With the continuous development of higher vocational education, improving the effectiveness of ideological, moral and legal education has become increasingly important. However, traditional teaching approaches often emphasize theoretical knowledge transmission, making it difficult for students to connect abstract legal concepts with real-life experiences and limiting their active engagement in learning. Based on embodied cognition theory, this study explores how embodied cognition-based teaching influences students’ learning outcomes in the Rule of Law chapter of the Ideological, Moral and Legal Education course in higher vocational colleges. This study adopts a qualitative research approach and conducts semi-structured interviews with teachers and students to investigate the challenges and improvement strategies related to embodied cognition-based teaching. The findings identify five major challenges: difficulties in connecting legal knowledge with practical experiences, limited student engagement in traditional teaching environments, insufficient integration of multimodal learning activities, teachers’ limited competence in implementing embodied teaching, and the lack of comprehensive evaluation mechanisms. Based on these challenges, this study proposes five strategies, including contextualized legal learning activities, student-centered interactive environments, multimodal teaching resource integration, teacher professional development, and comprehensive evaluation systems. This study contributes to existing research by extending the application of embodied cognition theory to higher vocational ideological and legal education. It also provides practical implications for improving teaching effectiveness by connecting students, learning environments, and knowledge construction through embodied experiences.
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