Edmund Aspbury-Miyanishi

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

Frontiers in Education May 29, 2026 Thorsten Scheiner, Dan Jazby, Edmund Aspbury-Miyanishi

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.