Embodiment And Professional Education

This book draws attention to the ways in which an awareness of, and sensitivity to, embodiment can enlighten educational practices. It explores discourses from a range of thinkers, including Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Bakhtin, Haraway and Ahmed to name a few. The book argues that attention to embodiment can help us to reimagine the goals of education in ways that fit more coherently with human concerns and that offer the chance to provide education that is more holistic and grounded in our corporeality. Theories of embodiment can be used to modify education at the level of curriculum and at the level of pedagogy. This can help us design educational interventions that fit more naturally with how humans are inclined to learn and thus make educational experiences more meaningful. Attention to embodiment allows us to appreciate the extent to which the body appropriates a professional practice and the extent to which a professional practice appropriates the body of the learner. It shows how greater sensitivity to the body can enliven and enlighten our educational practices, especially in professional education.

Explore the multiple ways adults learn through their bodies. Embodied or somatic learning is a way of learning that relies on the body’s knowledge. Our most basic form of learning in childhood is preverbal; however, traditional schooling forces us to check our bodies at the door, requiring us to sit at a desk and raise our hands, focusing primarily on cognition to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. By the time we reach adulthood, “being in our bodies” is a foreign concept and a source of discomfort for many of us. This volume challenges the dominant paradigm of how knowledge is constructed and shared. Embodied learning is examined through a variety of practice contexts, including higher education, community education, health care, and the workplace, and through multiple methods, including dance, theater, and outdoor experiential education. This is 134th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Noted for its depth of coverage, it explores issues of common interest to instructors, administrators, counselors, and policymakers in a broad range of adult and continuing education settings, such as colleges and universities, extension programs, businesses, libraries, and museums.

Explore the multiple ways adults learn through their bodies. Embodied or somatic learning is a way of learning that relies on the body’s knowledge. Our most basic form of learning in childhood is preverbal; however, traditional schooling forces us to check our bodies at the door, requiring us to sit at a desk and raise our hands, focusing primarily on cognition to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. By the time we reach adulthood, “being in our bodies” is a foreign concept and a source of discomfort for many of us. This volume challenges the dominant paradigm of how knowledge is constructed and shared. Embodied learning is examined through a variety of practice contexts, including higher education, community education, health care, and the workplace, and through multiple methods, including dance, theater, and outdoor experiential education. This is 134th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Noted for its depth of coverage, it explores issues of common interest to instructors, administrators, counselors, and policymakers in a broad range of adult and continuing education settings, such as colleges and universities, extension programs, businesses, libraries, and museums.

This book, by combining sociocultural, material, cognitive and embodied perspectives on human knowing, offers a new and powerful conceptualisation of epistemic fluency – a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation. Using results from empirical studies of professional education programs, the book sheds light on practical ways in which the development of epistemic fluency can be recognised and supported - in higher education and in the transition to work. The book provides a broader and deeper conception of epistemic fluency than previously available in the literature. Epistemic fluency involves a set of capabilities that allow people to recognize and participate in different ways of knowing. Such people are adept at combining different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge and at reconfiguring their work environment to see problems and solutions anew. In practical terms, the book addresses the following kinds of questions. What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? What enables a person to integrate different types and fields of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing, in order to make some well-founded decisions and take actions in the world? What personal knowledge resources are entailed in analysing a problem and describing an innovative solution, such that the innovation can be shared in an organization or professional community? How do people get better at these things; and how can teachers in higher education help students develop these valued capacities? The answers to these questions are central to a thorough understanding of what it means to become an effective knowledge worker and resourceful professional.

This handbook provides an important overview of corporeality, embodiment and learning in education from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Situating the body at the centre of educational practice, the editors and contributors introduce the concept of ‘tact’ as a practical corporeal language. The chapters provide a spectrum of historical, conceptual, empirical and practical educational approaches for embodied pedagogical engagement. Tact and embodied knowledge form a significant component of a teacher’s capability and professionalism: interacting with students, a pedagogue responds to them tactfully, emotionally, sensitively, and reflectively searching for the right thing to do, the right words to say, improvising in aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual way that are as restrained as they are enabled by the body. This handbook questions the familiar and established essentialist and naturalist view of the body to allow new perspectives on how corporeality affects learners. It will be of interest to scholars in education and philosophy as well as those researching in across social sciences.

The body matters, in practice. How then might we think about the body in our work in and on professional practice, learning and education? What value is there in realising and articulating the notion of the professional practitioner as crucially embodied? Beyond that, what of conceiving of the professional practice field itself as a living corporate body? How is the body implicated in understanding and researching professional practice, learning and education? Body/Practice is an extensive volume dedicated to exploring these and related questions, philosophically and empirically. It constitutes a rare but much needed reframing of scholarship relating to professional practice and its relation with professional learning and professional education more generally. It takes bodies seriously, developing theoretical frameworks, offering detailed analyses from empirical studies, and opening up questions of representation. The book is organized into four parts: I. ‘Introducing the Body in Professional Practice, Learning and Education’; II. ‘Thinking with the Body in Professional Practice’; III. ‘The Body in Question in Health Professional Education and Practice’; IV. ‘Concluding Reflections’. It brings together researchers from a range of disciplinary and professional practice fields, including particular reference to Health and Education. Across fifteen chapters, the authors explore a broad range of issues and challenges with regard to corporeality, practice theory and philosophy, and professional education, providing an innovative, coherent and richly informed account of what it means to bring the body back in, with regard to professional education and beyond.