Body Pedagogics: Embodiment, Cognition and Cultural Transmission

Abstract

This paper contributes to the growing sociological concern with body pedagogics; an embodied approach to the transmission and acquisition of occupational, sporting, religious and other culturally structured practices. Focused upon the relationship between those social, technological and material means through which institutionalized cultures are transmitted, the experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of this process, existing research highlights the significance of body work, practical techniques, and the senses to these pedagogic processes. What has yet to be explicated adequately, however, is the embodied importance of cognition to this incorporation of culture. In what follows, I address this lacuna by building on John Dewey's writings in proposing an approach to body pedagogics sympathetic to the prioritization of physical experience but that recognizes the distinctive properties and capacities of thought and reflexivity in these processes.

Embodying Teaching: A Body Pedagogic Study of a Teacher’s Movement Rhythm in the ‘Sloyd’ Classroom

“…Furthermore, embodiment research highlighting learning and movement has itself been enhanced by frameworks that recognise lived experience and the interactions between human beings and their social, material and symbolic world (Crossley 2006;Calhoun and Sennett 2007;Lefebvre 2004). Phenomenology and pragmatism stand out as the most influential traditions in this context (Shilling 2017;Brown and Payne 2009). Against this background, in this study three areas of research, all including pedagogics and embodiment, are important for contextualising the teacher's movement in and through the classroom.…”

“…2 The GoPro attached to the teacher's chest to body pedagogics (Shilling 2017;Mellor and Shilling 2010;. This mutual accommodation between individuals and their physical environment is also an important landmark in James' and Dewey's concept of experience and habit.…”

“…Body pedagogics is increasingly discussed in formal and informal education (Shilling 2007(Shilling , 2010(Shilling , 2017. Various empirical studies have suggested and argued for the notion of bodies as transactional Quennerstedt et al 2011;Maivorsdotter and Wickman 2011), i.e., a view of the body as an organic collection of activities ''characterized by habit and grounded in physicality that is constituted by its relationships with its various environments'' (Sullivan 2001, p. 40).…”

“…This growing analysis tradition suggests that as embodied beings intentionally situated in specific environments, we are capable of both securing and transforming existing habits and cultural customs (Shilling 2017). The important notion of body pedagogics in relation to rhythm, habit and experience (e.g., Lande 2007;Shilling 2008;Crossley 2005; is that people do not simply march to their own beat, but use and create different means, cultivate different experiences and actualise and appreciate different outcomes in relation to each other.…”

“…Although this research helps us to understand our personal and collective embodied processes at work, in our spare time and in education in a late modern era (e.g., Sennett 1998;Calhoun and Sennett 2007;Shilling 2005;Joas 1996;Evans et al 2008), there is a purported risk of positioning the body as a transcendent force and neglecting other important phenomena, such as meaning-making, interaction and reflective thought (Crossley 2007;Pink 2011;Shilling 2010Shilling , 2017. In this context, a body pedagogics approach takes the transactional relationship between organism and environment seriously and suggests that we recognise how pedagogical means, embodied experiences and habitual outcomes are shaped to meet the interactive exigencies of specific situations (Shilling 2010;Crossley 2005; Embodying Teaching: A Body Pedagogic Study… 181 .…”