency of experience." Condensing and simplifying some of Gee's ideas, I came up with the hypothesis that practice is pleasurable when it involves people in making choices that reward them somehow--choices about who to be: (imaginative projection: some participation in story-telling or drama) what the rules are (game recognition: the mental labor of identifying problems and how to solve them) how to adapt (or improvise on) the rules to suit a particular context (game elaboration: some kind of recoding of some elements of the game)

Far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions. Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding…. Those decisions are …predicated on two modes of intellectual labor that are kept to the collateral learning of playing games. I call them probing and telescoping (41) Probing: you have to probe the depths of the game’s logic to make sense of it and like most probing expeditions, you get result by trial and error, by stumbling across things, by following hunches (42-3) Telescoping is managing…simultaneous objectives… you can’t progress far in a game if you simply deal with the puzzles you stumble across; you have to coordinate them with the ultimate objectives on the horizon...Telescoping is about constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence. It’s about perceiving relationships and determining priorities (54-55).

Embodied Learning is not the same as, but shares sympathies with Experiential Learning, Project-based learning, Situated Cognition, Embedded Cognition, Monism, Physicalism, Phenomenology and Somatics.