Research has not established a clear relationship between laboratory experiences and student learning (Hofstein & Mamlok-Naaman, 2007), nor have popular learning theories of the past few decades demonstrated a necessary or rational connection between body and mind (Roth, 2018). Reflecting on the limitations of stylized laboratory work and traditional "hands-on" learning, science education now views authentic scientific practice as the ideal framework (García-Carmona, 2020; NGSS Lead States, 2013), advocating that students should reason and act like scientists (Ford, 2015). However, while the field emphasizes balancing "conceptual, epistemic, and social" learning goals (Duschl, 2008), substantial research has focused on the mechanisms of "thinking processes and verbal interactions"—such as argumentation and explanation (Newton et al., 1999; Tang et al., 2020)—while paying little attention to the heavily embodied aspect of "doing science." Consequently, while the field has effectively answered how students  "think" and "speak," it has largely overlooked the equally important question of "how they do"—that is, how the student's body engage with science practices.

       This oversight may stem from historical scientific, philosophical, and cultural traditions that privilege "reason" and perpetuate a mind-body dualism (Almqvist & Quennerstedt, 2015; Alsop, 2011; Hardahl, 2019). When discussing science, associations are more readily made with "mind," "logic," and "truth" rather than "body," "emotion," and "process." Educators often ignore bodily engagement or view "doing" merely as evidence for conceptual learning, while researchers tend to emphasize disembodied and immaterial aspects of learning (Kersting et al., 2024; Ross, 2004). Yet, can school science truly "liberate the mind from the body to see the world as it is" (Descartes, 1990)?

       In doing and learning science, bodily participation in the material and socio-cultural world is ubiquitous (Kersting et al., 2024). Studies in the philosophy of science and anthropology emphasize that bodily engagement is indispensable in core scientific practices such as producing phenomena, experimentation, and engineering (Goodwin, 1997; Hardahl et al., 2019). Beyond book knowledge, a scientist requires the personal understanding that comes only from rich, focused sensory experience; their senses must be sharpened, and their hands disciplined (Sibum, 2004). Indeed, scientific epistemology can be described as performative (Pickering, 2010). Empirical studies confirm that, like scientists, the body plays a crucial role in students' observational and experimental practices (Almqvist & Quennerstedt, 2015; Hardahl, 2019; Kersting et al., 2021; Orlander & Wickman, 2011). As Jaber and Hammer (2016) note, while there is growing attention to engaging students in scientific practice, "there is much to learn about how students step into and sustain those practices."

       Therefore, this study adopts a student-centered and process-oriented perspective to examine "how they do" through the lens of the body. It aims to open the "black box" of the body in "practicing like a scientist," expanding our understanding of the body's role and significance in science education (Kersting et al., 2024), and deepening insights into what can be learned within the act of "doing."

        In school science, the body is often presented as an invisible locus of learning (Alsop, 2011), an object to be disciplined,  rather than a source of meaning-making. However, phenomenologically, the body is our primary perspective on the world, the zero-point that gives meaning to all other coordinates (Zahavi, 2019), not an object we observe from a perspective. This study posits the student's body as the source of meaning-making—the zero-point—rather than an object or isolated coordinate, thereby avoiding dualistic traps. As Merleau-Ponty (2013) states, to understand a subject, we must seek it not in its pure form, but at the intersection of its dimensions. Starting from the body as the zero-point, we uncover its intersecting dimensions: tacit knoing, mind, speech, affect.

Adopting Spradley’s (2016) metaphor of the interpretivist "explorer" rather than the positivist "petroleum engineer," I entered the field without a rigid coding framework. Instead, I sought to describe the people and events observed in classroom life, utilizing a theoretical lens to reveal what students experience during the process of "doing" and how the body becomes meaningful (Hardahl, 2019). Specifically, "bodily engagement" is defined here as how the student's body interacts with scientific apparatus, acknowledging the apparatus as an "actor" that influences interactions. This definition deliberately excludes general somatic activities such as reading or writing. Data were collected from 75 science lessons (Grades 1–5) across three public primary schools in District X, City S—a developed eastern coastal region of China known for its high educational standards. The dataset comprises 125 episodes of student bodily engagement, triangulated with teacher interviews, textual artifacts, and scientific narratives to achieve data saturation. The study employs a situated, narrative approach aiming for "ethnographically adequate description" (McDermott, 1987). This involves detailing: (1) how participants construct their context; (2) how they organize body postures to activate this context; (3) how they coordinate behaviorally to integrate into others' contexts; and (4) how they hold each other accountable within that context. Methodologically, we utilized Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and Erickson’s (2006) "whole-to-part" inductive strategy for video analysis. The procedure included: (1) continuous viewing for immersion; (2) identifying themes and participation structures; (3) detailed multimodal transcription of core episodes; (4) identifying mechanisms; (5) conducting video-cued interviews (Tobin et al., 1989); and (6) checking for representativeness. To address the challenge of translating visual meanings into text (Goodwin, 2007; Vossoughi et al., 2020), the analysis combines written narrative with visual depictions to highlight moments of embodied interaction.

Viewing the body as the "zero-point," this study identifies four dimensions of the body’s role: the body in tacit learning, the body linking speech, the body as a clue to the mind, and the affective body. Specifically, we identified 15 roles of bodily engagement in scientific practice, such as "the body in focal awareness," "action speaking louder than words," "the body producing new phenomena," "the empathetic body," and "the frustrated body when unable to do science." First, the study challenges the tradition of "propositional knowledge" and its verbal assumptions. It highlights "tacit cognition" within the practice/body turn, using classroom examples to show how students learn "how to do" tacitly when practicing like scientists. Second, as students do science together, their bodies are often "speaking." This involves immediate sharing of bodily sensations, failures during multi-body participation lacking verbal explanation, or producing visible phenomena to persuade others when words fail. Thus, bodily engagement bridges the plural scientific practices of observation, experimentation, explanation construction, argumentation, and evaluation. Third, through case studies, we demonstrate that while body and mind are distinct, they are not separate. Bodily engagement serves as a clue to the mind in science learning, revealing the bodily roots of knowledge and how the mind inhabits the body. Finally, we show that the affective presence of the body is a crucial manifestation of practicing like a scientist. We explore its significance beyond the official curriculum script, including the embodied frustration students experience when "doing science." Overall, the study suggests that the significance of bodily engagement lies in introducing uncertainty, learning to "think" and "speak" within "doing," and allowing students to manifest intelligence, interact with others, and "exist" in the world through action.

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