The Body: A Treasure Of The Pedagogical Relationship

Author(s):

Joana Manarte(presenting / submitting)Amélia Lopes Pereira Fátima

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)

Format:

Paper

Session Information

ERG SES H 08, Practices, Sociology and Education

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

11:00-12:30

Room:

326. [Main]

Chair:

Francesca Gobbo

Contribution

«Because body has been considered more as a ‘problem’ or a ‘sin’ than a ‘treasure’, there is much that is unsayable about bodies in classrooms.» (Estola & Elbaz-Luwisch, 2003:702)

The body is the great means of communication and is always present in our life experiences. Research in Education has given little importance to the body in pedagogical practice, although being a teacher is an embodied activity that happens in the body and between bodies (Estola & Elbaz-Luwisch, 2003).

The body concept has been dominated by the idea of separation between body and soul, body and mind, body and consciousness. Following the Nietzschean thought of man as a “bodily wholeness”, Merleau-Ponty explains about phenomenology of the body and brings to light the notion of corporeality, of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, 1958). Men is bodily embedded in the world, that is, his relationships with others and with the world are mediated by the body (Reis, 2011: 38). Man is a phenomenological unit, whose existence is corporeal - the opening to the world and to himself is made by the body. In other words, the knowledge of the world and self-awareness are mediated by the body. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty does not see consciousness as a mental operation based on the separation I-subject / I-object, but rather as a 'reflective act from what is perceived by the body' (Reis, 2011: 39).

The body is a 'set of experienced meanings "(Merleau-Ponty, in Reis, 2011: 41). Subjectivity is a bodily experience. The body movement is what puts us in touch with each other and in relation to things, giving rise to a sensitive cognition, a 'cognitive act mediated by sensation "(Reis, 2011: 41).

Merleau-Ponty also sees the body as expression, stressing that it is not just an outer shell of the individual, but the very expression of being. I do not have my body, I am my body. Therefore, communication has a corporeal nature, in which the expressed does not exist separate from the expression, because the body is what it means. The body is a sign and it is message. Still within the communicative dimension, it is especially important to highlight the dialogical nature of the body, which serves its social nature. The body connects, connects us to each other - subjectivity is constituted from the inter-subjectivity as it is always relational. Thus, subjectivity is corporeality and Merleau-Ponty talks about an embodied subjectivity.

So, this argues against the disembodied rationality advocated by the traditional Cartesian model. Instead, the phenomenological approach encouraged by Merleau-Ponty “explores our experiences as embodied actors interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflected manner of normal experience”. (Dourish, 2001)

The goal of this paper is to understand the importance of the body in the pedagogical relationship, bringing to consciousness memories of daily experiences we all had with our teachers in school.

Method

«Attention to the body is a challenge. How do researchers find new epistemological commitments and methods to talk about bodies in education?» (Estola & Elbaz-Luwisch, 2003:697). On a first research on this subject we used the self-narrative to explore the empirical study of immediacy in the pedagogical relationship. We have concluded that the difficulty of disconnecting what is perceived from what is felt confirms that the narrative is a unique way to access either perceptions or feelings in the pedagogical relationship. Really, it's not a question of observing the nonverbal behavior of a teacher in a classroom, but to know what it feels like, which is only possible through the report of experiences. In this sense, the narrative comes to embody the intangible dimension of affect and stands as an appropriate methodology for the study of immediacy in the pedagogical relationship (Manarte, Lopes & Pereira, 2014). On this paper we give continuity to the narrative inquiry by collecting the stories of others on their life experiences in school. What memories do they have from their teachers? What kind of episodes can be seen through the perspective of the body? How do they feel now when they recount stories of their teachers? Our experiences are organized in the form of narratives, in a perpetual movement of experiences, memories and interpretations. Being inherent in human action, through narrative we represent and understand experience giving meaning to living (Manarte, Lopes & Pereira, 2014). Our epistemological stance balances between a constructivist and critical paradigm. We intend to engage in collaborative relationships with the narrators, collecting their stories through a conversational approach. Besides sharing the researcher’s writings and interpretation of the conversations, this implies the acceptance of the ambiguity on the co-intepretation of the stories (Clandinin & Connelly, 2007) The aim of content analysis is to understand the meaning of the text under study, with an exploration also centered on the point of view of those who produced the text (L’Écuyer, 1990). We will use a mixed content analysis, as suggested by Bolívar (2002:17), where the challenge is in using a «binocular vision» on narrative research, where the global and the singularity explain one another mutually.

Expected Outcomes

Having the educational context as a space for communication and interpersonal influence, transformation and human development, this paper thinks of the body as an element of affective, psychological, social and physical mediation. So far, we have realized that the attention to detail of a teacher is something that apparently goes unnoticed, but the truth is that after 20 years we can remember details, gestures, expressions, voices, movements of our teachers and what we have felt with them. We have also noticed that storytelling implies dealing with memories and, therefore, there is a difficulty in accessing factually past episodes; what seems to be slightly raising the veil of the story is the feeling triggered at the time, suggesting that the affective and emotional memory remained, being this perhaps one of the pillars for the act of narrating. Plus, this data reinforces the interconnection between perceptions (of the body) and emotions. Once we gather more life stories, we can consolidate a more global or comparative analysis to complete the individual analysis. We hope to find new ways of talking about the bodies in teaching, believing that this will help to reflect upon this subject in ways that can promote change to a more and more humanized education.

References

Estola & Elbaz-Luwisch. (2003). Teaching bodies at work. Journal of Curriculum Studies. 35 (6): 697–719. Merleau-Ponty. (1958). Phenomenology of Perception, Taylor and Francis e-Library. Reis, A. (2011). A subjectividade como corporeidade: o corpo na fenomenologia de Merleau-Ponty. Vivência. 37: 37-48. Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is. The foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge: The Mit Press. Clandinin, J. (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. Sage Publications. Bolívar, A. (2002). "De nobis ipsis silemus?": Epistemology of biographical-narrative research in education. Revista electrónica de Investigação Educativa 4(1): 1-24. Manarte J, Lopes A, Pereira F. (2014) Contributions to the empirical study of immediacy in the pedagogical relationship through self-naratives. Journal of Pedagogy 5 (2): 209-225.

Author Information

Joana Manarte (presenting / submitting)

Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Porto (Portugal)

Centre for Research and Intervention in Education

Porto

Amélia Lopes

Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Porto (Portugal), Portugal

Pereira Fátima