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

AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning,
udvikling og idéudveksling i professioner
Perceptions are plaited into my here-now flow of movement just as my here-now flow
of movement is plaited into my perceptions. Movement and perception are seamlessly
interwoven; there is no “mind-doing” that is separate from a “body-doing.” (ibid., p. 487)
Sheets-Johnstone is sceptical about the common theoretical standpoint where thinking is exclusively tied
to language and that thinking only takes place via language. In her understanding, thinking is a bodily
affair and an integrated part of movement. An important perspective is – in my opinion – that she regards
“movement neither as a vehicle for thinking nor as a symbolic system through which reference is made to
something else” (ibid., p. 492). In her argumentation she seeks for support by referring to Merleau-Ponty,
Goldstein, and finally Wittgenstein whom she quotes: ”’When I think in language,’ Wittgenstein points
out, ‘there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to verbal expression’” (ibid., p. 493).
Furthermore, she refers to the psychologist Jerome Bruner’s emphasis upon narrative as the primary form
of discourse:
He [Bruner] writes that when young children “come to grasp the basic idea of reference
necessary for any language use … their principal linguistic interest centers on human
action and its outcome” (1990: 78). His point is that narrative structure is, in the
beginning, concerned with movement, in particular, with “agentivity” (77). (Sheets-
Johnstone, 1999, p. 500)
Sheets-Johnstone continues her thoughts by reflecting on the term “agentivity” which she relates to her
concept of thinking in movement:
“Agentivity” specifies a dynamic concept of action coincident with this articulable,
essentially dynamic form [i.e., the tactile-kinaesthetic sense of one own body]. “Agentivity”
is thus intimately related to primal animation [in early childhood]. Primal animation indeed
is the epistemological ground on which thinking in movement develops. (ibid., 501; italics in
the original, author’s supplementation in brackets)
“Agentivity” or, in other terms, the dynamic concept of action, can function as the key to the
understanding of experience and perception: Action is based on the active involvement of the person
on his/her environment and expresses the dynamic relationship between the protagonist or perceiver,
respectively, and the perceived, where the lived and moving body is the mediator between person and
the environment. David Abram, an ecologist and philosopher, describes the dynamics of this process of
perception by introducing the term participation, which he has borrowed from the French anthropologist
Lévy-Bruhl (1985). Abram (1996) emphasises “that perception always involves, at its most intimate
level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it
perceives” (p. 57).
While perceiving, we relate to the world in an active process of involvement. And we are always involved
in and related to the world. Person and environment are co-dependent, i.e., there is a unity between
experience and perception on the one hand and movement and action on the other (see Stelter, 1998). But
the expressive forms of being involved in the environment are manifold; e.g., through gestures, speech,
thinking, emotions, through specific form of movements and through many other types of involvement.
Tamboer (1991) speaks about different modes or modalitities of relating to the environment. These
modes are expressive and person-context-bound forms of being and participating in the world. Through
embodying the world around us and through interiorizing the environment, things become meaningful;
and this happens in an expressive form or mode which seems to be right for the subject in the here and
now of the situation.
Premises of body-anchored and experience-based learning
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