FOR AN EDUCATIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE EXPRESSIVE, COMMUNICATIVE, AND TRANSFORMATIVE VALUE OF THE BODY IN MOVEMENT: BETWEEN BODILY PHENOMENOLOGY AND MOTOR PHILOSOPHIZING

Abstract

After arguing the role of phenomenology in rediscovering the communicative and transformative expressiveness of bodily movements in different educational contexts, also having tried to offer an epistemological and foundational contribution to the topic inherent in educational research through performance arts and transformative learning (of bodies, in bodies, between bodies), the essay delves into enactive teaching in the connection/supervision between enactive paradigm and phenomenology. The human mind is embodied in the affective and lived body, which is situated in the world in a continuous recursiveness of reciprocal relations between mind, body and world. The cognitive structures of mind would therefore emerge from sense-motor dynamics, recurring between the embodied agent and embedded in a natural environment, allowing action to be perceptually guided. Perception is thus enactive, that is, it is a type of action. From this perspective, enactive didactics stands as a privileged avenue of transformative learning, thanks in part to the biotransactional training of emotions and the neurophysiological study of empathy, turning its interest to the educational relationship in the multiple and interdependent aspects of affectively experienced corporeality, including its relation to multiple sense-motor processes. Concluding with an experiential explanatory node, a dancer’s motor-kinesthetic performance becomes philosophical motricity, as the inner dialogue that arises from the intensity of experience allows a more intense return to life to transform it again and again.