AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning, udvikling og idéudveksling i ...

AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning,
udvikling og idéudveksling i professioner
Embodiment & learning
By Professor Reinhard Stelter
Institute of Exercise and Sport Sciences
University of Copenhagen
Email: rstelter@ifi.ku.dk
There is a myth that learning processes are initiated in the brain. For sure, nobody wants to deny the
role of cerebral activity in the interaction of a person with the environment. But is this approach really
the best way to start? Do we really understand the relationship of man in his world while reducing
this relationship to cerebral processes? I doubt it. In this article, embodiment is the starting point for
an alternative approach. The intention is to turn things from the head on to the feet, or better, from the
head into the lived body. The aim is to highlight the participation of our lived body in the unfolding of
experience and learning. In that sense, the concept of embodiment leads to an understanding where we
can speak of body-anchored and experience-based learning.
The article will focus on the following issues:
• Premises of body-anchored and experience-based learning
• Body-anchored and experience-based learning as being a part of a community of practice
• Ideas on how to put a body-anchored and experience-based approach into practice
The lived body as the basis for experience and perception
In this first section, some theoretical reflections on an experience-based understanding of the body will be
highlighted. The subsequent presentation is the basis, firstly, for a thorough insight into the first-person
perspective (Varela & Shear, 1999) and, secondly, for an applied perspective presented later in this article.
From a phenomenological standpoint, Merleau-Ponty (1962) defines the body as a mediator
to the world and “our anchor in the world” (p. 144). He writes: “External perception and the perception
of one’s own body vary in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same act” (ibid., p.
205). And he continues: “Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception
of my body, just as every perception of my body is made explicit in the language of external perception”
(ibid., p. 206).
This understanding makes it possible to overcome the dualism between mind and nature and
between the inner and outer world. However, Waldenfels (1985, 163) notes that duality is still a part of
our life concept: I have my body and at the same time I am my body. The understanding of the concept of
the human body is – as Madison (1981) states – a strange “mixture of being-in-itself and being-for-itself”
(p. 24). Merleau-Ponty (1962) is conscious of this ambiguity or rather, circularity, when stating:
“The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms,
subject and object, brought up by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement
of existence.” (pp. 88-89)
It is due to Sheets-Johnstone (1999) that experience and perception are highlighted as embodied in
movement. Movement seems to be the concept where the body as an object and the body as a subject
appear as being integrated. In that sense, we could argue that Sheets-Johnstone (1999) goes a step further
in her phenomenological thinking than Merleau-Ponty, when she aims to “elucidate both the experience
and foundations of thinking in movement” (p. 483). As an essential for her approach she speaks about a
“non-separation of thinking and doing” (p. 485). She explicates her understanding by referring to the
experience and action of a dancer who – while improvising – is thinking in movement. She writes:
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