Unwarranted Return: A Response to McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek's (2005) "Schema Theory Revisited"

This article presents the authors' response to McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek's "Schema Theory Revisited." In "Schema Theory Revisited," McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek (2005) proposed a rearticulation of schema theory intended to encompass the ideas that schemata and other cognitive processes are embodied, that knowledge is situated in the transaction between world and individual, and that such transactions are mediated by socially and culturally enacted practices. This response addresses the incommensurability of conflating schema theory with sociocultural perspectives and then with theories of embodied cognition. The authors focus on the persistent ontological problem of granting form and substance to schema. And finally, they wish to amend the contribution of embodied cognition to reading comprehension by addressing possible misinterpretations expressed in the article and by highlighting existing work that forms a richer, embodied basis for an intersubjective existence and an emerging sense of self. (Contains 2 notes.)