It is impossible to think of any kind of education (formal or informal) taking place, without conscious awareness being essentially involved. Our educational efforts are pursued through mental activities, where teachers and learners not only appear as conscious subjects, but also engage intentionally with specific contents of learning they consciously apprehend, attend to, interpret, grasp, (mis)understand, transfer, reflect on, and so on and so forth. Accordingly, theories of learning have not, traditionally, been troubled by the existence of consciousness, since the existence of conscious awareness in a learning subject, (whatever conscious awareness is per se), has been considered constitutive for the subject’s being engaged in meaningful acts of learning; processes of learning taking place well above mere behavioral or neurobiological levels of description and explanation. Recent development of embodied approaches to learning and education (e.g. Stolz (2021) and Macedonia (2019) for a review), appear to put some pressure on this picture. In a sense, conscious awareness has (again) become an embarrassment to learning – and education. We know the short circuits of behaviorism and vulgar materialism, just as much as our students love (learn) to dismiss a simplified picture of dualism, attributed to René Descartes. How, then, in our embodied eagerness, do we secure a place and role for conscious awareness? My presentation looks into three early approaches to embodiment in order to (1) trace some deep roots of learning of lasting value to current discussions of embodied education, and (2) pinpoint and discuss three possible strategies for ‘handling’ conscious awareness in conjunction with learning. Dewey (2005), Merleau-Ponty (1962; 1983) and Polanyi (1958; 1966) harbors different insights on embodied learning, which have had lasting impacts on the growing research field of embodied education. These thinkers certainly rejected behaviorism, dualism, and materialism, but at the same time wavered between ignoring and silencing conscious awareness; only reluctantly they appeared to come to terms with it, displaying the peculiar struggles which are still with us today. They shared the basic insight, that conscious awareness of a learning subject is constitutively related to implicit, non-representational knowledge of its relation to the environment, whether this relation is static or dynamic. In a sense, they turned the psychophysical problem into a problem about knowing. Pros and cons of these efforts are discussed vis-a-vis a theory of awareness as a peculiar kind of learning.

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