AGAINST EPISTEMOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES: ON THE VALUE OF FORMING BODILY KNOWLEDGE

The article reveals such concepts as “metis,” “body techniques,” “practical skill,” “kinesthetic intelligence,” and “movement skill.” These concepts are united by the fact that the accumulation of knowledge is presented as a largely unconscious process in which muscles play the same role as the brain. The essence of these concepts can be expressed in the term “bodily knowledge,” which contrasts itself in the epistemological sense with codified practical knowledge, instructions, and rules – techne. Bodily knowledge is based on movements and muscle sensations. Russian physiologist I.M. Sechenov called this sensation “dark,” pointing out that such sensations are almost impossible to comprehend, describe, and analyze. However, such feelings cannot be entirely opposed to thought. This “smart skill,” as poet and writer Varlam Shalamov called it, can be considered a separate type of cognition. This article is an attempt to comprehensively discuss the concept of “body knowledge.”

Situating embodied instruction – proxemics and body knowledge

In various ways the movement and experience of the body is instructed by others. This may be in the dance class or on the playing field. In these interactions, one person claims knowledge of the other’s body and rights to instruct how that body functions, moves, and feels. By undertaking a close analysis of embodied and spoken interaction within performance training sessions from a multimodal conversation analytic perspective, this paper will identify one kind of broad sequential trajectory – from intimate contact to public display - that shows how an instructor claims rights over the internal workings of another’s body by traversing different levels of proximity and sensorial modalities.

Monitoring and evaluating body knowledge: metaphors and metonymies of body position in children’s music instrument instruction

This paper examines music instrument teachers’ instructive use of noun metaphors and metonymies of behaviors related to the playing and handling of a musical instrument. Drawing on 10 video-recorded 30–40 min-long instrument lessons as data, and conversation analysis as a method, the paper examines the temporal location of these figurative turns (i.e., instruction turns including a noun metaphor or metonymy) within the instructional activities and in relation to the student’s behaviors. At the beginning of a new instructional sequence, a figurative turn allows the teacher to test and monitor the level of student’s knowledge, while the student orients to a need to demonstrate that knowledge. Figurative turns also enable the teacher to initiate correction in complex movement sequences, its organization as a series of metaphors or metonymies enabling an easy return to an earlier point in a sequence. Furthermore, the flexibility of metaphors and metonymies as interactional resources is evidenced by the ease by which a figurative instruction turn may be transformed into an affirmative evaluation of student conduct. The paper thus suggests that instructing body knowledge through metaphors and metonymies has significant pedagogical advantages, also providing a detailed account for why and how this is the case.

Vocalizations in dance classes teach body knowledge

Language is believed to be a central device for communicating meaning and knowledge between humans. It is superb in its capacity to code abstract ideas and displaced information, which can be conveyed from person to person, sometimes across centuries. When it comes to instructing a bodily skill in co-present situations, language is used along with other multimodal resources. This paper focuses on the role of vocalizations in dance teaching, syllables that express simultaneous body movement rather than abstract lexical content. While being essentially a vocal resource, the meaning of vocalizations arises in the simultaneously moving bodies. By carrying indexical and only partially conventionalized meaning, vocalizations constitute a puzzle for linguistic theory that preferably targets the arbitrary, symbolic and conventionalized aspects of human vocal production. The meanings conveyed from one body to another through a vocalization are experiential rather than intellectual. Vocalizations provide a solution to the problem of transferring body knowledge from one autonomous organism to another, and can even be embedded in syntax. The analysis is based on an occasion of teaching a jazz routine to a larger group of students.

Synchronization in demonstrations. Multimodal practices for instructing body knowledge

Demonstrations are a central resource for instructing body knowledge. They allow instructors to provide learners with a structured perceptual access to the performance of an activity. The present paper considers demonstrations as inherently social activities, in which not only the instructor but also the learners may participate. A particular form of co-participation is that learners synchronize their own bodily actions with the demonstration of the instructor. The paper examines two practices of synchronization in demonstrations. In emergent synchronizations the instructor invites the student(s) to synchronize, rather than request them to do so. In orchestrated synchronizations teachers actively pursue the students’ bodily synchronization. The two practices are typically used for different instructional purposes. While emergent synchronizations are typically used in corrective instructions, orchestrated synchronizations are typically used to instruct new knowledge. Based on a large corpus of instructions in dancing Argentine Tango, the paper uses multimodal interaction analysis to characterize both practices regarding their interactional organization, their functional properties and the resources used by the participants to establish synchronization.

Participatory health education on school (re)inclusion of the adolescent cancer survivor

ABSTRACT Objectives: to analyze school (re)inclusion of an adolescent cancer survivor before/after participatory health education with adolescents. Methods: qualitative and participatory research that included data from the medical record of an adolescent rhabdomyosarcoma survivor and Talking Map dynamics (to diagnose the demand for learning and assess changes). The body-knowledge dynamics were applied in the educational intervention. In a public school in Rio de Janeiro, the adolescent (reference case) and nine people (four teachers and five teenagers) generated empirical materials, which became the content analysis objects. Results: strangeness to changes in an adolescent cancer survivor’s body image, bullying, and acceptance were problematized in educational body-knowledge dynamics through relationships between changes and barriers to welcoming. The participatory educational process was essential in raising awareness by promoting re-inclusive actions. Conclusions: participatory-problematizing education contributed to constructing a new collective identity and improvement in school interaction among peers.