When we realise that our breath is getting faster and heart is beating harder because we just got triggered by our sexist uncle, that's your body's knowledge. When you get winked at by someone and your heart flutters because you like this person, that is your body's knowledge. Because this is different from when your stomach drops when the stranger on the road winks at you no? When you realise that you have a tendency to listen to yourself more than what someone else is telling you, is the way in which your body is reflecting embodied habits that you have. The unfortunate part is that we're hardly ever listening to our own body or paying attention to another's. Or we've not been educated to?
An embodied self is one that houses the stored knowledge from experiences that it has had with the external world. It stores knowledge of the self, of the relationship that the self has with anything and it reflects the structures and patterns of the world around them. The habits and mechanisms developed are the ways in which the body has retained the culture around them. The "habitus" of the world around them. The individual is not an island. It builds and defends from the world and the relationships that they have with literally everything.
The embodied approach is only that of finally shining a light to the existing knowledge. Using care and safety to slowly dip our feet in the universe of the embodied. To see what their own experiences hold for themselves and subsequently using that knowledge, with care and intention, to understand themselves and the world they are in search of understanding. And in doing so bring themselves to deepen and clarify their schemas that allows them to engage in society as an 'educated' being.
This one way in which I understand our system and envision what we are working towards (that which I have written on the side of line).
|insight
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individual (self)
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| care
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relationships with other
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| justice
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relationships with the world (society)
Navigating the blurriness of where the individual starts and the society ends and which impacts which one is like identifying simultaneously the location and momentum of the electron; kind of impossible. It has plagued generations of thinkers. There exists some blurred energy shells that have some vague shape where the clear distinction between the individual and society resides. But as we do attempt to, the care and awareness we bring to ourselves and subsequently the relationships we share then eventually bring us to making peace with the society that exists outside of us. In doing so, ignoring the embodied selves that participate and significantly change the the dynamics in the system is a grave mistake. Because we are clearly only half-way there then.
Therefore embodied education! A way of bringing together this disjointed confused mind with the ignored and chastised body so as to enhance the individual's experience of themselves, their relationships and the world around them : social and natural. Embodied education spans the realms of socio-emotional and ethical learning as well as that of our 'curriculumised' education. The self takes part while learning in both those spaces. The embodied self does as well. It is in fact the conduit through which SEEL and content and all forms of knowledge and learning is brought together. Because the body and its experience is in fact the way to producing this universal knowledge. That knowledge will be sought out through a facilitated experience as well.
Embodied education is the facilitation of movement and somatic practices in a safe and caring environment; after which reflective and meta-cognitive practices are used to create and consolidate knowledge. This knowledge is both constructed and that which existed prior to this experience as well. It only uses the premise of learning that new information has to be assimilated with old. And if the natural way in which we learnt is through experience, what is to stop us from facilitating ways in which we are constructing natural learning.
So who is embodied education? That shy person in the corner who has something to say but is spoken over by louder and more commanding people who tell you that the mind is in charge of everything! What is embodied education? It is a way to make education take place in experience, relationships and vulnerability (what I think is the strongest recipe to genuine heartfelt learning and growth). It is a way of finally accepting our fallacious, strong and rich embodied selves. And our embodied selves hold history, sociology, chemistry and the mechanisms of the world. Only waiting to be seen, felt, smelt, tasted and heard.