Embodied Pathways and Ethical Trails: Studying Learning in and through Relational Histories (original) (raw)
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This paper argues that the terms through which we interpret and work to develop expansive pedagogical practices are overly constrained by the binary of adult-centered versus child-centered education. Analyzing ethnographic data developed over three years in a making/tinkering afterschool program serving Black, Latinx, and Asian American students (K-5), we explicate and imagine beyond this binary by (1) analyzing key forms of pedagogical talk, listening, and embodied assistance that supported generative forms of learning and relationality and defied categorization as either adult-or child-centered; and (2) theorizing joint activity as a pedagogical practice by historicizing and unmooring the work of critical education from the perpetual negation of Western, adult-centered models, thereby creating distinct grounds for specifying the role of direct assistance and its salience for questions of educational dignity and justice. Taken together, we argue for a more complex view of when and how direct teaching can support meaningful learning, and further delineate the relationships between such teaching and a broader ethos of joint, intergenerational activity. Western philosophers created an illusory appearance of unity and stability by reducing the flux and heterogeneity of the human and physical worlds into binary and supposedly natural opposites. Order is imposed and maintained by displacing chaos into the lesser of each binary pair. (Flax, 1993, p. 139 in Torres, 2005
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Embodied, Enactive Education: Conservative versus Radical Approaches
To appear in Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning. Sheila L. Macrine and Jennifer Fugate (Eds). MIT Press.
Fundamental differences in philosophical outlook divide the more conservative and radical branches of the E-family. Yet the emergence of E-approaches to cognition, wherever they sit on the conservative-radical spectrum, represents an undeniably important development for understanding cognition. Educational research and practice should take serious stock of these approaches for the simple reason that questions of how to educate cannot be kept apart from questions about how we think and learn. This chapter reviews empirical findings in the E-cognition domain that lend credence to Shapiro and Stolz’s (2019) claim that, “the emerging research agenda of embodied cognition has much to offer educational practitioners, researchers, and/or policy-makers” (p. 34). This chapter brackets question about the philosophical barriers that may, for some, block the acceptance of E-approaches and how to deal with them. It focuses instead on possible practical outcomes of such acceptance. Taking an imaginative leap, it asks: Assuming one adopted either a more conservative or more radical E-framework, how would that choice matter to one’s thinking about educational research and practice?
In this article I present an argument for 'embodied ways of knowing' as an alternative epistemological strategy, drawing on feminist research and embodied experience. To present my argument, I begin by considering a number of problematic dualisms that are central to Western knowledge, such as the separation between mind and body and between knowledge and experience. In critique of mind/body dualism, feminists and phenomenologists claimed that Western understandings were based on a profound ignorance about and fear of the body. Mind/body dualism needed to be challenged and articulated differently, potentially through valuing and understanding 'embodiment'. In critique of the knowledge/experience dualism, feminists and phenomenologists have suggested that 'knowing' could be based on lived experience. From lived experience, knowledge could be constructed by individuals and communities, rather than being universal and resulting strictly from rational argument. Research on women's ways of knowing and on movement experience provided valuable insights into alternative ways of knowing. Just as lived experience and movement experience could be ways of knowing, I argue that 'embodied ways of knowing' could also contribute specifically to knowledge. The relevance of understanding 'embodied ways of knowing' for those involved in education and movement studies may be the further appreciation, development and advocacy for the role of movement experience in education.