This in-depth case study aims to explore the bodily lived-through experiences of one experienced primary school teacher to elicit insight into the bodily awareness they may bring to the classroom situation.  By surfacing and making visible any bodily awareness we aim to further develop our understanding of the role of the body in and for teacher learning.

Three research questions guide this study:

1. What are the bodily lived experiences of an experienced teacher during a typical lesson?

2. What can be elicited from an experienced teacher’s lived experiences that make visible the bodily felt sense that underpins their classroom practice?

3. What, if anything, can we learn from the surfaced bodily felt sense elicited from an experienced teacher?

To date, there has been little research that addresses the role of the body as a source of information for helping teachers become more aware of the role of the body in and for teaching.  For example, Ivinson (2012) and Shapiro and Stolz (2019) have shown that the body is implicated in teachers’ instructions, observations and pupils’ learning.  However, it is not clear how such examples relate to how teachers learn through their lived-through bodily experiences.  In contrast, the idea that the teacher’s body can inform reflective practice is explored by Nagamine et al (2018) who show how a pre-service teacher was able to gain new insight into their lived-through bodily experience enabling them to overcome the debilitating effects of their anxiety in the classroom.  By exploring lived through bodily teacher presence in the classroom we may be able to elicit insight into how teachers might use bodily knowing to respond to the needs of their pupils.

Embodied knowing considers the body to function as “a constituent of the mind” (Fugate et al., 2019), a locus for knowing and differs from the more familiar Cartesian dualism, a way of knowing, that separates the mind from the body.   Grounded in the phenomenological tradition of the lived-through body (Husserl, 2001) and Merleau-Ponty’s (2008 [1945]) phenomenology of the body, our bodies connect us to the world we inhabit, possess the capacity to be pre-reflectively immersed in the world, and are integral to understanding what it means to know the world (bodily knowing). The value of investigating the world through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body is the opportunity to surface hitherto hidden insights about the role of the teacher’s body and the world they inhabit (Stolz, 2015) and how these insights can be applied to support teacher learning. 

Realising a sense of bodily awareness enables one to experience one’s bodily sensations as, “an essential aspect of one’s lived experience” (Menzel et al. 2019, p53).  By paying direct attention to bodily sensations (embodiment in mindfulness terms), it is possible to notice what Gendlin (2003) referred to as a bodily felt sense of any given situation.  For Gendlin, our bodily felt sense does not announce itself through words or thoughts rather it is encountered as a “single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling” (Gendlin, 2003:32).  We bring Gendin’s idea of bodily felt self into conversation with the research participant’s account of their bodily lived-through experiences and explore how this bodily awareness informed their teaching practice.

The data for the study were derived from interviews underpinned by the application of elements of mindfulness and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Our approach was similar to Vermersh’s (1994) explicitation interview (“L’Entretien d’Explicitation”) as cited in Tosey and Mathison (2010), which was used to guide the research participant to associate fully into the re-enactment of their bodily experiences during a typical lesson as an experienced teacher. The interviews were conducted with the research participant, Anna (pseudonym), via a video conferencing platform on three occasions, with each interview lasting approximately 40 minutes. The first two interviews were designed to capture the lived-through bodily knowing operating internally and underpinning the external behaviours as enacted by Anna in her teaching. For example, we asked questions such as: Can you think back to what sensations you were feeling in that lesson and where in your body you feel that bodily sensation? So, can you describe how that excitement felt in your body? Was this feeling/sensation all over your body or just in your middle? The third interview provided an opportunity for Anna to reflect on the value of paying attention to the role of the body in and for her teaching. All three interviews were audio-recorded and fully transcribed by the researchers, enabling engagement with data analysis and interpretation during the data collection phase. Our research design was operationalised in three stages. Stage 1 focused on capturing a sense of the bodily lived-through experiences encountered during a typical lesson for the research participant and was designed to respond to our first research question. Stage 2 the hermeneutic phenomenological reflection (van Manen, 1990) enabled a response to the second research question by engaging in a deeper reflection of the findings elicited from stage 1 of the research design. Finally, stage 3 responded to the third research question, by providing an opportunity for the research participant to reflect on their participation in the first two interviews and to consider how focusing on their bodily felt sense impacted on their teaching.

Our findings from Anna’s case, show that questioning solely on moment-to-moment bodily sensations in relation to her classroom practise, brought awareness of her felt sense and bodily signals which she then chose to develop within her teaching practice. For example, it was shifts in Anna’s breathing pattern, prior to her becoming consciously aware or scanning the room, that signalled the need for her to assess what was going on in her classroom. This bodily shift resonates with the idea of felt sense as proposed by Gendlin (2003) whereby the felt sense does not reveal itself through thoughts or words. However, Anna’s experience of a bodily shift differs from Gendlin’s (ibid) “felt shift” and from the felt shift identified by Nagamine et al. (2018) which required a pre-service teacher to participate in a process for verbalising and naming their “felt sense” prior to gaining insight into their lived-through bodily experience to support their teaching. Anna’s bodily shift in her breathing pattern was a bodily sensation that Anna did not understand prior to participation in this study, but, nevertheless, provided a signal for her to look, to scan the room, to see what was going on. The types of bodily sensations, bodily shifts and associated feelings Anna described were part of her everyday lived experience in the classroom. However, it was not until she participated in the interviews that Anna became aware of her felt sense and bodily shifts and was able to interpret these as signals her body was providing. She then chose to consider how she might use this knowledge to assist her approach to teaching. The nature of this in-depth case study is such that further research is necessary to explore the possibilities and limitations of bringing bodily felt sense to conscious awareness for teacher learning.

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