BODIES AND MULTISENSORY LEARNING: AN EMBODIED READING EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Through a precise reflection on embodiment cognition which has restored depth of analysis to the body and to the material spaces of life in learning, the essay intends to reflect on reading as an expressive form and an embodied educational and learning experience. In the necessary interconnection and reciprocity between reading mind and reading body, immersion in stories is not only a bodily and imaginative experience, but also an opportunity for comparison and encounter between bodies, adults and children, made of paper, whose steps between the pages of books they are a precious and indispensable guide in our learning history, in the construction of critical and reflective thinking, in the regulation of emotions and feelings.

Within this perspective, this paper presents the learning experience offered to the 2th-year students of the degree course in Primary Education within the teaching of writing and reading course, during the Didactics of Writing and Reading course. 

Reading, thus conceived, creates a space for expressive sharing that brings us to a dimension made of language, movement, mimicry, gestural expression and emotions, as well as (becoming) a precious occasion of integral formation for the human person (Dentale, 2012, p. 18).

On this basis, the aim of this work is to promote reading from the perspective of the embodiment theory applied to education. Enactment, as for example in the case of sentences, has, in fact, proven to be an extremely effective educational tool, activating verbal, visual and motor skills. (Engelkamp & Zimmer, 1985).