Researching embodiment in movement contexts: a phenomenological approach

Abstract

This article takes a phenomenological approach to understanding embodiment in relation to teaching and learning taking place in movement contexts. Recently a number of studies have pointed to the potential that phenomenology has to understand the meanings and experiences of moving subjects. By presenting two examples of our own work on embodied learning, and discussing these in light of a distinction between phenomenology as philosophy and as methodological orientation, our aim is to move beyond the recent celebration of the potential of phenomenology, and show concretely and practically how phenomenological approaches to embodiment can be performed. We hold that it is necessary to give the notion of embodiment a form, content and substance, which is informed by empirical work.

Keywords:

• Embodiment
• Movement
• Phenomenology
• Embodied learning
• Qualitative research

Notes

1. Of course, this is not the only debate or problematic point in this literature. We pick up on this specific issue, because it forms an important starting point for a discussion of the relation between phenomenology as philosophy and as methodological orientation.

2. In both studies, the ethical guidelines of securing participants’ anonymity and obtaining informed consent from the participants were followed.

3. Making reference to the ‘inside’ of the body might be interpreted as a dualistic. However, one should not see it that way, because as Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 474) states: ‘the world is wholly inside, and I am wholly outside myself’.

4. Examples are Tinning (2010) who sees embodied learning as ‘the learning that resides in the body itself (in the muscles, neural pathways etc.) as distinct from the brain (as in mental, academic learning)’ (p. 104) and Maivorsdotter and Lundvall (2009) who sees it as ‘a knowledge that lives ‘in the muscles’ and because it remains embodied, individuals can in a sense do nothing with what they have learnt, they cannot ‘use’ it in any sense’ (p. 277).