MIXI Lecture 06: Embodied STEM Learning: Place, Border, Being

This lecture series is hosted by MIXI, Adelphi University’s interdisciplinary collaborative research and practice institute, pursuing innovative projects that critically remix practices from science, art, mathematics, cultural studies, and pedagogy.

Thursday May 7, 2026 @ 5:30pm

hybrid, face-to-face (if you can!) and online

free & open to all, [RSVP here]
virtual attendance details shared after registration

Setting as more than container for learning: Expanding notions of context for and content of learning

Jassmine Y. Ma

Unpacking and contesting "failure" in learning and interaction

David DeLiema

What is learning? What is relevant to learning? How do our understandings of learning shape what we see, what we can ask about learning, and how we understand what gets learned? In considering these questions, I take a theoretical jaunt into the learning sciences’ treatments of context in relation to learning, and with what consequences. I share two empirical cases looking across settings and at embodiment, place, and affect—one in an afterschool documentary filmmaking program, and another in an out-of-school mobile science lab—to explore some possibilities for conceptualizations of learning that take up context in different ways.

Drawing on video-based interaction analysis studies of youth debugging computer code, climbing outdoors, and playing puzzle games, I will focus in this talk on what happens in social interaction when people reach some kind of impasse as part of their learning process. This work takes into consideration power in social interaction, contexts that shape learning (e.g., play), and valued outcomes of learning, and applies a three-part framework -- noticing impasses, proposing possible causes, and intervening to pursue a resolution -- that invites educators, learning scientists, and students to consider ways to support others (and ourselves) when we hit roadblocks.

Jasmine Y. Ma (she/her) is a learning scientist who moonlights as Associate Professor of Mathematics Education and Urban Education at New York University. Her scholarship and collaborations take her within and across contexts that are in- and out-of-school, professional and decidedly unprofessional, formally and incidentally educational. Her work begins with the understanding that typical ways learning is studied and designed for, especially in schools, systematically benefits some and marginalizes others. She is concerned with how to better conceptualize learning as deeply situated in local, sociomaterial, sociohistorical, and political contexts, especially at the interactional level. Her recent work includes an investigation of expansive theories of embodiment in learning, and the science identity work of adult and youth participants in an out-of-school mobile science lab. Ma is currently Past-President of the International Society of the Learning Sciences and co-Editor-in-Chief of Cognition and Instruction.

David DeLiema (he/him), a learning scientist at University of Minnesota’s Department of Educational Psychology, studies the conversations, designs, and processes that shape how learning emerges from moments of impasse. In research-practice partnerships that foreground the knowledge and voices of teachers, students, and parents, his research examines cognitive and psychological processes in the context of social interaction, technology-rich settings, play-based activities, and embodied movement. His work aims to provoke reflection on the open-ended, power-laden, and everyday nature of turning impasses into learning.

Note: this lecture is taking place at the brand new Adelphi University Manhattan Center, located at 529 5th Avenue.