Journal of Physical Education and Sport

Abstract

IntroductionThe research on cognitive mechanisms has increasingly supported an interaction among different scientific traditions. Furthermore, in last decades, they have also helped scientific community develop a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary study on role of teaching, highlighting its multidimensional aspects, including those related to function of body and movement in teaching-learning processes. The complexity of study has included philosophical discussions about distinction between Geist and Natur (Dilthey, 1883) in heuristic statute of didactics, even with regard to bodily and motor dimension in teaching and learning processes. In fact, body and its motor potentials have not only an educational function for whole person but they also provide important empirical data for a research aimed at identifying educational theories and practices which can support teaching-learning processes.On epistemological level, interaction between natural sciences and human sciences allows use of two different categories: understanding and explanation. The understanding focuses on potentials of body and human actions involved in learning and teaching mechanisms. The explanation focuses on observation and description of empirical data of educational event involving body and movement.Hence, it has been useful to establish interdisciplinary relationships that have led to a confluence in educational research of data emerging from theoretical and experimental research in psychological, philosophical, pedagogical and neurobiological domains. This scientific contributions have been particularly useful, and sometimes necessary, to investigate how body and movement can help cognitive mechanisms in teaching and learning processes. The theories developed about this study have produced teaching methods and techniques which, in turn, have been inspired by specific cultural, philosophical and epistemological paradigms , which have provided different interpretations on possible relationships among body, movement and mechanisms of knowledge. With this aim, success of constructivist paradigm has proved particularly effective in providing an interpretation of functioning of teaching-learning relationship based on raising of subject's active role in mechanisms of knowledge. According to constructivist view, learning is indeed function of how person constructs from his own experience, and his most radical version develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an objective ontological reality, but exclusively an ordering and organization of a world constituted by our (von Glasersfeld, 1988). Within constructivist paradigm, in fact, the teaching is conceived as time when teacher and students cooperate to produce a meaning (Tizzi,1990). It implies a constant construction and reconstruction of their mental schemes using experiences in progress (Bertrand, 1998). In this sense, constructivism rejects metaphysical realism. Its consequences in educational and teaching field are reflected in development of training programs that can foster a communicative interaction leading to a construction of shared meanings. Hence it is against a concept of teaching meant as a transfer of absolute knowledge. In constructivist perspective, experience is basis of construction of knowledge: meanings ascribed to events and objects depend largely on personal experience that involves thoughts, feelings and actions (Novak, 1998).The communicative interaction achieved through active participation encourages sharing of experiences necessary to acquisition of meanings that can be marked in order to share, compare and modify them (Novak, 1998). According to Joseph Novak, body and action play a central role in processes of knowledge. …