Teacher noticing as embodied ecological enactment: an embodied–ecological–enactive model

Summary

Teacher noticing—how teachers perceive and respond to classroom events—is often explained by cognitivist models that treat it as a mental operation separate from the body and environment. This paper proposes an alternative model grounded in embodied, ecological, and enactive perspectives, arguing that noticing is an embodied, situated practice. Teachers attune to classroom affordances through bodily exploration, actualize those affordances through action, and cultivate them through ongoing engagement. The model unifies these three traditions as complementary analytic lenses for describing a single phenomenon: professional responsiveness to the classroom. It rejects mind–body and teacher–environment dichotomies, reconceptualizing noticing as an emergent, lived practice within complex classroom ecologies, and offers a research agenda for studying it in real teaching contexts.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper addresses limitations of traditional cognitivist models of teacher noticing by proposing an embodied–ecological–enactive model grounded in the pragmatic synthesis of three complementary theoretical perspectives. We examine how teachers engage bodily processes in perception (embodied perspective), perceive affordances in classroom environments (ecological perspective), and enact meaning through dynamic interactions (enactive perspective). Drawing on these perspectives, we conceptualise teacher noticing as embodied ecological enactment—teachers’ professional responsiveness to classroom affordances through action—which manifests through three interrelated analytic dimensions: affordance attunement through embodied exploration, affordance actualisation through enactment, and affordance cultivation through dynamic engagement. Critically, we do not treat embodied, ecological, and enactive accounts as separate processes that interact; rather, we employ them as complementary analytic emphases for describing one core phenomenon of professional responsiveness to classroom environments. Each tradition already incorporates central features that the others foreground; our synthesis draws selectively on the distinct conceptual emphases each provides in order to illuminate complementary dimensions of a unified phenomenon. This synthesis transcends the mind–body and teacher–environment dichotomies that constrain traditional cognitivist frameworks, reconceptualising teacher noticing as an embodied professional practice that emerges within complex classroom ecologies rather than as a decontextualised mental operation. By positioning this model as a research agenda, we open new directions for studying teacher noticing as it unfolds in the lived experience of teaching.