In the last three decades, we have been witnessing a turn in cognitive sciences, social sciences, and the humanities: the turn toward understanding learning, feeling and cognition as situational embedded, embodied activities. More recently, impacts of this turn has started to emerge in the fields of education - theoretically as well as empirically. This symposium discusses cutting-edge research of embodied and enacted cognition in relation to practices and theories of education, including learning and didactics.  

We first offer an introduction to embodied cognition, where educational implications of embodied varieties of constructivism, recent as well as classical, are discussed in particular. Somatically enacted figures like rhythm and other tangible elements pervade human experience and imbue it with narrative form. We then turn to the question of the place and function of conscious awareness vis-a-vis embodied approaches to learning and education, an issue related to the challenge for educational theorists mentioned in the first talk, that the bodily experience of the world is of a first-person sort that cannot be easily, or exclusively, communicated in propositional form. In the third presentation, a pragmatic take on the deep roots of learning is pursued by looking into the questions about the causal and representational frictions between the learning subject and her world. Although recent embodied theories of cognition and learning are typical of an antirepresentational ilk, space for the subject’s abstraction and reflection, prevalent in formal education, must be found. This problem connects to the issue about conscious awareness raised in the second presentation. In the final presentation, we discuss a specific topic that exemplifies the concept of embodied enactive education, namely the employment of mindfulness meditation practice in educational settings. Here we focus on some of the main factors that can help descrining and interpreting the subjecive experience of meditation. 

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