In our paper, we outline educational implications of embodied varieties of constructivism, both classic and recent, which hold that perceiving and knowing necessitates changing things or at least conditions under which they are encountered [1, 2, 3, 4]. We see this in distinctions such as those carpenters make between soft- and hardwoods—distinctions rendered concretely according to human needs, but not merely nominal since they exist in built things like houses [5, 6]. Other examples of embodied constructivism are the somatically enacted rhythms of doing and undergoing that pervade human experience and imbue it with narrative form. Embodied narrative is a basis of early learning, according to prominent developmental psychologists like Trevarthen [7]. Yet it also connects to advanced learning since it introduces structure, unity and endurance, so things do not appear as isolated, fleeting bits, here now, gone an instant later. By introducing structure, unity, endurance and hence tangible meaning, narrativity can satisfy criteria for intelligible form, laid out by classical figures, albeit forgoing the atemporal schemes favored by Plato [8] and his intellectual compatriots. A challenge for educational theorists is that the experience that is got through bodily messing about in the world is of a first-person sort that cannot be easily communicated, even though linguistically relatable knowledge rests upon its foundations [9]. Here, one can consider how generating and grasping the map-based knowledge of a geographer depends on the embodied experience of travelling through mountains, across streams and down streets [2]. Or again, one might ponder the difference between an exhaustive survey of the musical score for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit vs. the embodied experience of bobbing to the song, and how the former is empty without the latter, which cannot in any event be relayed from person to person in words or musical notation. We do not, of course, advocate doing away with abstract modes of communication, but recommend more in the way of activity-based learning as a critical supplement to more traditional forms of classroom teaching. This recommendation tacitly carries a second idea: that pretty much all intellectual endeavors—and obviously practical ones, too—are arts [9, 10]. This is to assert that intellectual activity involves a kind of know-how that formal or standardized methods can hint at, but not capture [11], because the messy challenges of the lived world often call for unreplicable solutions.

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