This paper utilises selective writings by John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the conceptual basis for considering how an enhanced synergistic focus on habit and embodiment could support practice gains in schools. The paper focuses on Dewey’s belief that established habits can help students to incorporate experiences into evaluations of educational progress and Merleau-Ponty’s spotlight on the body-subject, and how it provides a holistic way of conceiving relations that avoid over privileging abstraction and cognition and under-representing the centrality of the (...) body in human experience. We then evaluate the role of language and reflection in relation to habit, embodiment, and education before discussing some of the general educational practice considerations which might improve the quality of students learning experiences. In conclusion, we consider the possibilities for Dewey’s pragmatism to function as a theoretical bridge to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and the nature of experience. We argue that while it is important to recognise points of difference, in relation to philosophical treatments of habit and embodiment, it is also important to consider the overlap and new connections between Merleau-Ponty and Dewey which are valuable to take forward in contemporary education. (shrink)

This article argues that assessment is a central feature of teaching, particularly as a means to determine whether what has been taught has been learnt. However, I take issue with the current trend in education which places a significant amount of emphasis upon large-scale public testing, which in turn has exacerbated the ‘teaching-to-the-test’ syndrome, not to mention distorting teaching decisions that are detrimental to the overall development of student knowledge and understanding. Part of the problem with assessment in education seems (...) to revolve around the nature of knowledge and how best to assess human knowledge and understanding. Although much philosophical uncertainty and disagreement exists surrounding the nature of knowledge, I argue that coming to know something is a sine qua non of any education. In saying this, I highlight the limits of assessment by demonstrating how certain activities are resistant to large-scale public testing because they are not easily reducible to facts which can be tested for, or at least in the same way as propositional forms of knowledge. Consequently, my argument is a philosophical one to the effect that assessment, particularly large-scale public testing is incapable of assessing all forms of learning, or even the quality of student understanding because the instruments available are both too blunt and tend to capture a certain kind of knowledge that privileges theory over practice, and mental skills over physical skills. (shrink)

[In Czech] This article aims to explain how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodiment contributes to the theory and practice of physiotherapy. The mechanistic conception of the body, to which physiotherapy usually refers, assumes a universal model of its functioning and interprets its relationship to the environment causally. In fact, however, it does not allow a satisfactory explanation of the efficiency of the therapeutic methods used in practice. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motor intentionality points to the fact that the body (...) “understands” the practical meaning of a situation. Bodily understanding is then manifested in particular by the ability to adequately differentiate, adapt or vary motor and postural responses to environmental challenges. This change in the conception of embodiment also has important implications for understanding the therapist-patient relationship and the intervention itself. Physiotherapists should draw more on the fact that they are themselves a body and, on this basis, guide the patient’s bodily intentionality towards a more developed understanding of the practical meaning of situations. (shrink)

This study clarifies the need for a renewed account of the body in physiotherapy to fill sizable gaps between physiotherapeutical theory and practice. Physiotherapists are trained to approach bodily functioning from an objectivist perspective; however, their therapeutic interactions with patients are not limited to the provision of natural-scientific explanations. Physiotherapists’ practice corresponds well to theorisation of the body as the bearer of original bodily intentionality, as outlined by Merleau-Ponty and elaborated upon by enactivists. We clarify how physiotherapeutical practice corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s (...) critical arguments against objectivist interpretations of the body; particularly, his analyses demonstrate that norms of optimal corporeal functioning are highly individual and variable in time and thus do not directly depend on generic physiological structures. In practice, objectively measurable physical deviations rarely correspond to specific subjective difficulties and, similarly, patients’ reflective insights into their own motor deficiencies do not necessarily produce meaningful motor improvements. Physiotherapeutical procedures can be understood neither as mechanical manipulations of patients’ machine-like bodies by experts nor as a process of such manipulation by way of instructing patients’ explicit conscious awareness. Rather, physiotherapeutical practice and theory can benefit from the philosophical interpretation of motor disorders as modifications of bodily intentionality. Consequently, motor performances addressed in physiotherapy are interpreted as relational features of a living organism coupled with its environment, and motor disorders are approached as failures to optimally manage the motor requirements of a given situation owing to a relative loss of the capacity to structure one’s relation with their environment through motor action. Building on this, we argue that the process of physiotherapy is most effective when understood as a bodily interaction to guide patients towards discovering better ways of grasping a situation as meaningful through bodily postures and movements. (shrink)

Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis as a method, this article explores the role of embodiment and tactility in negotiating peer relations in classroom interaction. We aim at discussing how social relations between peers are locally constructed and negotiated through embodied, tactile-haptic, and spatial practices during classroom activities. The focus of the empirical analysis is on how students sequentially co-construct specific peer-to-peer touch type—sustained leaning touch—as well as how embodied two-student formations, synchronization of bodily movements and negotiation of personal space serves (...) as displaying social bonding and balancing between students’ dual role orientation. Our findings suggest that intercorporeal construction of we-ness—including exclusive and inclusive practices in relation to peer groups—is based on students’ embodied orientations during leaning touch as well as re-organized embodied choreographies, participation frameworks and spatial arrangements. Our empirical analysis on tactility, embodied consciousness and incorporeal compresence has its basis in a phenomenologically rooted understanding of intercorporeality, and therefore our article aims at building bridges between phenomenological understanding and conceptualization and detailed empirical analysis of clearly observable interactional phenomena. (shrink)