Teaching Argumentative Skills with LEGO:Building a case for an embodied and enactive approach

When we want to enhance a skill, we obviously need to understand what that skill is. In this paper, I show that education’s typical view of argumentative skill is based on the theory of cognitivism, a theory that claims that all cognition should be understood as an internal afair, as a process that takes place in the mind. I argue that cognitivism makes highly problematic assumptions, and is unnecessarily restrictive. We should look for theories that allow for external elements and processes to be part of cognition. Focusing on an embodied and enactive conceptualization of the basis of argumentative skills, I develop and test a way to use LEGO in teaching. The preliminary results point at the viability of further developing and testing the LEGO system.