Stories Of The Body In Education

Author(s):

Joana Manarte(presenting / submitting)Amélia Lopes Fátima Pereira

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 08 C, Professional Learning from an Individual Perspective

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-25

09:00-10:30

Room:

OB-H2.12

Chair:

Slawomir Krzychala

Contribution

The goal of this research is to contribute to better understand the place of the body in the educational context, through the study of narratives on our school experiences. The purpose is to give voice to a body that has been forgotten by the educational system itself and to explore the insights it may provide.

Phenomenology and sociology of the body have expanded the concept of corporeality beyond the boundaries of the anatomical figure and its physiological functioning. The concept was enlarged to something wider which includes the communicative, social and cultural dimensions. Our body is a place of relationships with others and a place of connection with the world. In this sense, it is a space under continuous construction, where meanings are created and recreated. This semiotic dimension of the body makes it the leading actor of human presence, giving it the unavoidable purpose of communication and connection. (Le Breton, 1992; Merleau-Ponty, 2005; Reis, 2011; Louppe, 2012; Tavares, 2013)

We find important to clarify that this research is not about making a prescription of non-verbal behaviors, because "there is no proper picture, correct posture or even a correct move. There is a way of functioning that at a given moment, simultaneously leads to unity and openness“ (Irene Dowd, in Louppe 2012: 71). Instead, we follow the suggestion of Le Breton (1992) of having the body as a research path, because it is a projection (and the projector) of a constellation of human dimensions, which makes it an appealing viewpoint to a different understanding of man and the world, in different fields of knowledge.

From this multidimensional perspective of corporeality, we seek to look at the body as a structure of meanings and of emotional, psychological, social and physical mediation with the world. It is a place where we record our life stories and carve memories of our lived education and the stories that have contributed to our identity. Yet, the educational practices and research in education have paid little attention this question so far (Estola & Elbaz-Luwisch, 2003; García et al, 2014).

Educational context is a space for communication and relationship, transformation and human development. Nevertheless, discussions about education have been more and more centered on measurements and outcomes. There is a need to reconnect with the purpose of education. (Rogers, 1985; Biesta, 2009)

Our body is an element that is inevitably present in all our life experiences: “Before anything else, existence is corporeal.” (Le Breton, 1992:7; Damásio, 2000). This study may contribute to rescue the relevance of the dialogical, relational and teleological essence of pedagogical relationship. How important can this be for the field of Education, particularly in teacher education and professional development?

Method

The phenomenological approach focuses on the exploration of conscious experience or on the experience brought to consciousness to deepen the understanding of the social and human phenomena (Littlejohn and Foss, 2009). Through narratives we represent and understand experience, giving meaning to living (Manarte, Lopes & Pereira, 2014). Given the heuristic relevance of the research topic, narrative methodology supports the intention of this work. Our data sources - autobiographic report of the researcher; focus group with teachers; written stories on school memories; and biographic interviews - have life experiences as the common denominator, although each source offers a different kind of input. The autobiography assessed the suitability of the methodology for the research questions and reconfigured the researcher’s character, bringing an inside perspective of the process (Clandinin and Connelly, 2011). The focus group worked as an idea generator device, giving access to the main discourses on the subject in just one meeting (Breen, 2006), where teachers shared memories of pedagogical relationship and thoughts on corporeality issues. We have close to 40 written stories so far, from people with different ages, gender and nationalities, most of them from Portugal. Writing about our experiences is a special way of remembering and promotes our sense of others and our sense of self. This leads to the revealing task of re-contextualization, setting the experiences in a new structure of meanings (Lopes and Pereira, 2004). The interviews will be made with people who already have some kind of reflexivity on the body and its multidimensionality (e.g., dancer). We believe that the knowledge on the subject will shed a different light on the process of revisiting the memories of the body in school. Working with NVivo Software, we use a mixed content analysis, joining the paradigmatic and the narrative approach. We try to organize the data in a network of emerging concepts, highlighting the communalities of the stories. This gives us a repertoire of concepts to work with. On the other hand, we attend to the singularities of each experience. Focusing on the particular implies looking at the surrounding context. Place, temporality and sociality necessarily appear as referential axes to interpret the stories and extract meaning. Gathering the analyzed information we can create our narrative on the research topic, calling contexts, experiences, meanings, concepts and the theoretical framework to the plot. ( L’Ecuyer, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1995; Bolívar, 2002; Bardin, 2011; Clandinin and Connelly, 2011)

Expected Outcomes

The autobiography underlines the narrative inquiry as an appropriate methodology to access the intangible dimensions of the body and an enriching approach for the study of corporeality (Manarte, Lopes e Pereira, 2014). The focus group highlighted the relationship between body and emotions and triggered a curious process of self-analysis, leading to the questioning about teacher education and the awareness of the reflective process. A first analysis on the written stories brings out a visible and an invisible body, corroborating Nietzche’s thought of the pan character of the body as something that is so obviously material and simultaneously so immaterial (Damásio, 2000). The presence of the symbolic body is transversal to all cultures, stressing the global interest of this issue. Looking at the singularities, interesting experiences reveal the surreptitious use of the body to control, discriminate, express, and other ways of embodying education, reminding the domestication described by Foucault (1987) and also the link between body, consciousness and emotions studied by Damásio (2000, 2003). At the ECER we intend to present a meta-analysis, constituting a first draft of the findings. So far, the various stories reflect that the body is not something we usually think about and they mirror its polysemic nature. Further, we realized we were in a double way research. While drawing a landscape of corporeality in the educational context, we were also getting a picture of the environment emerging from the stories. Le Breton (1992) states that the body and the social are a metaphor of each other and it is becoming clear in this inquiry that the school narratives on the body help characterize the educational context. The findings suggest the study of the body and corporeality contributes to a more comprehensive and humanized understanding of the pedagogical practices in order to meet the purpose of education.

References

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Author Information

Joana Manarte (presenting / submitting)

Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto (FPCEUP)

Centre for Research and Intervention in Education (CIIE)

Porto

Amélia Lopes

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

Fátima Pereira