Abstract
In this paper, we attempt to show some consequences of bringing the body back into higher education, through the use of performing arts in the curricular context of scientific programs. We start by arguing that dominant traditions in higher education reproduced the mind-body dualism that shaped the social matrix of meanings on knowledge transmission. We highlight the limits of the modern disembodied and decontextualized reason and suggest that, considering the students’ and teachers’ bodies as non-relevant aspects, or even obstacles, leads to the invisibilization of fundamental aspects involved in teaching and learning processes. We thus conducted a study, from a socio-cultural perspective, in which we analyse the emerging matrix of meanings given to the body and bodily engagement by students, through a systematic qualitative analysis of 47 personal diaries. We structured the results and the discussion around five interpretative axes: (1) the production of diaries enables historicization, while the richness of bodily experience expands the boundaries of diaries into non-textual modalities; (2) curricular context modulates the emergent meanings of the body; (3) physical and symbolic spaces guide the matrix of bodily meanings; (4) the bodily dimension of the courses facilitates the emergence of an emotional dimension to get in touch with others and to register one's own emotional experiences; and (5) the body functions as a condition for biographical continuity. These axes are discussed under the light of the general process of consciousness-raising and resignification of the situated body in the educational practice.
Highlights
In a very broad way, we can say that the orientation of educational actions is inscribed in a matrix of meanings1 that transcends the borders of the educational organization and crosses culture in all its dimensions (Tau & Parrat-Dayan, 2018). Necessary to identify this matrix of naturalized meanings and practices implied in the acquisition and development of knowledge, with the objective of being able to pose some problems related to the role of the body in formal learning processes
We present some findings from our ASCOPET research project (Les Arts de la Scène comme Outil Pédagogique dans l’Education Tertiaire, or in English Performing Arts as Pedagogical Tools in Higher Education), which
Diaries are a type of artifact, that is, something made by the student considering–consciously or unconsciously–an other: a recipient
Summary
One of the turning points in the configuration of modern thought was the work of René Descartes and the so-called “subjectivist turn” (Assalone & Misseri, 2010; Gaukroger, 1995; Gillespie, 2008). A posteriori knowledge of perceptions and intuitions, far from allowing access to an indubitable truth, was conceived as one of the inevitable sources of confusion and error (Maresca, 2010) In this way, Descartes’ rationalism–and that of Leibniz or Spinoza, in a different way–established the bases of the fundamental cleavage that allowed to dissect, in a surgical way, the mind from the body. This notion, anchored in the theory of complex systems (García, 2000, 2006), makes it possible to explain how a complex of thoughts permeates a culture, down to its most concrete fields of everyday action In this way, the orientations imposed by the epistemic framework served as a fertile ground, producing ontological and epistemological assumptions of the modern worldview, projected to our days. The different systemic perspectives, especially that of enactivism, based on the viewpoint of complex systems (García, 2006), integrated dimensions that had been underestimated or rejected (Álvarez Hidalgo, 2017; Di Paolo, 2013; Holton, 2010; Overton, 1998; Oyama, 1999; Thelen, 2000; Thelen & Smith, 1990; Valsiner, 1998; Van Geert, 2003; Varela, 2010)
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