Embodied Knowledge

ABSTRACT

The study of teachers' personal practical knowledge is an emerging orientation that focuses on the way teachers' understanding of their world affects the way they structure classroom experience and interact with students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. I argue that several recent articles on this topic are developing greatly enriched models of cognition, meaning, understanding, and knowledge. These models emphasize nonpropositional, pre-reflective dimensions of meaning that arise in our spatio-temporal orientations, perceptual interactions, and bodily movements. To take these experiential dimensions seriously requires new models of cognition and thus marks out a new territory for curriculum inquiry.