The social organization of play, embodied cognition, and failure in stem education

To respond more directly to the question that opened this piece, I have found that recognizing the discursive practices that organize immersion in different roles during play, and likewise recognizing discursive practices that ground collaboratively constructed accounts of failure, continues a long-running challenge with respect to research and practice. Discourse happens quickly, often below the radar of attention, and under pressure from other aspects of activity. The upshot is that we need to understand to what extent teachers and students can become aware of these micro processes that ground learning. This is not an altogether new challenge, but one that I believe warrants more attention to how we can design teacher education workshops, and even further, how to communicate these insights to students to give them agency to design their own learning trajectories.