The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of body movement-based methods in co-defining and embodying the meanings of democratic values with higher education teachers and students at the University of Lapland. This research is part of the AECED Horizon project which aims at strengthening the personal commitment to the democratic values of freedom, equality and responsiveness (see AECED 2025) through embodied and aesthetic methods in education. Behind this endeavour is the idea that if we learn, what democratic relating in educational organisations means in practice, it will encourage people to engage in democratic values in other circumstances too, hence in the wider society. Democracy in AECED is defined as democracy-as-becoming, which refers to the mobile and nexus-like idea of it. From this perspective, democracy is not seen only as a decision-making mechanism but as day-to-day practices in any community (AECED 2025). In this paper, develop further the theory of the moving idea of democratic relating by thinking about it with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh (Costello 2017; Mazzocchi 2013; Merleau-Ponty 1968; Plot 2012) and reversibility of body movements as research method (Jääskeläinen 2023) in educational encounters. For this purpose, we arranged workshops for university teachers and designed a course for higher education students in the field of Psychology of leadership, where body movement-based activities were used as reflective mediums. I will analyse five body movement-based activities we used, which directly address the three values that the AECED project chose to be most essential in our endeavour to work towards democracy in educational settings. I will also reflect on the insights our stakeholder teachers got when they tried these activities in their courses. In analysis, I use the reach-searching methodology I have developed (Jääskeläinen 2023), which is ontologically based on understanding research as collective movements of the social flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1968). These reach-searching movements co-create the insights when collective flesh turns itself into itself by reflecting the meanings we give to our movements. Hence, we (researchers and participants), as the flesh of this research form an example of how the collective flesh can know about itself by using body movement as a medium. After analysing the experiences and insights we wish to contribute to the understanding of democracy-as-becoming as embodied experiences in higher educational institutions and how the meanings of democratic values are co-created through the reversibility of body movements.

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