The text presents a case study, a dance therapy course, which focuses on teaching activities that aim to enable students to develop their body awareness. The study aims to showcase teaching activities designed to enable students to develop body awareness, and to explore both students' and their teachers' experiences of these activities as professional skills or savoir-faire.

Education links learning to teaching which often focuses on thinking linked to cognitive aspects of knowledge, where the capability of the brain is central, but where the brain becomes separated from the rest of the human body. Vocational education is supposed to develop savoir-faire, knowledge that defines a person’s occupational or professional skills, their capability and competence. These aspects of knowledge are sometimes referred to as tacit but, include more than motor skills or cognitive abilities separately since it is relational. In this paper, it will be defined as body awareness. Within a wide range of professions or occupational practices such as nurses, physiotherapists, sociologists, psychotherapists, dancers, teachers et cetera a key to success or failure in their vocational or professional practices concerns body awareness skills becomes significant, in the meeting with clients or customers. This paper focuses on a higher education dance therapy course and didactic aspects of body awareness pedagogy. This vocational training course is identified by the participants, from a wide range of professions, as professional development. The article focuses on the complexity of vocational didactics, with the desire to provide students with the opportunity to develop professional and personal skills in body awareness. 

Body awareness as a vocational skill, emerge from the idea of embodied knowledge. From an educational perspective Öhman and Klope (2024, p. 2) express the bodies functionality as bridging the gap between teaching and learning in a multi-sensorial context involving visual, tactile, and auditory sensations, such as in the hairdressing classroom, teaching the correct performance also includes students’ own bodies and experiences. The body, as a physical and conceptual body therefore needs to become identified and recognized. A body´s socio-historical setting thus creates a grammatology for desired subjects and a desired performativity regarding each body and its potential as a particular subject. Performativity is both creative and the creation of a mode. Learning with, rather than learning from twists the pedagogical idea from doing and performing, the activity or performative doing, to events, actions and becoming. In that sense “there is no subject of desire, only a production of desire according to a sign machine”. A body memorize these contacts as forces, actions, but memories is a production of change and as a productive desire of life that creates learning situations constituting possibilities. Memories is a kind of recollections-image that actualizes in contact with and in relation to. Body awareness means that each body, as a corporeal and incorporeal constitutions, with bodily memories, conscious or unconscious, become aware of how these memories turns into forces that affects actions enabling or hindering them. 

Body awareness creates in a performative gap, allowing change, where performativity becomes actions of transformation. A metamorphose that enable individuation rather than to produce a subjugated subject. Individuation as desire becomes production where consciousness of bodily memories enables actions of resistance, which is productive body awareness.

Body awareness pedagogy open for awareness not only of bodily constitutions but of the memories that memorises bodily actions and therefore remembers the forces that constitute hinders. A desire for individuation, is a desire to learn, a desire of producing rather than production. The hierarchical apparatus or rather the abstract machine of, for example, patriarchy can be suppressed by creativity arising from multiplicity of forces actualizing possibilities.

The setting of the study case is a Swedish university course in dance therapy (7.5 credits (ECTS)). The course syllabus includes predefined course literature, a written exam, full participation and a process diary. The course covers four, physical, full days participation. Education with various collaborative learning activities. Observations and interviews were carried out focusing the varies activities aimed to enable students´ body awareness and how the participants (the students and the teacher) presented body awareness as a vocational skill and how this emerged within these teaching and learning actions. Body awareness is elaborated with philosophical ideas from Deleuze and Guattari writing along with their readers writing. Two significant concepts are identified. Mannings (2009) concept relationscapes that emerge in between the performer and the performed, the performance and the audience, as a flow of actions and sensations. The concept individuation merge learning, physical and social transformation and identification. Individuation is always in process and emerge as a process. Deleuze (1990, p. 107) differentiate this from the idea of the subjects as “The subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality”. With the concept of the rhizome, described by Deleuze and Guattari (1987(2023)) as a network of things and actions creating an assemblage or machinic assemblage, a post-qualitative opportunity emerges to analyse the studied case. In the study a rhizo-analytic approach was performed mapping the collected material. A mapping that exceeds individual and collective experiences to reveal potential new organizations of reality became possible. Martin and Kamberelis (2013) outlined six principles of rhizomatic analysis from Deleuze and Guattari (1987(2023)). These principles describe the nature of rhizome, which are anti-hierarchical, ever-growing networks of connections among heterogeneous nodes. The principles include connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, a signifying rupture, decalcomania (tracing), and cartography (mapping). Rhizomes are characterized by their horizontal, proliferative, and regenerative nature, contrasting with traditional hierarchical structures. Mapping, as opposed to tracing, is emphasized for its ability to create new realities and connections (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987(2023)). Rhizomes can regenerate and reroute around disruptions, continuing to grow and form new connections (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013).

Mapping teaching activities created a map with body awareness pedagogy, where educating turned out to be a delicate activity with high ethical and interpersonal demands. The educator clearly distinguished between therapy and teaching therapeutic strategies. To enable this the educator had to be observant, that the students never entered a therapeutic state. Using the participants' bodies to perceive the individuation process is different from letting the participants read about these strategies in texts. Body awareness pedagogy required creative teaching methods and active listening since body awareness pedagogy emerges with empathy and trust between the participants in the room. The case study highlights how dance and movement connect emotional and perceptual experiences, impacting the individuation process. Body memories emerged in classroom relationscapes, during multiple events that the participants perceived intellectually/cognitively, emotionally and as physical sensations. The participants expressed individuation processes in connection to the collaborative actions as sensations affecting their bodily memories creating body awareness. Body awareness in turn created new possibilities that enabled receptiveness to different experiences and transformations in the participants' professional lives. Body awareness skills enhanced confidence due to their experience of future professional relationships and meeting people in professional work. Body awareness aims to unfold affective forces and enable a creative consciousness. Questions like, how or why do I act or react as I do in a certain situation, what or why does a social or physical environment situate a feeling and thereby affect me in a certain way. How can I meet another person aware of what my body does to that person and vice verse.

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