Research On Strategies For Cultivating Geography Practices Of High School Students From An Embodied Cognitive Perspective

In order to meet the development needs of today’s society,the Ministry of Education of China promulgated the General High School Geography Curriculum Standards(Revised Edition 2020),which takes the core literacy of geography as an important content and puts forward clear requirements for cultivating students’ geography practicability.Therefore,secondary schools should put the development of various forms of practical activities on their agenda,and teachers should also focus on conducting research about the cultivation of geographic practicality.At the same time,embodied cognition is also flourishing in the field of education,which emphasizes the interaction between the human body and the environment and believes that human cognition is the result of the interaction between physical activity,emotional experience and the context in which one is placed.In the past studies on the cultivation of geography practice among high school students,more attention has been paid to the technical operational aspects such as the process and method of geography practice activities,but the embodied nature of embodied cognition brings the body back to the scope of cognitive research,which coincides with the connotation of geography practice.Therefore,this study investigates the development of geography practice among high school students from the perspective of embodied cognition.This paper compares the relevant literature on embodied geography teaching,and finds that there are few studies integrating embodied cognition and geography practice cultivation,the relevant cultivation strategies still need to be improved,and their depth and pedagogical practicability also have certain shortcomings.On this basis,the study was further developed.Firstly,the relevant concepts were defined and the theoretical basis was established.Secondly,through questionnaires and interviews,we investigate and analyze the current situation of geography practice cultivation for high school students based on embodied cognition,and explore the common problems in high school geography teaching that are reflected behind it.Through the survey,we found that the following four problems exist in the current situation of geography practical training in high school from the perspective of embodied cognition: the development of geography practical activities is limited and the quality is not high;the way of geography practical training is single and the embodied teaching method needs to be improved;the integration of geography practical training and embodied cognition is insufficient and students do not have enough embodied experience;the evaluation of embodied geography practical activities is infrequent and in a single way.Again,under the guidance of Dewey’s "learning by doing" theory,contextual learning theory and humanistic learning theory,we analyze the causes of these existing problems and propose practical cultivation strategies for them: first,we select the types of activities from analyzing teaching contents,use campus resources for teaching design,and conduct practical activities based on classroom embodiment.Second,to enhance teachers’ ability of guiding embodied activities from four aspects: strengthening theoretical literacy to guide geography teaching,focusing on context creation to stimulate students’ interest,analyzing students’ learning situation to pre-design teaching objectives and enhancing embodied experience to pay attention to students’ role,and further focusing on students’ embodied experience;third,to build a diversified evaluation system for embodied practice teaching.Fourthly,the school should play a role in solving the problem of embodied geography practice activities.Finally,based on the proposed strategies and the principles of embodied,contextual and interactive case design,four complete classroom teaching cases incorporating the cultivation of embodied geography practice were designed and practiced from the perspectives of four geography practices that can be cultivated: geography mapping and production ability,geography observation and observation ability,geography experiment ability,and geography investigation and survey ability.By comparing the changes in students’ performance before and after the experiment and the level of practical skills as reflected by the geography practical skills scale,the effectiveness of the teaching strategies and case designs proposed in this paper in enhancing the development of high school students’ geography practical skills from the perspective of embodied cognition was tested.The analysis of the experimental results and the daily teaching reflections show that the strategy of geography practice development from the perspective of embodied cognition proposed in this paper has significantly improved the students’ geography practice ability and performance.The combination of embodied cognition and the cultivation of geography practice can not only enrich the relevant theories,but also provide some reference values for front-line teachers in geography teaching.