Teaching The Extended Mind to Pre-service Teachers: Retrospective On a Lesson Unit Intervention

The prevailing, "brain-bound" model of cognition in U.S. education—expressed by metaphors like "mind as computer" or "mind as empty vessel"—contributes to a teacher-centered, content-emphasizing, and potentially disengaging learning environment. This study responds to the need for alternative educational paradigms by investigating the practical impact of the Extended Mind Hypothesis (EMH) on pre- service teachers learning and teaching practices. EMH, which posits that thinking routinely incorporates external elements such as the body, environment, objects, and social connections, offers a philosophical and practical framework for restructuring classroom practice. This research presents a retrospective qualitative study of a lesson unit intervention on EMH, delivered during a General Instructional Methods and Assessments course (EDSE4320) to pre-service middle and secondary education majors. The intervention was intentionally designed to align with the course's student-centered, collaborative culture, emphasizing principles from EMH such as distributed cognition (thinking with others) and embodied cognition (thinking with movement and the body). The study utilized a blend of Action Research and Constructivist Grounded Theory. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with seven former students who were in their student-teaching semester, and subsequently subjected to line- by-line axial coding. The interviews explored three research questions: 1) The efficacy of the unit in promoting the adoption of EMH; 2) The aspects of EMH that most resonated and persisted; and 3) The factors that encouraged or inhibited implementation. We found that participants consistently demonstrated the transferability of EMH principles, identifying instances of implementation in their own learning and student- teaching practice. However, fluency with specific EMH terminology often relied on access to collaborative artifacts (portfolios) from the original course. The principles of embodied cognition and distributed cognition showed the greatest resonance and persistence, primarily because they mapped directly onto the successful, distinct features of the EDSE4320 course (e.g., group work, movement, table seating). Implementation was influenced by a range of factors that fall into categories of “encouraging” or “inhibiting.” Encouraging factors included: supportive school setting, high self- confidence, and mentor teachers’ status. Inhibiting factors included practical resource scarcity, mentor teachers’ adversarial orientation towards students, and a perceived lack of freedom—the explicit and implicit permission to deviate from traditional methods- often based on institutional priorities and standardized testing pressures. Ultimately, this study affirms that an EMH-based curriculum can effectively equip pre-service teachers with an alternative cognitive paradigm that persists and transfers into practice. It highlights the critical role of classroom culture in making abstract theory concrete and underscores the need to address the structural and sociocultural barriers that restrict a novice teacher's agency to implement innovative, student-centered strategies.